Why is it that some narrators feel real to us—as if they were sitting across the table, telling us their story? And why do we feel so utterly compelled to listen to them? The sense of a narrator’s deeply individual presence starts with what we like to call voice, the linguistic expression of character. Voice is why your mother can call you up and start talking without ever stopping to identify herself. You know it’s her because of her voice. Voice is the feeling of the person behind the words. But how does voice work? And how do we create it in our own writing? We will look at a series of examples of voice from great works of fiction, consider what makes them effective, and then do in-class exercises, putting what we’ve learned to work in our own writing, whether it
ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other publications, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Robert taught creative writing at UNC Wilmington for 22 years, as well as Hollins University in Virginia, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA from Harvard.
