WRIT52301 - Experiments in Voice and Style: Finding Your Own

Course Description

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was fond of repeating a line from Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Imitation, copying, can be a path to developing your capacity for creative theft and transformation in your own work. Faulkner, for instance, imitated other writers for two decades in order to find his own voice and style. In this short course, you will imitate passages chosen from diverse writers such as Toni Morrison, Hubert Selby, Jr., Louise Erdrich, Toni Cade Bambara, Christina Stead, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Junot Diaz, and Virginia Woolf, or others in order to discover and use the power of your own authentic voice. Stylistic play will help you access heightened language and your own distinctive style in order to move toward a healthy creative theft and more engaging writing in multiple genres and modes.