This might be a little frou-frou academic but let’s get polemic and creative and re-interpret The Blog. Add jazz hands as necessary.
Yes. I’m for real. I’d kinda like to encourage you to mangle language, stream consciously (or un), make wild analogies, mix and unmatch metaphors, make up words (plurk), get taxidermical with George Orwell, run fast and loose with slutty punctuation, wax lyrical, write 12,000 word essays (on porn – please – at least keep us interested), create loopy titles that are paragraphs and induce migraines and embrace that as a personal objective, take on personal titles as pronouncements and dub yourself Queen of the Gays/non-sequiturs, and toggle between play-dough and Plato.
Read poetry and if you must, write it, but for the love of ye gods and all that is holy DO NOT INFLICT ANY OF IT ON US.
Instead, channel Hemingway and write anorexic prose. Or embellish. Amplicate. Invest in curlicues and adverbs, make adjectives your bitch, and swear a mofo lot in cynical cartoons because that’s just funny.
Be funny. Insist on detailing the amoebic nuances of daily, boring, beautiful life. Tell us about the time your little brother glued his G.I. Joe’s to the kitchen wall and declared war against all things legume. But stay away from clown sex.
(Probably NSFW. Google The Bloggess and clowns – and squids, while you’re at it.)
Mess around with fonts and characters and spacing to make your point. Sidle up to your point and kiss it on the shoulder. Parse. Write some unscannable pieces (whaaaaa? No lists? No bullets? No headers? Fetch the stake and the matches!). Please. Thank you.
Use vivid, physical, metaphorical language (mad, insane, crazy-making, blinded, deafened, crippled, disabled, epileptic, schizophrenic, idiot, fat, MILF- what?! because usually, not so much?? – bitch, pimp). Despair at the politically nefarious connotations of that language. Talk about it. Write through it. Invent a new language.
Link to everything. Link to Jonathan Swift (thanks, Seth). Link to nothing, at all, ever. Let your copy stand on its own.
Promise never, ever to use the word copy again. Liar.
Indulge in the dash. Be parenthetical. Be self-referential. Pretend you’re an expert. Admit you don’t know a thing except how to be wildly intellectually mastubatory while using your blog as therapy. It is all a writing prompt, after all, and we’re all in it together.
Create characters (The Farmer. The Gentleman Caller. You), address your readers directly, imagine you’re Samuel Richardsonand your blog is your Clarissa and in fact blogs are the new epistolary novel because that’s not pretentious at all. It’s still true.
Go dirty. Go highbrow. Result in raised eyebrows.
Decide that you can’t decide between your two beloved babies, fragment or run-on sentences, and just out and out dare people to call the grammar police.
(Because what is grammar for? Writing clearly and conveying your point effectively. Use it. Abuse it. Bend it like Beckham. Do whatever you need to do.)
Be homey. Invite us in. Strip textually naked. Surprise!
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Do you want to surprise – and delight – your readers (and hell,yourself) with wild and free writing?
I can teach you some specific techniques to create emotional tension in your work. I can help you unlock – unleash! – your unique writing voice.
And I do that in a writing workshop that is chock-full of inventive exercises, examples, and gossip.
(Because writers are storytellers which is just a fancy way of saying we can’t keep a secret.)
…and we’ll do that, together, in a two hour workshop in Vancouver.
How Not to Be a Boring Writer: The Workshop
Here’s how it goes down:
- you, me and twenty-odd (they don’t have to be odd but it helps) people
- two hours of chewy-delicious talk and practical tips
- how to introduce emotional contrast (it is essential, darling)
- how to use telling, telegraphic details
- threading the grommets – pulling metaphorical threads through your piece and tying it up in a pretty (or messy – you decide) knot at the end
- examples, exercises and lotsa love.
Bonus:
+ a rant on why it is crucially, politically, artistically important to write personal
+ profanity. No extra charge.
The Details:
Saturday, July 17
1pm to 3pm(ish)
Hollyhock Room, 4th Floor
163 West Hastings
Vancouver BC
$100 CDN 
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PS never, ever do what I just did. Promiscuous out-linking in sales pages is VERBOTEN. Sales letters should NOT have links to anything except your “buy now, dammit!” page.
So. Do as I say not as I do.
Except in the writing workshop – you’re coming, right? – where you WILL TOTALLY OBEY my every command.
xoxoxo
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wanna be an affiliate? E-mail me!
Oh my stars, how I wish for the millionth time that I lived in Vancouver. I would SO be there, even if I had to live on Ramen Noodles for a month to be able to afford the workshop. (Not that it is expensive just that my income is that low.)
I love reading your blog and know I could learn a lot from you. I am trying to learn the art of blogging but have a LONG way to go.
I wish you well and hate that there is no way for me to get there…if you hear a BIG sigh just know it is coming from Arkansas, USA.
