This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.

Finding Your Own Voice in Fiction

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul illustrates the problem every beginning writer faces: “The idea given me by the more ‘cultural’ part of my education was that the writer was a person possessed of sensibility; that the writer was someone who recorded or displayed an inward development… To be that kind of writer (as I interpreted it) I had to be false; I had to pretend to be other than I was.” It took him years to shake that idea off. It took him several years to, as is expressed in the common parlance, find his own voice.

In this class we will discuss the idea of voice. What is it? Does every writer have one? How may we find ours, if it is at all possible to. We will read primarily first-person stories by Junot Diaz, Kendrick Lamar, Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Raymond Carver, and a few third person stories, as well. Together, ee will discover how they operate in common, and then differently. We will then see, through generative exercises and in-class sharing, what we can take from them to our own writing, to help us find this elusive voice or, as V.S. Naipul refers to it, “material.”