The Writing University Podcast

“Find your voice”—the most natural thing a writer should do, right? Somewhere inside me is my voice! Yet, the search tends to proceed like a grail quest, only trickier, because ‘voice’ pops up everywhere on the page, appearing now in the style, now in the sound, now in the stance, now in the details. So, is it the bedrock DNA of great writing, or a will-o-the-wisp? Should we follow the fiction writer Sylvia Watanabe’s advice, “Don’t try to find your voice; write a story”? In this Eleventh Hour session we’ll try to un-confuse an elusive all-inclusive concept, and we’ll start by looking at what ‘voice’ means to poets and what it does and doesn’t mean to fiction writers. Bring paper, we’ll be experimenting with a few exercises!