Rather than taking years to become a writer, take this writing workshop.
You will learn through the maxim “start fast, start fresh; continue carefully, finish surely,”© a well-formulated and extensively practised set of techniques for writing anything with confidence, clarity and credibility.
In this five-hour workshop, participants will first be introduced to the benefits of meditation in the writing context and receive the tools to write with a new sense of ease, enabling them to improve the efficiency, impact and clarity of their writing — a skill vital to one’s standing in the world.
If you suffer from writer’s block — what writer Himla Wolitzer poetically refers to as “laryngitis of the soul” — or wish to beat your blogger’s block, this workshop will equip you with tried techniques to “get writing,” with, or without, a visit from the muses. Where the muses can be fickle, well-formulated techniques are reliable.
If, as in the Beatle lyrics, you want to become a paperback writer, or turn your journals into books, articles and blogs, write elegant wine notes, legal briefs, medical assessments, art descriptions or business memos, aspire to greater mastery in writing and presenting speeches or dramatically shift your ability to communicate effectively, this ecologically conceived workshop will give you the means to steer the process of communication to a credible and desirous end appropriate to the audience.
Holistically designed, this workshop will get you into the ready-for-writing state, give you the tools to pin down a specific topic to win audiences from a general area of interest, find clarity on what the work offers readers, craft a table of contents and opening chapter (which is what most publishers want to see) and develop a clear vision of what is required to proceed to completion.
The workshop covers techniques to avoid procrastinating, think about writing less and write more and include good preparation practices; methods for using ideas and material from other writers; the matter of sourcing — as, for example, with the lyrics of the song Paperback Writer — research protocol, as well as how to bill and write about yourself as writer and speaker with force and credibility, but without pretension or conceit.
The workshop — premised on the idea that both mind and body need to be ready for writing — includes power breathing exercises at the start, hand and eye exercises in mid-afternoon and a yoga closing technique to end the writing process.
The workshop will be presented by S Fuller of www.spaforthemind.com, where you can view comments from participants in earlier writing workshops and testimonials from clients coached in writing. She holds a PhD with a dissertation topic relevant to how effective communication can result in change, and worked as a journalist for nine years, mostly as a foreign correspondent for international news agency Reuters, where clear, memorable and efficient writing combined with clarity of vision and awareness of audiences was a career requirement.
She is now a writing and book coach, helping clients take their books and articles from their minds to the screen, and to select only the best ingredients from their experiences, talents, thoughts and observations to create the writing recipe for success. Like good cuisine, writing should be appetizing, full of nuanced flavour, made of nutritious ingredients and easy to digest.
In addition, S Fuller is an award-winning communication coach, workshop designer and freelance writer. She has been invited to give writing workshops over the last 20 years within universities, corporations and at writing retreats, and she gives them at her home in this format.
The mews, with its symbols of provocative thought and mindful practices, provides the perfect surroundings for pursuing purposeful techniques to kick-start the writing process.
(If you can’t see a video console above this caption, you need to download and install the Adobe Flash player here.)
This workshop first took place on August 8, 2009, from 12 noon to 5 p.m. at the mews. Included were writing anchors — a grounding place mat and sheathed set of chopsticks, as well as brown-rice-sushi lunch.
Participation is limited to eight and the cost is $125 per participant. However, if two participants book at the same time, the fee will be reduced by 10 per cent ($12) to $113.
Two preparatory articles will be sent out on receipt of payment registration.
The writing workshop can also be custom-designed for a one-on-one meeting or group meetings at the mews, or at your site.
©S Fuller 2003-2009