The Big Voice: How to Amplify Your Narratives

In this seminar, we'll contemplate what Chuck Palahniuk refers to as the big voice and little voice; we'll look at the different strategies writers have used to amplify the little voices they have to use in both fiction and creative nonfiction. We'll learn how to create tension via the back-and-forth “dialogue” a big and little voice can evoke while paying attention to the ways the big voice can be utilized to make a character’s motivations more believable. Finally, the big voice can serve as a loophole to get around the limitations of first-person or close-third points-of-view for revealing big picture information the reader needs to know.