Help Please! I’m Looking For Great Examples Of The Writer’s Voice…

[Hannah F]

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland.
There used to be a town in Green Lake as well. The town shrivelled and dried up along with the lake and the people who lived there.
During the summer, the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade - if you can find any shade. There's not much shade in a big, dry lake.
The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the "lake". A hammock is stretched between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that.
The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the warden. The warden owns the shade.
Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions find shade under rocks and in the holes dug by campers.
Here's a good rule to remember about rattlesnakes and scorpions. If you don't bother them, they won't bother you.
Usually.
Being bitten by a scorpion or even by a rattlesnake is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You won't die.
Usually.
Sometimes a camper will try to be bitten by a scorpion, or even a small rattlesnake. Then he will get to spend a day or two recovering in his tent instead of having to dig a hole out on the lake.
But you don't want to be bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard. That's the worst thing that can happen to you. You will die.
Always.
If you get bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard, you might as well go into the shade of the oak trees and lie in the hammock.
There is nothing anyone can do to you anymore.


Holes by Louis Sachar (MG/YA humorous fiction, publ. 1998, Bloomsbury) [Opening]

Amazon product ASIN 1408865238

 

[RK Wallis]

The screw through Cinder’s ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle. Her knuckles ached from forcing the screwdriver into the joint as she struggled to loosen the screw one gritting twist after another. By the time it was extracted far enough for her to wrench free with her prosthetic steel hand, the hairline threads had been stripped clean.

Tossing the screwdriver onto the table, Cinder gripped her heel and yanked the foot from its socket. A spark singed her fingertips and she jerked away, leaving the foot to dangle from a tangle of red and yellow wires.

She slumped back with a relieved groan. A sense of release hovered at the end of those wires—freedom.

Meyer, Marissa. Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles Book 1)

I love how Cinder's goal is upfront.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Invasion had come to the town of Adano.
An American corporal ran tautly along the dirty Via Favemi and at the corner he threw himself down. He made certain arrangements with his light machine gun and then turned and beckoned his friends to come forward.
In the Via Calbria, in another part of town, a party of three crept forward like cats. An explosion, possibly of a mortar shell, at some distance to the north but apparently inside the town, caused them to fall flat with a splash of dust. They waited on their bellies to see what would happen.
An entire platoon ducked from grave to grave in the Capuchin Cemetery high on the hill overlooking town. The entire platoon was scared. they were out of touch with their unit. They did not know the situation. They were near their objective, which was the rocky crest not far off, but they wanted to find out what was going on in the town before they moved on.
All through the town of Adano, Americans were like this. They were not getting much resistance, but it was their first day of invasion, and they were tight in their muscles.
But at one of the sulphur loading jetties at the port a Major with a brief case under his arm stepped from the sliding gangway of LCI no 9488, and he seemed to be wholly calm.
John Hersey
A Bell for Adano,

 

[Pamela Jo]

CHAPTER I​

UNEARTHLY humps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants. At night when the stars rose over them they looked like a starlit herd of divine pigs. The villagers called them Hullocks.
The valleys were full of soft and windblown vegetation. The sea rolled at the foot of all as though God had brought his herd down to water.

The Hullocks were blackening as Velvet cantered down the chalk road to the village. She ran on her own slender legs, making horse-noises and chirrups and occasionally striking her thigh with a switch, holding at the same time something very small before her as she ran. The light on the chalk road was the last thing to gleam and die. The flints slipped and flashed under her feet. Her cotton dress and her cottony hair blew out, and her lips were parted for breath in a sweet metallic smile. She had the look of a sapling-Dante as she ran through the darkness downhill.

At the entrance to the village the sea was pounding up the sewer with a spring gale behind it. She passed to the third cottage, stopped at the door, opened it, let a gush of light on to the pavement, closed it and carried her tender object inside.
Edwina, Malvolia and Meredith sat in their father’s, Mr. Brown’s, sitting-room just before supper time. It was dark outside and hot inside, and outside in the darkness the Hullocks went up in great hoops above the village. There was an oil stove in the corner of the sitting-room and lesson books on the table. The ceiling was low and sagged. An Albert lamp with a green glass shade lit the table. There was no electric light. Donald, the boy of four, was asleep upstairs.
Edwina, Malvolia and Meredith were all exactly alike, like golden greyhounds. Their golden hair was sleek, their fine faces like antelopes, their shoulders still and steady like Zulu women carrying water, and their bodies beneath the shoulders rippled when they moved. They were seventeen, sixteen, and fifteen. Velvet was fourteen. Velvet had short pale hair, large, protruding teeth, a sweet smile and a mouthful of metal.

