OAP: "Writing Salon Series 1: A Creative Adventure in the Writing Salon"

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Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Writing Salon Series 1: A Creative Adventure in the Writing Salon

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inspiring, fabulous, awe, creative, jazz, improvization, healthy, mind bloggling,
good network, poetry alive, lovely, friendly, laidback, greenery, mental gym

These are the words that come to my mind as I look back at the writing salon adventure. The entire concept is very noble and challenges your mind to go to where it has never gone before. I was very inspired to unleash my creative mind into the written word and James Nave is a bohemian poet that gives you a glimpse of the possibilities. Hopefully, it sets out and unleashes your wild imagination. Originally, I was planning to do a day-by-day series of the events that happened during the 3 day weekend, but instead I'll post our writing exercises instead to give you a glimpse of the salon experience.

Here are my key learnings from the Writing Salon:
1. Unleash your Creative/ Design Mind. Most of us are trained to be logical and creativity comes from the subconscious where it does not follow any logic. One trick would be if you wanted to start writing about a place of inspiration, instead of starting with perfecting your first few sentences, start with capturing all the words that immediately comes to your mind. Just capture what comes out and what you can hear in your head -- that is your subconscious. The words might not make sense but once you compose your writing using the words you collected, your writing would be totally different. Now this takes practice, practice, practice and will apply it when posting things about an awesome site next time.

2. Character Writing is all in the details. The power of a characterization is not in terms of how complicated the character is, but how detailed you are able to describe the character in 360 degrees detail. Now, there is no logic in developing the character, you just need to look into yourself and allow your own creative imagination to tell you what the character would be. Details could be what's the favorite food, age, first de-virginized, education, friends, social state, etc. This actually gave me a confidence on creating my own character not in novel but anonymously blogging (Ha!)

3. Each of us have our own imaginative energy which is a product of our experiences, books that we read, people that we met. To better explain this (or confuse you even better... hehe) I would leave you with a quote:

"What is it in the imagination that keeps surprising us in odd moments when something is given back in solitude, spontaneously and with great joy."

Just let it flow and better listen to yourself and trust your creative/ imaginative self.

>> More Photos Here.