Pitch-perfect voice
When we use “voice” as a literary term, we can mean it a number of different ways. There’s the idea of a writer’s voice – the thing that makes that writer sound like themself, the thing that is distinct enough to be recognizable, that can be mimicked in pastiche, or parodied. We can talk about the voice of a story, the kind of language, prose, and style it’s written in. Or we can talk about the voice of a specific character – do they sound unique, do they sound like we think they should?
As a reader, the voice of the story matters to me a lot. Sometimes it can be an almost instant sign that this book is not, in fact going to be for me – I can think of two fairly recent series, both critically acclaimed and hugely popular, both ones that I very much hoped to enjoy, where the voice of the story grated on me so much that it made it impossible for me to read them. It was the literary equivalent of a horrible blind date. And I can think of other books where the voice immediately pulled me in, and sometimes kept me going where I might have otherwise stopped.
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