National Velvet
Enid Bagnold

 

[Pamela Jo]

1

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail.

“You pigs git,” Augustus said, kicking the shoat. “Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.” It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake. Pigs on the porch just made things hotter, and things were already hot enough. He stepped down into the dusty yard and walked around to the springhouse to get his jug. The sun was still high, sulled in the sky like a mule, but Augustus had a keen eye for sun, and to his eye the long light from the west had taken on an encouraging slant.

Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day—and most of the months of the year—the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices—if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices—of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned.

His stubborn partner, Captain W. F. Call, maintained that there was excellent shade as close as Pickles Gap, only twelve miles away, but Augustus wouldn’t allow it. Pickles Gap was if anything a more worthless community than Lonesome Dove. It had only sprung up because a fool from north Georgia named Wesley Pickles had gotten himself and his family lost in the mesquites for about ten days. When he finally found a clearing, he wouldn’t leave it, and Pickles Gap came into being, mainly attracting travelers like its founder, which is to say people too weak-willed to be able to negotiate a few hundred miles of mesquite thicket without losing their nerve.

The springhouse was a little lumpy adobe building, so cool on the inside that Augustus would have been tempted to live in it had it not been for its popularity with black widows, yellow jackets and centipedes. When he opened the door he didn’t immediately see any centipedes but he did immediately hear the nervous buzz of a rattlesnake that was evidently smarter than the one the pigs were eating. Augustus could just make out the snake, coiled in a corner, but decided not to shoot it; on a quiet spring evening in Lonesome Dove, a shot could cause complications.
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry

 

[Jan L]

David Joy's When These Mountains Burn:
When the days grow shallow, there are only the memories, the stories that remain scattered like seed, the tales that bind us in this world. We can retell them, gather the remnants of souls that have exploded into the infinite, piece the shattered bits back to form, and breathe life into the ones we’ve loved and lost. As we stare into the oblivion and slowly fade from the familiar, those stories will be the faces that surround us, and the voices we hear when we too come to pass.

There are so many amazing Southern (U.S.) writers who have strong voices.

 

[Jonny]

The opening to Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

For me, this voice is ethereal, beguiling, mesmerising and completely otherworldly. It probably helped to have heard read peerlessly in the audiobook version by Chiwetel Ejiofor. I was instantly gripped by the mysteriousness and immediately felt transported to this place wherever the hell it was

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule entry for the first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls to witness the joining of three Tides.

This is something that happens only once every eight years. The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great Staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into the distant heights. I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee – this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness – crawls over her left Eye.

I squeezed Myself into the Woman’s Niche and waited until I heard the Tides roaring in the Lower Halls and felt the Walls vibrating with the force of what was about to happen. First came the Tide from the Far Eastern Halls. This Tide ascended the Easternmost Staircase without violence. It had no colour to speak of and its Waters were no more than ankle deep. It spread a grey mirror across the Pavement, the surface of which was marbled with streaks of milky Foam.

Next came the Tide from the Western Halls. This Tide thundered up the Westernmost Staircase and hit the Eastern Wall with a great Clap, making all the Statues tremble. Its Foam was the white of old fishbones, and its churning depths were pewter. Within seconds its Waters were as high as the Waists of the First Tier of Statues. Last came the Tide from the Northern Halls. It hurled itself up the middle Staircase, filling the Vestibule with an explosion of glittering, ice-white Foam. I was drenched and blinded.

When I could see again Waters were cascading down the Statues. It was then that I realised I had made a mistake in calculating the volumes of the Second and Third Tides. A towering Peak of Water swept up to where I crouched. A great Hand of Water reached out to pluck me from the Wall. I flung my arms around the Legs of the Woman carrying a Beehive and prayed to the House to protect me. The Waters covered me and for a moment I was surrounded by the strange silence that comes when the Sea sweeps over you and drowns its own sounds.

Susanna Clarke - Piranesi - Bloomsbury Publishing - Kindle Edition.

