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 Richardson and 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.

+ 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!