Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D.
With Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D.
Period: FRIDAYS, April 16, 2010 to June 25, 2010
Meeting dates: 4/16; 4/23; 5/7; 5/14; 5/21; 5/28; 6/11; 6/18; 6/25
Time: 8am pacific / 9am mountain / 10am central / 11am eastern
Level: Intermediate to Advanced Workshop
If you have been writing for a while and enjoy the process of understanding yourself through memoir writing, contact Linda Joy. She will help you determine how you might fit into the level of workshop that meets that session. Various factors help to determine how you will fit into one of the ongoing workshops, and we like to help you find one that works for where you are in your writing life. Simply send an email to info@namw.org with the best telephone number at which to reach you and Linda Joy will contact you directly about your writing needs relative to one of her intermediate to advanced workshops.
The format: write your story for that week, email it to the workshop members. Write your feedback to each participant, and email it to them. Gather on the conference call once a week to discuss the work, get feedback from Linda and others on the call, and develop new ideas for your stories. Handouts are sent by email for new writing prompts or lessons.
The Goal of our Workshops
The goal of these workshops is to deepen your progress with your memoir, and to develop fictional techniques such as dialogue, scenes, point of view and structure. Developing new writing skills and getting support for your ongoing learning is a good reason to take an online workshop. Perhaps you have written some vignettes and now are ready for feedback.
Writers work alone, and eventually need to find out what others think of our work. You might have been journaling for a long time, but now you are ready to put your memories into story form, whether for your own personal satisfaction or to create a legacy for your family.
In these workshops we send the stories and feedback to the whole group through email, then gather at the appointed time through a conference call to discuss the stories, develop the ideas and questions that have arisen during the week, and talk about new techniques as needed. We offer supportive feedback to help you develop your work. It is not a critique group, but a workshop that helps you to keep writing and offers help in understanding both the content of the stories as well as new techniques to develop your skills.
With your permission, we audio tape these calls so you can listen to them later to help you learn and remember the feedback you received.
The following questions and ideas are part of the workshop sessions:
- What is one of your favorite stories? Would you like to develop it further?
- What time frame have you covered in your early vignettes? Place them on the timeline to get a visual image of the quilt of your memoir.
- Character sketches: Choose some of the people you have sketched and create a more complete scene with them. Learning about scene writing is ongoing.
- Do you struggle with writing your truth?
- Learn about quilting your vignettes into a larger work.
- Does your inner critic bother you? Learn new techniques to help silence the inner critic.
- Write about landscapes and places that are part of your soul.
- Editing: We teach you gently how to become your own editor.
- Revision—means “seeing again.” Writing means revision, an important skill as you grow as a writer.
- Organization: we will discuss how to organize and keep track of your vignettes. This is an important part of ongoing writing.
- Plot, showing, telling, and reflection in memoir.
- What’s the heart of your story? Do you know your themes? These become clearer as you write.
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