Words Matter Week Blog Challenge: Writers That Make My Heart Sing

Wednesday’s blog challenge question for Words Matter Week is:

Writers are people who take isolated words and craft them into memorable phrases, stories, poems and plays. Who are the writers who make your heart sing? What is the magic ingredient?

Different writers appeal to me at different times, and the magic ingredients can be found in different proportions in most of my favorites.

Here are the magic ingredients for me:

• A sense of possibility
• A big idea
• Humor
• A worldview that I can believe in
• A wonderful setting (usually foreign)
• Something unexpected

Writers who make my heart sing:

I love C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien anytime, all the time.

Other authors who’ve had the magic touch at some point in my life (and usually still do– I tend to remain loyal):

• Madeleine L’Engle (Crosswicks Journals, as well as her middle-grade fiction)
• Rosemary Sutcliff (Dawn Wind)
• Edith Wharton
• Dorothy Gilman
• E. Phillips Oppenheim
• Mary Stewart
• Edward Ormondroyd (David and the Phoenix)
• Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun)
• L. Frank Baum
• William Butler Yeats
• Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea; Journals)
• Laurie Colwin (Home Cooking)
• Annie Fellows Johnston (Little Colonel books; Mary Ware)
• Clair Blank (Beverly Gray series)
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Isak Dinesen

Of course, there’s always a flip side– things you couldn’t pay me to read. I won’t read anything in which an animal is harmed, and I am dismally bored by whiners, navel-gazers, chronically-depressed characters, and insecure people in unhealthy relationships. I confess to a completely low-brow desire to spend my reading time with characters, ideas, and settings I find interesting. Life’s too short to tolerate bores!

You can visit the Words Matter Week website and blog to find more posts from the blog challenge. They’ve been a lot of fun to read.