 

[Hannah F]

This thread is a good fun read.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished by it nothing but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman.
Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilisation. To be illiterate is to be deformed. And the derision that was once directed at the physical freak may, perhaps more justly, descend upon the illiterate. If he or she can live a cautious life among the uneducated, all may be well, for in the country of the purblind the eyeless is not rejected. It was unfortunate for Eunice Parchman, and for them, that the people who employed her and in whose home she lived for ten months were peculiarly literate. Had they been a family of philistines, they might be alive today and Eunice free in her mysterious dark freedom of sensation and instinct and blank absence of the printed word.
A Judgement in Stone
Ruth Rendell

 

[Serra K]

Susanna Clarke - Piranesi -

This is one of the voiciest books I've read, and also a favourite.

 

[CarolMS]

These quotes from Tony Morrison's Beloved:

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”

 

[CarolMS]

Anais Nin's journals were very popular among young women like me during the late 1960s and 1970s. I remember reading them feverishly, steeped in her sensual world and in Paris and Louveciennes. During those years, I wrote volumes in journals, and I think her voice and her world always lingered nearby, deeply influencing me. Here are some quotes from her journals:

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”

“Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”

“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”

 

[CarolMS]

This empowered voice rises up in Alice Walker's The Color Purple:

"All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men. But I never thought I'd have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me."

 

[Nikky Lee]

Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky immediately sprang to mind for this thread. Clever use of voice to reveal character imo.

1.

My name is Rex. I am a Good Dog.

See Rex run. Run, enemy, run. That is Master’s joke.

My squad is Dragon, Honey and Bees. They are a Multiform Assault Pack. That means they are not Good Dogs.

I am coming close to the enemy now. I am coming from downwind. I can smell them: there are at least thirty human being in their camp. I can smell guns. I cannot smell explosives. I cannot smell other dogs or any Bioform breeds, just humans who are enemies.

I am talking to my guns. They tell me they are ready and operational. All systems optimal, Rex, they tell me. Good Dog, well done for remembering, says my feedback chip.

They are called Big Dogs, my guns. This is a joke by the people who gave me them. They are on my shoulders and they will shoot when I talk to them, because I need my hands for other tasks than pulling triggers. They are called Big Dogs because humans are too little to use them without hurting themselves.

I do not like the thought of humans hurting themselves. Bad Dog! comes the thought. I like humans. Humans made me.

Enemies are different.

I am talking to my squad. Dragon is not replying but his feedback signal shows that he is alive and not already fighting. Dragon is difficult. Dragon has his own way of doing things and often he conflicts with what Master has told me. Master says “Dragon gets results,” and so I cannot tell him to stop being Dragon, but I cannot be happy with him being Dragon. Dragon makes me uncomfortable.

Honey is talking to me. She is in position with the Elephant Gun. This name is also a joke. Like the other jokes, I do not understand this one. Honey is not an elephant.

Bees is talking to me. She reports 99 per cent integrity. Bees doesn’t have or need a gun. Bees is ready. Honey is ready. Dragon had better be ready or I will bite him, even if that makes me a Bad Dog.

I am talking to Master on our encrypted channel Master tells me I am a Good Dog. I am in position and there is no sign from the enemy that they know I am here.

Master tells me I can attack. Master hopes I do well. I want very much to make Master proud of me.

I tell Honey to start. She has gone crossing off the enemy camp. I can smell her but they cannot. She talks to her targeting system and I listen in as it identifies targets of opportunity. Honey agrees. They send eleven explosive shells into the Samp from a distance of four hundred meters, aiming of maximum disruption. As soon as the eleventh is away, even as the first shell hits, I am moving in.

I see the fire. I hear the sound of human voices, shrill above the explosives. Run, enemy, run.

 

[CarolMS]

When a novel opens with a voice that makes me smile as Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Gamus does, I find it hard to resist. I'm just starting it, and this is the first page.


BACK IN 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there'd even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.

Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter's lunch.,

Fuel for learning, Elizabeth Zott wrote on a small slip of paper before tucking it into her daughter's lunch box. Then she paused, her pencil in midair, as if reconsidering. Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win, she wrote on another slip. Then she paused again, tapping her pencil against the table. It is not your imagination, she wrote on a third. Most people are awful. She placed the last two on top.

 

[CarolMS]

I could have dipped into any part of Brian Doyle's novel Mink River and come up with something equally visually evocative and utterly delightful, or similarly slipped with satisfaction into the pages of one of his other stories or many essays, running the gamut from hilarious to inspirational, and often deeply moving. This is a slice from the opening pages of Mink River, where he is describing the small Oregon town where the story takes place.


