April 14, 2023
Happy Friday!
Spring is sprung!
The most exciting thing that happened this week is that spring seems to have arrived! Hooray! It’s true to say that we had a very mild winter and by my reckoning, no snow at all, but yesterday when I walked out to the park, it was full of daffodils, tulips, and tourists. I like to go and feed the sparrows, and there were lots to feed!
Word of the Day Webinar
The webinar was very exciting. We worked on how to control our reactions to criticism, an inevitable part of getting your work out into the world. This is a two-part process. The first part is to clearly understand that criticism is only someone else’s opinion. The other part is to have a clear sense of how to make your work good enough so that you really can be completely confident that you’re sharing your best work by perfecting the things you can. For example, if you don’t want to be criticized for format or spelling errors, I suggest that you have someone else read it for you to make sure you have no errors and that you spend extra time correcting the manuscript.
Marilyn Horowitz/PANO Award
In our recent screenwriting award contest, we sent all of the applicants a copy of the fifteen most common mistakes that screenwriters make. If you’re interested, email me, and we will send you a copy.
Show, Don’t Tell
In this week’s webinar, the class was about how to train yourself to “Show, not Tell” when you are writing using the Word of the Day process.
The left side of the brain is very fast and can form words in less than a second. The right brain takes three to five seconds to form an image.
To write visually, it’s important to learn to think of your word and then wait for the image to form before you actually begin. There’s an Asian proverb that says a picture is worth more than 1000 words, and it’s true.
We put this into practice by brainstorming about a quality that we would like in our lives, such as joy. We then found the images in our cluster that were represented by the word joy; watching a sunrise, walking on the beach, or being in a beautiful writing room of your own. The most striking image was of the classic scales of justice made out of diamonds with gold chains and flowers on each of the scales.
We then converted the images back to words. This discipline of words to images in reverse helps to train that you have the brain to work together synergistically in a new cooperative way. Try it; you’ll see what I mean.
Poetry by Mitch Ditkoff
WOTD Webinar
Don’t miss the Word of the Day webinar on April 26. Please join me and register here.
Here’s to your writing success,
Professor Marilyn Horowitz
