Still pondering the koan of "writer's voice" ( Damn you! Bob Price...may She Who Must Be Obeyed box your ears. :-), and having no answer as to what makes one inviting and another not, I thought I'd ponder in this cafe a couple of writers whose voices sucked me in from page one, in an attempt to figure it out.
The first had me at the title of the first book by him that I stumbled onto: "The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove." I stopped reading the Internet post on which it had been mentioned and pressed Ctrl-N to pop open a new tab and ordered the book from Amazon before I'd even read what it was about <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lust_Lizard_of_Melancholy_Cove> (insert link to a description of LLOMC here). I knew I was in good hands -- at least for me and my warped tastes -- the moment I read that title. I was thus not all that surprised, when the book arrived the next day, that by the end of page one I was a Class A fan, and was already Amazon-ing to buy all the rest of Christopher Moore's books. Chris' voice just resonates with me. Part of it is that he's funny, one of the funniest writers I have ever encountered in my life. It's positively embarrassing to read a Chris Moore book in public, because you laugh out loud on almost every page, and no matter what folks say about liking jolly people, they still tend to look at you funny if you're sitting in a airport waiting lounge or a crowded cafe laughing hysterically to yourself ever few minutes. Especially in an airport; I've had people walk over to make sure I wasn't reading the Koran. :-) But it's not just the humor. Chris is a *tremendous* storyteller, almost bard-like in his ability to spin a tale so enchanting that you're enchanted, and would sit there listening to him tell it for hours if he were telling it to you in person. And that's the "take away" I get from pondering why his writer's voice resonates with me. I am a sucker for a well-told story. The other writer is in many ways the polar opposite of Chris Moore, but not in terms of storytelling. I consider her one the best writers of the English language ever, and it's largely because of her mastery of the art of telling a good story. She is occasionally very witty, but funny is not the primary reason anyone would want to read one of her books, which are all historical fiction; the story is. And the characters. Dorothy Dunnett writes the best characters I have ever encountered in literature. They're so COMPLEX. You meet them and they're already larger than life. The "had me at" moment for me with Dorothy was the line she used to introduce the hero of "The Game Of Kings <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Kings> ." Francis Crawford, Earl of Lymond, now declared an outlaw, breaks into his mother's castle and enters the room in which she is holding court, with many of her friends in attendance. He is there to rob them. Dorothy describes his entrance with the words, "Drama entered, mincing like a cat." I read that line and ordered the other five novels of the series, and read them back to back. Part of the reason was that this description was so perfect that I thought I knew who this brigand and outlaw was. I thought that I had him bagged. I didn't have a clue. 2000 pages later Dorothy could pull something out of her writer's hat about this man that rocked me back in my chair and made me gasp and say aloud, "Holy shit. I never saw that coming. Now I have to go back and reread the entire series." Prophetic reaction, that. I have now reread the series seven times. With each reread I learn more, and appreciate her writing and her storytelling more. There are layers and *depth* to the writing of this Scottish matron ( Dorothy was married to a Scottish nobleman who in real life was Ian Fleming's model for James Bond ) that I have rarely encountered elsewhere. Just like her characters, trying to get a handle on Dorothy Dunnett's writing is like peeling an onion. You remove one layer, and there's another. And another. And another. Ad infinitum. But what was it about her writer's voice that got me, from page one? It was a kind of "mother is at home" feeling of being in the hands of a master storyteller. I was hooked on the story of this 17th-century outlaw on page one of the first novel and by the time I got to the last page of the sixth novel the first thing I did was to go back to the first page again and start rereading. I'll probably never stop rereading, because the story compels me, even though I know how it ends. So I'm thinking that the bottom line for me when it comes to a writer's voice is, "Does this person make me want to read more?" It may be related to Maharishi's "natural tendency of the mind." My mind wants to hear more if a good story is being told. It wants this even more if the story is being told well. But it can't be dragged kicking and screaming into a story if it isn't very good, or if it's being told badly.