. . . . Or the sheer jungle energy of trees and plants here, where the flora release so many feminine ions and the light fractures into geometric patterns that are organized along magnetic lines coherent with the tides and sometimes visible to the naked eye.

Really and truly.

And some buildings here have a moist salty dignity even as they grow beards of stringy pale green moss as seasick old men; and long relaxed streets that arrive eventually where they are headed but don't get all fascist and linear and anal as highways do; and unusual fauna right in the town sometimes, like the young elk who ate a whole box of frozen hotdogs at a school picnic once, or the black bear who wandered through the shed at the Department of Public Works and tore apart a pile of newspapers and was discovered reading The New York Times travel section, turning the pages daintily with her claws as big and sharp as steak knives.

Right now, for example, look up, right over there, see the eagle flying low and fast over Curlew Street? Watch: As he sails over the grocery store he whirls and snatches a whirling piece of cardboard, and he flapflopflaps down the street triumphantly, big as a tent, you can almost hear him thinking I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn't getaway from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air.

Not something you see everyday, an eagle chortling over a beer box, eh?

Brian Doyle: books, biography, latest update

 

[Pamela Jo]

“And then say what? say, ‘forget you’re hungry, forget you got shot inna back by some racist cop—Chuck was here? Chuck come up to Harlem—’ ”
“No, I’ll tell you what—”
“ ‘Chuck come up to Harlem and—’ ”
“I’ll tell you what—”
“Say, ‘Chuck come up to Harlem and gonna take care a business for the black community’?”
That does it.
Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
It’s one of those ungodly contralto cackles somewhere out there in the audience. It’s a sound from down so deep, from under so many lavish layers, he knows exactly what she must look like. Two hundred pounds, if she’s an ounce! Built like an oil burner! The cackle sets off the men. They erupt with those belly sounds he hates so much.
They go, “Hehhehheh…unnnnhhhh-hunhhh…That’s right…Tell ’em, bro…Yo…”
Chuck! The insolent—he’s right there, right there in the front—he just called him a Charlie! Chuck is short for Charlie, and Charlie is the old code name for a down-home white bigot. The insolence of it! The impudence! The heat and glare are terrific. It makes the Mayor squint. It’s the TV lights. He’s inside a blinding haze. He can barely make out the heckler’s face. He sees a tall silhouette and the fantastic bony angles the man’s elbows make when he throws his hands up in the air. And an earring. The man has a big gold earring in one ear.
The Mayor leans into the microphone and says, “No, I’ll tell you what. Okay? I’ll give you the actual figures. Okay?”
“We don’t want your figures, man!”
Man, he says! The insolence! “You brought it up, my friend. So you’re gonna get the actual figures. Okay?”
“Don’t you shine us up with no more your figures!”
Another eruption in the crowd, louder this time: “Unnnnh-unnnnh-unnnh…Tell ’im, bro…Y’ on the case…Yo, Gober!”
“In this administration—and it’s a matter of public record—the percentage of the total annual budget for New York City—”
“Aw, maaaan,” yells the heckler, “don’t you stand there and shine us up with no more your figures and your bureaucratic rhetoric!”
“And then say what? say, ‘forget you’re hungry, forget you got shot inna back by some racist cop—Chuck was here? Chuck come up to Harlem—’ ”
“No, I’ll tell you what—”
“ ‘Chuck come up to Harlem and—’ ”
“I’ll tell you what—”
“Say, ‘Chuck come up to Harlem and gonna take care a business for the black community’?”
That does it.
Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
It’s one of those ungodly contralto cackles somewhere out there in the audience. It’s a sound from down so deep, from under so many lavish layers, he knows exactly what she must look like. Two hundred pounds, if she’s an ounce! Built like an oil burner! The cackle sets off the men. They erupt with those belly sounds he hates so much.
They go, “Hehhehheh…unnnnhhhh-hunhhh…That’s right…Tell ’em, bro…Yo…”
Chuck! The insolent—he’s right there, right there in the front—he just called him a Charlie! Chuck is short for Charlie, and Charlie is the old code name for a down-home white bigot. The insolence of it! The impudence! The heat and glare are terrific. It makes the Mayor squint. It’s the TV lights. He’s inside a blinding haze. He can barely make out the heckler’s face. He sees a tall silhouette and the fantastic bony angles the man’s elbows make when he throws his hands up in the air. And an earring. The man has a big gold earring in one ear.
The Mayor leans into the microphone and says, “No, I’ll tell you what. Okay? I’ll give you the actual figures. Okay?”
“We don’t want your figures, man!”
Man, he says! The insolence! “You brought it up, my friend. So you’re gonna get the actual figures. Okay?”
“Don’t you shine us up with no more your figures!”
Another eruption in the crowd, louder this time: “Unnnnh-unnnnh-unnnh…Tell ’im, bro…Y’ on the case…Yo, Gober!”
“In this administration—and it’s a matter of public record—the percentage of the total annual budget for New York City—”
“Aw, maaaan,” yells the heckler, “don’t you stand there and shine us up with no more your figures and your bureaucratic rhetoric!”
They love it. The insolence! The insolence sets off another eruption. He peers through the scalding glare of the television lights. He keeps squinting. He’s aware of a great mass of silhouettes out in front of him. The crowd swells up. The ceiling presses down. It’s covered in beige tiles. The tiles have curly incisions all over them. They’re crumbling around the edges. Asbestos! He knows it when he sees it! The faces—they’re waiting for the beano, for the rock fight. Bloody noses!—that’s the idea. The next instant means everything. He can handle it! He can handle hecklers! Only five-seven, but he’s even better at it than Koch used to be! He’s the mayor of the greatest city on earth—New York! Him!
Tom Wolfe
Bonfire of the Vanities

