You know the adage: It's not what you say, it's the way you say it. This seminar builds on that idea, asking: What makes one writer sound entirely distinct from another? Why do some characters seem to come alive on the page from their very first line? How do word choice, syntax, dialect, tone, and rhythm combine to create a writing style as individual as a fingerprint? Voice is often considered an elusive quality a writer either has or doesn’t have, a certain something readers experience but can’t quite name. We will approach it differently: not as something innate to a writer but as a series of choices made through attention, experimentation, and artistic leaps. Reading closely across poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, playwriting, and literature for young people, we will study writers with compelling voices and trace the decisions they made to produce them. Through weekly writing exercises, we will try on the voices of these writers in order to hear our own more clearly. Reading List to come