OIL and S3

courtesy of geovoices.geonetric.com

Now that my Create Your Success session is over, I’m breathing a sigh of relief. Seems every inch of spare personal time over the past few days was devoted to ensuring I am at my best for the presentation. Now, it’s like a big field has opened before me. I’m freer to embrace my creative writing and all that I’m learning in the Gotham Writing Workshop. Last week it was about OIL: Observation, Imagination, and Language. This week it’s about show and tell and using 3 S’s: Specificity, Sensory, and Scenes. I’m being challenged and stretched by the writing assignments and having fun seeing what comes out of a week’s experimentation. I’m dabbling for the first time with dialogue, for example. I’m really imagining scenes and playing with language and the senses. I’ve noticed how what I am learning is influencing my work – like the presentation I just gave, which I think had stronger personal stories as a result of what I’m learning. This week’s assignment is to rewrite a 4-sentence description of something that happens in a way that shows the event unfolding moment by moment. First draft showed me just how challenging it is to SHOW versus TELL. I’ll keep playing…