Ciao Bella,
Ardee-ann
[Reply]
Kelly
replied:
on July 13th, 2010 at 11:09 am
@Ardee-ann, I wish it too. Every day.
[Reply]
Ardee-ann
replied:
on July 13th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
@Kelly, Kelly, I guess we will just have to wish together! Ciao Bella, Ardee-ann
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you’re so bad, what with all that promiscuous linking and all.
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Pity Vancouver is soooooo far away! Would love, Love *LOVE* a MP3 & transcripts etc though!
[Reply]
PicsieChick
replied:
on July 6th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
@Rachael Stott, Yes! yes, please! Can we buy an MP3 and transcripts? Please??
Hugs and butterflies,
~T~
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Shit! Even if I started riding my bike today, I wouldn’t make it! (Car died!) Move it to Toronto and I have a chance! You just keep it up and I will be there one day!
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Have I told you I love you lately?
Reading this is the best thing I’ll do today. Okay, I’m in Knoxville and I’m facing an 8-hour 2-flight nightmare later just to get home… but still. Oh, the glamourous freelance life. Sign up and you, too, can jet off to places like Knoxville to write plant safety videos.
Sign up for your workshop, though… heaven. Wish I could, Kelly… really. I’d walk up I-5 if I wasn’t busy that day. You’ll kill ‘em.
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Well, it’s a four and a half hour drive from Vernon to Vancouver…probably more with two kids and my husband…we’ll have to stop for ice cream on the way and I’m sure I’ll hear “Are we there yet?” about five million times. But, fire and brimstone can’t keep me away. Blogging has been goooood to me this year. I’m all signed up. Did you get my Paypal payment yet?
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w00t, what a preview… can’t wait to meet you and the other odd participants on the 17th!
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Awesome. Wild and free, with no e-book in sight. Make a version I can be part of NOW, dammit!
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Your pitch is killer. Sounds like SO much fun. Wish I lived closer. My finger would be hovering over the “Buy Now Dammit!” button for sure.
Best of luck with it & keep up the great work.
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Kelly – another voice from the other coast. Tape it, girl, and offer those mp3 downloads, and I’m in. Puttin’ on my red shoes right now (ok, they are red Birkenstocks, but y’know…;))
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Oh, I’m so wishing I lived in Vancouver! I think you should definitely take this show on the road. Any plans to come to Texas?
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Vancouver, wished I could get there too. If you get to the UK, give us a shout, it’s about time Cleavage had a tour bus and you and your girls did a bit of sightseeing…
I bet it will be fab x
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Oh, I think it is so sad that you are conducting a writing workshop but immediately insult all poets early on in your pitch – there are a lot of poets who blog, too. And you’ve said before that you write poetry, and you really like Charles Bukowski’s poetry, so why the gross generalization that poetry should not be inflicted on anyone? Reinforcing a weird, totally false stereotype that poetry is borrrring: ugh.
There are so many good poets out there that totally cancel out the crap ones:
* Allen Ginsberg, particularly his poem “Howl”.
* Leonard Cohen
* Sylvia Plath (I like her collection “The Colossus”, also her collection “Ariel” which has the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”)
* Elizabeth Bachinsky (Vancouver poet; I really like her “Home of Sudden Service” collection)
* Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Her collection, Sky Ray Lolly, has lots of filthiness which may appeal to you)
* Nadine McInnis (Canadian, currently based out of Ottawa): her collection entitled “Two Hemispheres” is based on 19th century photographic portraits of inmates from a women’s insane asylum in England. Beautiful and disturbing poetry. http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=3&bookid=175
*La Loca’s “Adventures on the Isle of Adolescence” collection — the title poem in particular is pretty awesome, what with pop culture & classical history reference, teenage boys on skateboards and, oh yeah — sex.
Or for something sort of light-hearted, Alan Cassels’ “ABC’s of Disease Mongering” has practical info by Cassels and somewhat Suess-like poems by Victoria based poet Alisa Gordaneer.
Go, poetry!
[Reply]
Kelly Diels
replied:
on July 11th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
@Carrie, yes, GO POETRY!
It was tongue-in-cheek – *I* write poetry too. I love spoken word poetry, I read poetry like it is water and I’m thirsty…
Dear Poets: I love you so much. I want to be one of you.
xoxo
Kelly
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Can’t wait for the Monterey workshop! It’s my only saving grace for not being in Van.
Yay!
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Go and badger Dave to invent that time warp machine thingy so that we can all come from whichever tiny corner of the planet we live, descend on Vancouver for the day and then use the same special invention to gatecrash the Give A Brick cocktail party in West Wales the following Saturday. Go on. You know you want to
Seriously though, it sounds like a fabulous afternoon. Have fun
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Damn. I wish I could be there Kelly, really, I do. Especially because I am in the process of launching my humor blog.
Unfortunately like many people who WISH they could be there, I live halfway across the continent. Maybe next time. Maybe you’ll do something like a web seminar one of these days?
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