WRITE LIKE A LOVER!
Instructor: Tad Wojnicki
Workshop Duration: 8 weeks
Workshop Syllabus
Want your hero jump off the page? Wish to woo, cajole, and seduce your reader? If so, this workshop is for you, because this workshop is about writing like a lover! Drawing from the facilitator's own (forthcoming) book on communicating emotions, this workshop will help you examine the way the body perceives the world through the senses and how these sensations can be brought back in writing. We will look into evoking the visual (pertaining to the eye), olfactory (nose), tactile (skin), auditory (ear), gustatory (tongue), and kinesthetic (muscles). We will talk about grounding our writing in the bodily, physical, sensual--the nitty-gritty. In effect, we will talk about writing with feeling, using the whole of the body as a lover would.
Weeks 1-2: Stop Kvetching and Start Stretching!
First two sessions will introduce you to the writing through the senses. We will use brain-teasers and stretch our imaginations, trying to unleash the creativity and freedom of expression through haiku, wordplay, figures of speech and synesthesia (the concomitant sensations).
Weeks 3-4: Suck Them In with Juicy Verbs
Next two weeks we will focus on the art of creating vivid, livid, stirring scenes by using textured, succulent, onomatopoeic, emotion-packed verbs. You will be shown the way to bring dead scenes alive and kicking.
Weeks 5-6: The Inner Split
If a truly great character must be "larger than life," how do you make one "lifelike," or even "realistic"? The Inner Split technique, invented specifically for this workshop, makes it a cinch!
Weeks 7-8: Those Magic One-Liners
The final sessions will focus on pithy characterization. Good writing has to start somewhere. Why not at cutting off all the fluff? We will open a treasure-trove of tapable experiences by practicing brief, blitzy and breezy cameos of people and settings we know.
Objective:
This class will show you how to write anything well--would it be a bodice-ripper, whodunit, travel piece, journal entry, kids' stuff, or a love song--because this class offers the nuts and bolts for establishing an emotional and visceral connection with your reader.
Prerequisite:
A loving, compassionate, forgiving attitude toward the world, including oneself. "I make love painting," Renoir said. Working with words, we, writers make love writing.
Required Reading:
Write Like A Lover! Tricks and Techniques to Evoke Emotions by Tad Wojnicki
Recommended Reading:
Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood
The Senses Wide Open: The Art and Practice of Living in Your Body by Johanna Putnoi
Lie Under the Fig Trees, A Novel by Tad Wojnicki
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Registration: Starts every other Wednesday
Workshop Duration: 8 weeks
Tuition: $100
Private Mentoring: $35
Tad Wojnicki is a freelance author, painter, and educator holding a Ph.D. in Philosophy and an M.A. in Creative Writing. He is the author of a factual novel, Lie Under the Fig Trees (1966), an experimental haibun novel, Under the Steinbeck Oak (2005), and flash fiction, tanka, and haiku published online and off-line. In addition to his writing, Tad exhibits his paintings in Carmel, CA where he leads "poetry powwows" by the beachfire and teaches "Write Like A Lover!" workshops, mentoring dozens of writers.
