One chilly evening in February at the Pearl River Library, author Emmy Laybourne (Monument 14: Sky On Fire, Feiwel and Friends, forthcoming April 2013) led workshop participants through a series of vigorous warmups.
“I feel electric after these!” Laybourne exclaimed, as the others, including teens and adults, grinned and shook out the kinks.
This was not an aerobics class–it was a writing workshop.
“Ideas come through the body. Wake up your brain!”
Once the juices got flowing, the workshop kicked into full creative gear. Laybourne covered the basics of story structure, but added healthy doses of improvisational techniques in written and spoken free association, encouraging writers to both discipline their wordcraft and free their muses to explore the outer limits.
How did these writers transform over the course of the workshop? One teen began a word-association exercise saying, “I don’t know where to go from ‘banana.'” By the end of the evening, during another exercise in imagining unexpected things a character could get from a donut shop, she yelled out, “An eyeball!”
In a genre-bending exercise, writers riffed off each other’s most outrageous ideas, eventually spinning out ideas for tales that made Goldilocks into a hard-boiled detective novel, or had Tinkerbell fending off goblins in a futuristic post-apocalypse.
Laybourne’s writing, performing, and publishing experience gave writers a great source for information as well as inspiration, as the discussion turned to the limitations of genre fiction (the sky!) and publishing trends.
Catch Emmy again in May for an intensive workshop on story structure. More news on that to come!