 

[Hannah F]

I never did no magick.
Not at the time they said, anyways.
It was Mother who heard them. Mother could hear a frog hiccup from a mile yonder. She could whisper out a blackcap nesting in the trees. Mother had old ways, from far across the sea. And that's what she looked to teach us. Perhaps that's what led to it all. All the blood. And the death.
When Mother hollered us, I didn't see them. Dill pointed down.
'There, Eveline, there low!'
I saw them. The skulkers. Men. Horses. They were coming. They knew us.
No matter that Mother had healed them. Cured their stock. Smashed their children into the world. Here they came, like whelps. Boys to fetch us in. Scared. Angry. Men.
'Dill, get!'
We ran fleet foot, wind after catching us, and we found Mother, leaning on her staff. She pressed a bag to me. She was pale as birch bark. She could not run. Her leg was twisted and scarred like a root grown wrong.
'They're coming!' Dill pullet at Mother, who only bent to stroke dirt from her cheek.
'Here my Dilly Dee . . .'
She opened Dill's hand to place something. It sat round and heavy on Dill's thin fingers. The Wolf. The Tree Stone. Mother's scrying stone. Then she looked at me sharp.
'Get to the coven. Find my sister. Look to Dill. Go now!'
I remember that. Her face like wax settled on wood. Her lips split. Her eyes all fire.
'Evey, swear you will ever look to Dill.'
Her face so fierce with love. I heard shouts. They were close.
'For my blood, your blood, your sister's blood . . .' She pushed against me. 'Swear it and go, Evey!'
And this I have of her always. Her mouth, shouting, furious at me.
'I do swear it, Mother . . .' Then I took Dill's hand and we ran.

Witch by Finbar Hawkins (MG/YA Historical Fantasy, publ.2020, Head of Zeus) [Opening pages]

Amazon product ASIN B0BPCJ2VNH

 

[Pamela Jo]

It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St Paul’s at Covent Garden. Martin, who was none too sober himself, at first thought the body was that of one of the many celebrants who had chosen the Piazza as a convenient outdoor toilet and dormitory. Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body the ‘London once-over’ — a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy or a human being in distress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport — like base-jumping or crocodile-wrestling. Martin, noting the good-quality coat and shoes, had just pegged the body as a drunk when he noticed that it was in fact missing its head.

As Martin noted to the detectives conducting his interview, it was a good thing he’d been inebriated because otherwise he would have wasted time screaming and running about — especially once he realised he was standing in a pool of blood. Instead, with the slow, methodical patience of the drunk and terrified, Martin Turner dialled 999 and asked for the police.

Rivers of London
Ben Aaronovitch

 

[TimRees]

For me the voice comes from the main character. All my novels feel different. Delphian is very different from Raw Nerve because Vincent and Gideon are very different characters, although both novels are thrillers. But I notice that with other big name authors such as Grisham and Coben. A Time To Kill has a very different voice/feel than the Pelican Brief and Coben's Missing You has a very different voice to Just One Look. I recently had Anu on Pop-Ups and that has a very different voice/feel because Anu is a world away from any character I have created. On Sunday Royal Seal is on Pop-Ups and the voice/feel is radically different from what you heard on Anu.

