Robert Anthony Siegel, “Voice: The Most Tricky and Hard to Define, Yet Most Essential Aspect of Creative Writing”

Why do some storytellers seem so real to us – as if they were sitting across the table from us telling us their story? And why do we feel such an urgent need to listen to them?

The sense of a narrator’s deeply individual presence begins with what we like to call voice, the linguistic expression of the character. Voice is the reason your mother can call you and start talking without even 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 analyze some examples from great works of fiction and nonfiction and then apply what we have learned to our own writing in class exercises.

Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a treatise, criminaland two novels, Everything will be revealed And All the money in the worldHis works have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian MagazineAnd The Paris Reviewand was anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014And Pushcart Prize XXXVIHe has been a Fulbright Fellow 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. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from Harvard.