| About Voice
"We all have a voice," Pat Schneider says in Writing Alone and with Others, as surely as we all have a face. Every writer practices to find their voice. "Voice is style, voice is the words you choose, voice is the way you begin and end sentences." Writers ask how they find their voice. Schneider says the answer is simple: Listen to yourself, telling your stories to someone you trust. Until you can trust your own voice, it can be difficult to write in the voice of characters you create.
 The Writer's Workshop delivers exercises based on Amherst Writers & Artists methods to help you hear that voice of yours, already full of character from your life. You write, then you read aloud to the group you trust. The sounds you hear help you find your authentic voice. Reading aloud is one of the many writing tools we find together at the Workshop. Many of the tools in the Workshop are carried in exercises, practiced together to create trust.
Ben Yagoda has a fine book, The Sound on the Page, devoted to style and voice in writing. He advises what we practice in our Writer's Workshop groups: the search for the natural voice within you, not showy, but simmering with substance:
"Anyone who puts pen to paper can have a prose style," Yagoda says. "In almost every case, that style will be quiet, sometimes so quiet as to be detectable only by you, the writer. In the quiet, you can listen to your sound in various manifestations; then you can start to shape it and develop it. That project can last as long as you keep writing, and it never gets old."
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