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Book group zoom sessions for your writers group to reframe the old paradigm and light up new ways of interacting, learning, and reconnecting.
The idea for ensemble sessions and sense of rehearsal spaces for writers is inspired by the amazing work happening around somatics, dance and movement within and beyond Dartington Arts School in Devon, England. Coaching writers, I’ve found moving in and out of our prescribed roles exhilarating. The SLOW method (Speaker-Listener-Observer-Witness) has proven an inspiring aid in helping creatives engage more energetically and profoundly with their stories at emergence and revisioning stages. Embracing the language and embodied terms of choreography also frees something within the writer that once was caged.
So what lies at the heart of this space we are entering?Choreography and Vital Practice
Gabrielle Roth’s 5 rhythms and the writings of female dance choreographers has proved a boon in approaching our writing process in more embodied, centred, collaborative, consensual ways. Making it both a pleasure and a joy once more.
Make-believe…
is another huge component of the writing process but one that is sadly displaced in the traditional workshop model. Imaginative enquiry is still alive though in improv and theatre, so we’ll borrow from those too.
Restored Relationship
The Navajo have a word ‘hozho’ which directly translates as ‘beauty and balance’ but as a concept it comes closer to living in harmony. The beauty and balance we will seek is between hearing oneself think, hearing the other - truly hearing them, communing with our vision in an environment that is actively seeking to guard each person’s vision and recognise one another’s uniqueness.
Poetic thinking
Readers read linearly. Writers think associatively. Scenes and chapters don’t follow logically. They pop out as images, ideas. They spawn. Only, in time, do we spot patterns. It takes time for a thought to form, and many thoughts are mere stepping stones along the way. There is a time for spawning and a time for gathering.
A change is a’coming
Regarding a new breed of facilitators.
“What we need is sea-change from within the writing and publishing community - pushing back and moving away from acting like gate-keepers, keeping certain stories in and all manner of inspired thinking out, and instead BECOMING guardians, guarding the flourishing of the imaginative visions of creative, feeling, thinking, intuitive beings - and that means editors and decision makers re-educating themselves in undoing their cultural conditioning. When publishers serve humanity, we all benefit. When you're only looking to feed a machine though, the cost isn't what's on a spreadsheet, the price is our humanity.”
Book group zoom sessions for company editorial teams to reframe the old paradigm and light up new supplemental methodologies that support the writing and ways of thinking that long to come through.
Training for Editors transitioning from traditional marketplace, or some other field, into development and support of creatives and their work.
Training One. Making switch from telling to enquiring.
Corresponding with your clients on an equal footing.
You might like to think about why you’re looking to make your own transition. Could it be for the same reasons writers are wanting to reach out to someone like you? Reclaim a sense of autonomy and agency. Receive that creative charge. Love of what you do. It’s good to bear in mind that with writers doing the hiring, dynamics have shifted. Trad. editors can no longer rely on the old power structure: Do as I say. At last, we get put into practice our credo: Show, Not Tell.
It’s a fine line though between explaining the rationale between one narrative choice over another, and justifying yourself. Especially when you’re starting out and feeling the need to prove your credentials. The key that unlocks this attitude is when you register that “You truly want the writer to become the authority” and your role becomes to mine the questions that help them establish what’s what for themselves.
If that’s something you want to model and practice, this material can show you how to make for a happy transition.
Training Two: Managing overwhelm.
Annotating manuscripts sensitively.
Working for a fiction packagers, I was in the unusual position of feeding back on my peer’s creative work - the newly hired junior editor, sitting across the aisle from me, who was anxious to make a good impression on me, their senior, and their new boss. We’re talking 40-page storylines and larger story world documents. Aware of a change in their demeanour, I realised how easily each annotation could be seen as an attack|threat. We are talking about someone’s livelihood after all. Quickly, I learned to pare back my annotations: make a point once, asterix future references, and turn comments into suggestions and not a critique. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Later, when feeding back to mid-level authors, who have already successfully gone the traditional publishing route but aren’t crossing over into marketable books, I was in another unusual position. One of the greatest compliments I ever received though was from a lovely professional writer - who was also a secondary school teacher at the time - saying how she loved the annotations so much that she was going to incorporate it into her practice with her students going forward.
Online correspondence course.
Onboarding at any time.
Case studies across traditional and self-publishing industry.
Training Three. All in divine order.
Crafting reports with due care and consideration.
Consider this. Are you more likely to respond well to constructive criticism if someone has first given you their full attention and truly listened, sought to understand your intentions, and then shared how they relate to what you’re saying?
Too often, we (editors) skip straight to wanting to fix the problem - fix what isn’t working - and cultivate it as constructive criticism but if you haven’t taken time to construct praise and understanding then you’re only doing half your job.
It takes more than being constructive in your criticism, it comes down to how you frames things and how you order and sequence feedback. Core to that is appreciating our own responses. It’s all about getting under the understood and, with this mini-course material, you’ll come to fully appreciate how to best present feedback to others by having it presented to you first and seeing how you think and feel about it.
Nothing is perfect, but we can always learn what works well for us and refine that for our clients.
Online recorded tutorials,
Written materials as pdfs.
Complete in less than a day or in your own time.