An Exercise for Analyzing Authorial Voice

When I was in my MFA program, two pathways of sorts were offered. The one I chose was the education route, and I earned a certificate for online teaching while also getting my MFA in Creative Writing.

One assignment I had a lot of fun completing allowed me to plan out a mock course. My classmates and I could decide on the grade-level and the focus of the course. I chose to create a course for college students that focused on analyzing authorial voice. Students were to pick a writer who had published a novel and a collection of poetry and dig into the similarities and differences each genre showcased about the writer’s voice.

I was thinking about this idea recently, and I kind of want to try it out. I made example pairs of books for the course, including Margaret Atwood and her novel The Handmaid’s Tale and her poetry collection Dearly. Both of the books have been waiting to be pulled from my bookshelf and read, so why not pick them up now? And make the reading experience even more educational? I know the topics I focus on in my own poems and prose often overlap, but I don’t know if I could tell you what my authorial voice actually is. Looking at someone else’s voice across genres might help me better hone my own.

It’s been a while since I’ve properly analyzed a piece of literature, but keeping a compare-contrast mindset is going to be fun!

Do you have a novelist-poet or poet-novelist you’d analyze? Which works? Do you have your own exercises centering on authorial voice? Feel free to share them!