Crafty Love

We were sharing pieces of our love story.  The reasons we fell in love with this love, how we kept up that love.  How we tended to its needs and the places we went wrong.

We were talking about writing, and our love of it.  The craft itself. And we were giddy about it.

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{Note: I was giddy and the other gals may or may not have been giddy but they seemed like it to me so I’m going with it.}

Like a combination of teenagers in puppy sloppy love, and seasoned couples looking knowingly at their long time sweetheart, we talked about our love of writing.  We were the speakers for the Writer’s Craft workshop at the Blissdom conference, and we had a room full of women who wanted to hear what we had to say.  We were there to share some of the tools in our writer’s toolbox, the resources, tricks, and process of our trade.

**Photo by Secret Agent Mama

I sat with Megan and Deb and Amber and we started by talking deep dish about why we love what we do, what inspires us to do it and what precisely we do to get word on screen.

We gave a writing prompt.  “What did you leave at home?“  No editing, just getitout writing was the first step.

{Feel free to answer that question in your own creative writing session right now.  Craft the question to fit your circumstance.  You never know what will come out of it…}

As we watched each woman put ink to page, we glanced excitedly at each other.  We watched writers being writers and it was heart pumping awesome.  We saw some flow through page after page effortlessly, while others ached over each word.  Tears and smiles and furrowed brows abounded.  It was magical.

We talked about tone and flow and cadence.  Lovely words to describe how a piece of writing “sounds”.  How you can lead with the eye, how you can insert breaths and pauses, or speed the reader up until you crash them into a wall that you knew was coming when the reader did not.

We had the women edit their work based on this idea.  More grins and more tears.

We talked more about language usage and grammar rules we do or don’t follow, about knowing the basics and then throwing them out the window (for blogging, that is), and about structure of the work.  There was more editing, and more happy.

We shared specifics on sites we love, books we adore and gathered all that for the attendees (or anyone who wants them), here at Amber’s blog.

We encouraged the women to become readers themselves, that every good writer is reading work better than her own.  Blogs, literature, poetry, anything.  We talked about watching out for jealousy of better writing than your own — to let it mentor and inspire rather than stunt creative work.

In short, we taught about seeing writing as a craft that is to be practiced and worked on and nurtured and to fall in love with. It was my most favorite workshop/session at a conference ever {if I do say so myself}.

Were you there? I’d love to hear your thoughts on our workshop.  Did you post your writing piece from the class?  Please link it in the comments below.

If you weren’t there, don’t you wish you were?  I do too.  Please feel free to make use of the Toolbox at Amber’s place.

{I would love to start workshops like this on a local level, or see others do it in their hometowns.  Wouldn’t that be amazing?}