Writing from The Heart: What's In A Name?

Writing from The Heart

"Writing from The Heart" is a workshop on creative writing, creative drawing, and creative drama. There are three available versions of this workshop: one for beginners on the secondary, tertiary, and graduate levels, and another for practitioners. A third version of this workshop is designed as an outreach program to disadvantaged and underserved audiences such as the disabled, the poor and the marginalized, victims of human trafficking, battered women and abused children, drug rehabilitation center residents, child combatants, children in conflict with the law, prisoners, and gang leaders. This third version incorporates creativity and problem awareness, conflict resolution, crisis intervention, trauma therapy, and peacemaking.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

What's In A Name?

Choose a name you've seldom encountered, preferably one you cannot associate with a real person. For example, "Corinne" or "Maksim", whatever your gender.

On a day and a night that you are mostly alone, use that name for yourself, going about your day and your night as though that were indeed your name.

You will find, among other things, that:

--You will have a different color sense.
--You will develop different preferences for food.
--Your penmanship will change.
--Your behavior will also change.

This is, actually, the process of "possession". And what is a writer, after all, but a person being possessed by the current character he or she is writing about?

Note: Heighten your powers of observation during this exercise, and always in the service of creative writing, rather than merely going through the experience just for fun.