You Knows It When You Reads It

March 23, 2010

We talk a lot about "voice." How important it is. To-date, I don't think anyone's given it a good definition, and sure as hell nobody I've ever heard talk or write about it has given a good idea on how to develop it short of "read a lot; write a lot" which covers most of what you need to become a publishable writer.

I've often heard agents and editors say that when they pick up a manuscript and the voice jumps out at them, they know just ... know.

Not helpful for us writers, certainly. But I was reminded of this just last night. I like novelist Robert Crais a lot. I love his Elvis Cole novels, have enjoyed his stand-alones, especially DEMOLITION ANGEL. I picked up his latest a month or so ago, THE FIRST RULE, which is a Joe Pike novel. For whatever reason I put off reading it, partially just to keep some variety in my reading, alternating thrillers with SF with crime novels with...

So last night I picked up THE FIRST RULE and read:

Frank Meyer closed his computer as the early winter darkness fell over his home in Westwood, California, not far from the UCLA campus. Westwood was an affluent area on the Westside of Los Angeles, resting between Beverly Hills and Brentwood in a twine of gracious residential streets and comfortable, well-to-do homes. Frank Meyer--more surprised about it than anyone else, considering his background--lived in such a home.

Okay. Nothing amazing there, I don't think. A couple things did strike me, though. It seemed very assured. There's a rock solid construction aspect to this that jumped out at me, even in three sentences. A sense of place. I like the phrase "in a twine of..." I also think the final sentence, suggesting that there's more to Frank than just an upper middle class suburban resident is very deft.

The second paragraph is interesting as well and perhaps more subtle.

Work finished, Frank settled back in his home office, listening to his sons crash through the far side of the house like baby rhinos. They made him happy, and so did the rich scent of braising beef that promised stew or boeuf bourguignon, which he never pronounced correctly but loved to eat. Voices came from the family room, too far away to make out the program, but almost certainly the sound of a game show on television. Cindy hated the nightly news.

Hmmm. Some fairly sophisticated characterization and scene-setting going on here. We're getting a real sense of Frank and a sense of family (of which something really horrible is soon to happen). A couple things strike me about this. I like the "...sons crash through the far side of the house like baby rhinos." I think his use of the verb "crash" is nice because of all the energy and sound and images it creates, and the "baby rhinos" is a nice touch. The joke about the dinner is interesting. And then, again, there's that last sentence that sends something a little jarring through all the domestic bliss, just a tiny bit.

Is there voice here? I think there is, but it's not necessarily immediately apparent. And it's possible that other readers just won't respond to it. Overall, what hits me most about these opening paragraphs is the careful modulation, the solid sentence structure, just how much information is being provided with very little effort. It seems effortless, but the more I analyze it the more I suspect he spent some time on each and every word. Scene setting, characterization, mood, with just tiny hints that hell will probably break loose soon (and it's a Robert Crais novel, so we know that's going to happen anyway; we're generally pre-sold). Here's the sentence that ends the first section on page 7:

Frank Meyer had no reason to suspect that something unspeakable was about to happen.

Now, the next section, we get a change of voice, a bit, a change of tone, a change of language:

Four men in the vehicle, black cutouts in the shadowed interior, Moon driving, Moon's boy Lil Tai riding shotgun, Jamal in back with the Russian. Moon, eyes flicking between the houses and the white boy, wasn't sure if the foreigner was a Russian or not. What with all the Eastern Bloc assholes runnin' around, boy coulda been Armenian, Lithuanian, or a muthuhfuckin' Transylvanian vampire, and Moon couldn't tell'm apart. All Moon knew, he was makin' more cash since hookin' up with the foreign muthuhfucka chillin' behind him than any time in his life.

Hmmm. There's a lot here. Once you get past the first part of the first sentence, we're inside Moon's head, his POV, more or less, even though it's still in third-person. The language changes, the images change, it moves to a street dialect (muthuhfucka versus motherfucker, to me, is fairly interesting word choices), dropping the g's.

So, to me, the question is: Do you hear the "voice" here?