Class Description
Most agents and editors will tell you that “voice” is their foremost criterion when it comes to selecting writers to represent or publish. But what exactly IS a literary voice, and how does an aspiring writer go about developing one? How is voice related to point of view, and what are our options in this regard? How can we achieve the rich specificity of detail that is such an essential ingredient of gripping fiction, and how can we harness it to write sentences and paragraphs that will make our stories irresistible to readers?
In this intensive six-part class for aspiring novelists and short story writers, we’ll begin by zeroing in on the question of literary voice, using a series of brief exercises to discover and refine our natural storytelling style. Then we’ll explore the techniques, advantages and pitfalls of different points of view, making the important distinction between point of view and psychic distance and discovering how a better grasp of how degrees of omniscience can be used to create fiction of unusual depth, clarity, and emotional complexity. We’ll examine the reasons that conveying the sensory details of setting and character is a crucial skill for writing immersive fiction in ways that many aspiring authors don’t fully appreciate, and we’ll look for ways to harness the full capabilities of sentence-level writing to enrich and expand the range and impact of our stories.
We’ll tap the richness of a wide and diverse range of classic and contemporary fiction writers including Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Ursula K LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, James McBride, Junot Díaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Haruki Marukami, Sally Rooney, John Le Carré, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen Graham Jones, Esi Edugyan, Jane Austen, Maggie O’Farrell, Kasuo Ishigiro, and many others to refine our skills and discover new techniques. A series of brief but impactful exercises and occasional out-of-class reading and writing assignments will enable us to integrate our observations into our own fiction writing to endow it with greater range, flexibility, vividness, authority, and power.
Please note: This class follows a custom schedule, and will meet on 1/16/25, 1/30/25, 2/13/25, 2/20/25, 3/20/25, and 3/27/25.
Writing Roadmap: We've created a simple, goal-based writing roadmap to help you find the perfect GrubStreet course for your writing needs.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.