By the way, after Anu's Pop-Ups appearance I have re-written the entire first two chapters. I appreciate the reviewers didn't like Anu's immaturity at the start, so the first two chapters are now seen through the eyes of adults. Interesting process Pop-Ups. It is so important readers get through the first 700 words. It was very helpful. Thank you.

 

[Rachael Burnett]

I'm going for a slightly different approach here. Images from the graphic (and fabulous) novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

 

[Bloo]

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.

And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone. When the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and stayed with me so that I would know I hadn’t lost him too.

But before he could come to me, I had to convince the police that he did not belong in jail. That took time. The police were shadows who appeared intermittently at my bedside to ask me questions I had to struggle to understand.

“How did you hurt your arm?” they asked. “Who hurt you?” My attention was captured by the word they used: Hurt. As though I’d scratched my arm. Didn’t they think I knew it was gone?

“Accident,” I heard myself whisper. “It was an accident.”

They began asking me about Kevin. Their words seemed to blur together at first, and I paid little attention. After a while, though, I replayed them and suddenly realized that these men were trying to blame Kevin for “hurting” my arm.

“No.” I shook my head weakly against the pillow. “Not Kevin. Is he here? Can I see him?”

“Who then?” they persisted. I tried to think through the drugs, through the distant pain, but there was no honest explanation I could give them - none they would believe.

“An accident,” I repeated. “My fault, not Kevin’s. Please let me see him.”

I said this over and over until the vague police shapes let me alone, until I awoke to find Kevin sitting, dozing beside my bed. I wondered briefly how long he had been there, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was there. I slept again, relieved.

Finally, I awoke feeling able to talk to him coherently and understand what he said. I was almost comfortable except for the strange throbbing of my arm. Of where my arm had been. I moved my head, tried to look at the empty place...the stump.

Then Kevin was standing over me, his hands on my face turning my head toward him.

He didn’t say anything. After a moment, he sat down again, took my hand, and held it.

I felt as though I could have lifted my other hand and touched him. I felt as though I had another hand. I tried again to look, and this time he let me. Somehow, I had to see to be able to accept what I knew was so.

After a moment, I lay back against the pillow and closed my eyes. “Above the elbow,” I said.

Octavia Butler - Kindred

 

[Jan L]

Anais Nin's journals were very popular among young women like me during the late 1960s and 1970s. I remember reading them feverishly, steeped in her sensual world and in Paris and Louveciennes. During those years, I wrote volumes in journals, and I think her voice and her world always lingered nearby, deeply influencing me. Here are some quotes from her journals:

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”

“Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”

“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”

Such a great example. Her voice is like no other.

 

[ChandlerJules]

There are so many wonderful examples already. But I can't resist sharing the opening lines of one of my personal favourites:

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Contemporary fiction. https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-...john-kennedy-toole/walker-percy/9780141182865

He had me at 'ear flaps'.

Love, love, love this character, this author. Thanks for the reminder

 

[Pamela Jo]

Love, love, love this character, this author. Thanks for the reminder

I had thought of this voice too. One of those like Wolfe that doesn't fall into genre or any kind of singsong sameness. A voice like a sore thumb.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

Such a great example. Her voice is like no other.

I read her, too, and loved both the voice and the feelings.

 

[James Charles]

Love, love, love this character, this author. Thanks for the reminder

I read this a couple of years ago. Sad that he passed.

 

[ChandlerJules]

I read this a couple of years ago. Sad that he passed.

Yes and as I recall it was his mother’s Very Persistent efforts that saw its eventual publication.

 

[Hannah F]

Yes and as I recall it was his mother’s Very Persistent efforts that saw its eventual publication.

Oh yeah. You've reminded me. He's the guy who killed himself because so many rejections led to depression. His mum got the book posthumously published and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

Footnote: Suicide is not a wise method for seeking a publishing deal. Please don't follow his example.

 

[gbhunt]

The passage I love most is Aslan's song in The Magician's Nephew, although I suspect it would receive robust critique if I presented it in the Writing Workshops. But it worked, because I heard the narrator speaking to me, and I bathed in the sound of his voice.

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it…” The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis