Writing Workshop at the Library

This Thursday I went to a creative writing workshop at the Library. It was lead by Melanie Schnell, who teaches creative writing at the University of Regina.

She focused her talk on two essentials to writing.

1. Use imagery! She described imagery as concrete details that cause the reader to imagine. Writers need to include details for all 5 senses to create realism and feeling in their work.
2. Harness desire! A good story is not driven by what happens to characters, but what they yearn for, desire. 

Her second focus really resonated with me. In teaching the elements of fiction, I tell my students that the conflict is the engine of the story. It gives the push to move from event to event in the plot. However, conflict in this sense depends on the desires of the characters. If a character didn't want a certain thing, that character would not be invested in the conflict or the conflict wouldn't even exist. I think, instead of asking my students what the conflict is in a given story, from now on I'm going to ask them what the characters in the story want, what are their driving desires.

Of course, it cannot be a workshop without some work to do. Melanie gave us three interconnected exercises, related to her two points.

1. Describe something you do everyday by hand. Focus on using imagery.
2. Define a character by their want. Fill in this template: (Name) is a (adjective) (age)-year-old (noun) who wants ______________.
3. Rewrite the first exercise from this character's perspective.

The exercise stressed the importance of tailoring the writing to the characters in the story. Knowing what your characters are like and want, should influence how you write about them. She said that most people find the final exercise the easiest, because it's just an edit of what came before; however, the character I concocted was so different from my self that I had to start from scratch for that one and found it more difficult.

I've included what I wrote for the first exercise. It isn't finished yet as my time ran out, but I shared it at the end of the workshop and thought I'd share it here too.