Fridays, Doce Cuarenta Cafe, Todos Santos, BCS, Mexico
11:00 AM – 1:00 PM, $5-10 US / 100-200p sliding scale donation
Lead by AWA Affiliate, Leslie Fierro
Begin, support or revive your writing practice through creative prompts and motivating feedback to help keep you writing every week.
If you’re looking for a writing workshop lead by a famous, published author who will help you become a famous, published author, this might not be for you. If you’re looking for an excuse to write, with prompts and people to inspire you to keep writing, join us!
Writing…
During our sessions, I’ll start the workshops off with a writing prompt, which all participants (myself included) will write to for an allotted amount of time. We’ll write about anything and everything, in any form–prose, poetry, play, word cloud, free association…sometimes you might just need to throw ink on the paper to find the way to your words. Though I’ll be giving new prompts for each writing session (at least twice during our two hours together), you are free to approach the writing time with either brand new work, or works-in-progress inspired by the prompt. You can also choose to write whatever is happening in your head, or out the window, or in the room. Your writing is what matters here, not how you get that writing out onto the paper.
Sharing…
We’ll then go around and voluntarily read our work. Following the practices of the AWA workshop method, all of our first-draft writing will be heard as fiction or story, so that we can all write as wild, as dark, as heart-rending, as fantastical, or as real as we like, without fear of being judged or assumed into the role of the character or the first-person narrator. No one will be pressured to read, but it really does help inspire confidence in your writing to put yourself out there, and believe me, it gets less scary every time you do!
Responding…
Again, all writing will be responded to as fiction, or–even if the author does state that their writing is autobiographical–as story, to keep the focus on the writing and the craft as opposed to the writer. Each member of our group is encouraged to respond to what they like, what stands out, what is strong and memorable in the writing. Responses that include criticism, suggestions for revision, or questions about the writer’s motivations or intent will be discouraged in order to keep our hot-off-the-brains writing safe in its incubative state. We can then take that positive feedback home, to steer our new writing however we see fit. Rough draft reviews and written feedback can be an option for longer-term participants, either in-workshop by multiple participants, or by me. Contact me for any questions about this.
Cast Off! Writers' Workshops 