Web conferencing

Another great webinar with Marcy Kennedy

/ Melanie Marttila

This past week, I signed up for another WANA International webinar.

Yesterday, between 2 and 3:30 pm, Marcy Kennedy spoke on the topic of showing and telling.

First, she defined her terms and gave examples, demonstrated the difference between showing and telling, and let us know that she would not only be sharing tips for showing and for detecting when telling isn’t appropriate, but also that she would be discussing instances in which telling actually works better than showing.

She covered several telling ‘tells’ in writing and shared strategies for detecting and eliminating each.  Each of her strategies was accompanied by more examples, which was great, because it’s good to have something solid to base your own efforts on.

She also mentioned that her strategies were suggestions, or guidelines, rather than rules, per se.  There are always exceptions, and she’d be getting to those.

When it came to when telling, while I won’t give away the content of her webinar, I will share one suggestion with you: use telling in your first draft.  This was very interesting and Marcy shared her experience and how she came to this conclusion.

Marcy used to be a slow writer. Her first drafts might have emerged in nearly perfect form, but they took forever to write.  Then she decided to try tactics to write a fast first draft.  Using telling as a way to help her get her ideas down and give her a cue for where to deepen her narrative on the next draft was something she found very effective.

Overall, it was a very insightful webinar and I took away lots of good information.

I’d highly recommend Marcy’s sessions.  Visit the WANA International site to view their course calendar.  Marcy will be giving her pitch, tagline, and logline session again in the fall.  I attended that one as well. Awesome good.  She’s also a Twitter and Google+ maven, so if you want tips for the social media, look for those too!

WANA webinars are very reasonable and many are held at times convenient for the writer with a day job 🙂

I’ll also encourage you to visit Marcy’s site (linked above) and to sign up for her newsletter.  It’s good stuff!

That’s it for this week, my writing peeps.

Sundog snippets: The learning mutt is learning :)

/ Melanie Marttila / 8 Comments

I haven’t made much progress on Khara House’s May submit-o-rama and that’s kind of pathetic given that I only signed up to submit once a week.

I do have two stories due for the 31st, but can’t see getting another story done this month.  My other two submissions will have to be poetry, if anything at all.  I may just have to concede to failing the challenge.

What’s more exciting (for me, anyway) is that I signed up for some excellent courses in the last few weeks.

First was Marcy Kennedy’s logline, tagline, and pitch webinar, through WANA International.

Initially, the webinar was to have been May 11, but had to be rescheduled due to technical difficulties.  We got to complete the webinar yesterday, May 18, and it was very worthwhile.  Marcy knows of what she speaks 🙂

Then Last Tuesday, I signed up for another WANA International webinar with Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, authors of The Emotion Thesaurus and the minds behind The Bookshelf Muse blog.

That webinar was also very good, and focused on creative ways to show emotion in your writing.  What works and what doesn’t for modern authors.

I’d highly recommend WANA International courses.  They’re reasonably priced, and the presenters are all experts in their respective fields.  Marcy’s and Angela’s/Becca’s webinars weren’t the first WANA courses I attended.  About a month or so ago, I signed up for Jay Donovan’s internet security course.  He’s one of the techsurgeons behind the WANA site.  It too, was a good one, though I had to miss part of it.

The good thing about WANA webinars is that you get the recording on the other side 🙂

My month-long learning effort, though, is my first Margie Lawson course.  Margie Lawson is my kind of writing teacher.  Her method is deep editing and you really have to experience it to understand it.  It’s eye-opening.  She gets into rhetorical techniques and studying the writing of acknowledged masters.

The course will continue until the end of the month  and I’ll blog about it in more detail at that time, but for now, I’ll just say that you have to check out the Lawson Academy.  Once again, the courses are very reasonably priced.

I got hold of Margie through the Writers in the Storm blog.

That’s all I have for you this week, my friends.  I’ll encourage you to check out WANA International and Margie Lawson for yourselves.  They. Are. Awesome.

Until next weekend, the learning mutt is learning.

 

Going “rogue”

/ Melanie Marttila

Thanks to the colleague who helped me to introduce my idea, I started to attend free training and learning Webinars that were offered by various magazines and firms.  I was doing this at work.

Learning by Doing

Learning by Doing (Photo credit: BrianCSmith)

It was professional development, and I didn’t doubt, question, or waver a bit in my decision to take advantage of them.  Since March 2011, I have been attending, on average, about two of these Webinars a month, and they’ve been most instructive.  I’ll even chat about some of the things I’ve learned from them in this blog from time to time.

Then my manager got me signing up for some eNewletters, essentially subscription feeds from some very interesting blogs by learning and development professionals.  I’ve linked to some of my favourites under Learning Blogs 🙂

Some of the articles I receive are fascinating, and the links to other resources within them have often led me on a merry chase over the Interwebz, yielding even more resources, sites, and blogs of interest.

When I signed up to attend a course to become a certified trainer in my organization (I know, I’ve been training for three years, and now I’m getting certified …) I picked up a few more resources.  And so the catalogue grows.

I’ve become a social learner, a rogue learner, a mutant learner, and I’m in charge of my learning, by and large.  There are still formal courses to attend, and hoops to jump through, but I’m getting so much more from reading a handful of interesting articles regarding learning theory and design and attending the odd Webinar, than I ever did from institutionalized education …  Mind = Blown 😉

Not that I’m knocking formal education.  Entirely.  It’s gotten me where I am today, but social learning is going to take it from here.

“… second star on the right, and straight on ‘til morning.”  J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

So … what has the world of social media brought you?  Any surprises?