Monday, October 15, 2012

While we're on the topic of voice--a writing prompt

My Intro to Writing Short Fiction students got onto the topic of Monsanto topic--more specifically, onto the idea of patented genetic code. As I was trying to re-rail them back onto the topic of the day (narrative structure), one of the students called out, "can you imagine God coming into the office of the CEO? being all like, 'Yo, bitch, I own the copyright to all genetic codes.'" They laughed, but another, clearly worried about our irreverence, called out, "God doesn't sound like that."

"We're getting back onto structure," I said, secretly loving the idea of God sounding like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, "but I'm throwing that out there as a writing prompt: God confronts a CEO." I paused with them a moment to bask in the coolness of this idea, then added, "but if you write it, the voice of God is going to be a crucial choice, and it better not sound like anything we'd expect."

I'm throwing this idea out to the larger world. God's been given the voice of George Burns before, but what would God sound like in your story/poem? Make the voice specific to the context and let the language be determined by the personality in response to the situation.