‘The ability to see and the talent to speak’: The emergent writer and questions of voice and authority

Abstract

With the question of appropriation in fiction in debate – given prominence through the furore caused by Lionel Shriver’s keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival in October 2016 – the importance of discussing issues of voice and authority with emergent writers has become ever more apparent. Yet how should these ideas be discussed with student writers who are still coming to terms with craft notions such as point-of-view and narrative voice? What alternatives are available other than focusing on privilege and power, where students tend to retreat into their subjugated identities to justify their speaking positions? And when discussing ‘the right’ to tell other people’s stories how can a recognition of fiction writing as a political act in itself move emergent writers away from the idea of ‘making things up’ towards a more engaged view of their practice? This paper will attempt to answer some of these questions via a mixture of voices itself, utilising the ‘voice of experience’ of the tertiary teacher as well as that of the practicing creative writer whose own work – a draft novel entitled ‘The Master Class’ – is concerned with fiction as, inevitably, an act of appropriation and utilities a narrative where fictional characters directly engage with the question of who owns a story.