This is such a cool opportunity and I'm really thrilled I get to share "Zen and the Art of Ideating: A Story Writing Café" with you. I'm also sharing a brief description of the workshop below, though you can learn more about the workshop (and register) at the Writing Workshops website here as well. Please take a look, please let me know if you have any questions, and do please plan to join us, yes? Cool.
(Also, and as noted above, "Introducing the Power of Hope to Our Writing Process" will be offered again on September 29th and you can learn more about that and/or register here).
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Zen and the Art of Ideating: A Story Writing Café
What to expect:
This highly interactive creative writing seminar will inspire you to embrace idea generation as a way to enhance your story writing, craft, and ongoing productivity. The session is modeled on "Parent Cafés" — a structured, peer-to-peer small-group discussion approach Ben has used throughout his work as a nonprofit leader, facilitator, and communicator — and adapts it into a generative engine for fiction writers.
What's distinctive here is the pace: the workshop pushes you to generate a flurry of ideas in short order while simultaneously crafting the concrete details your stories need to take flight. Through a series of individual and group exercises, you'll brainstorm, look within, and examine your own experiences — the people and places you know, and where you've lived, both physically and emotionally — to create a pool of ideas to work on and from going forward. The work focuses on the building blocks of fiction: setting, characters, situations, and dialogue.
Expect to talk, reflect, create, and write — a lot. You'll leave inspired, with the beginnings of a draft story and a stockpile of ideas for more. Instructor feedback runs throughout the live Zoom session and is welcomed after the workshop as well.
