Workshop report

Sooooo last weekend, or more specifically Friday night and Saturday, I was at Bob Welch's Beachside Writing Workshop! Yay! Throws confetti! Dances? I dunno.

Friday night we ARRIVED (actually a whole five minutes early, SHOCKING!). They were set up in a school gym but actually it was pretty neat.....Bob's wife did the decorating and she's kinda hardcore. There was a section for eating (meals were provided, yay!) and a section for the workshop. On the dining tables were large, old books with their innards sliced out and replaced with dirt and grass. Haha I alternated the entire time between horror, fascination, and admiration. Lolz. They were cool though.
We also got plenty of snacks provided for us! The whole food thing was pretty pro. For Saturday breakfast we got this insane French Toast insanity with cream cheese and stuff. It was like....all meshed together. Yeahhhh....and fruit salad and epicness. For Sat. lunch we got CRAB LASAGNA and other stuff. Crab lasagna! Whose idea was that, anyway? It was REALLY fantastic except they used quite a bit of lemon.....lemon in food is probably my least favorite idea, lol. I remember a lemon soup I had at Augustine that I downed through sheer hunger and willpower alone. :D
So Friday night we did sort of the introductory sort of sessions, stuff about inspiration and imagination and Bob's life, etc. lol. He has a plethora of interesting stories about himself, his writing, and how he found the stuff to write about. I decided, even more after talking to him, I would HATE to be a columnist. Like....that's just a LOT of columns. He said he's in the 2000s. Three columns a week, year after year? No thank you. But it was fun hearing the stories. He told us a lot of what went into his American Nightingale book, which is about an American nurse, Frances Slanger. He spent like $67,000 going around Europe researching the darn thing. Crazy. But I need to read that, as well as A Pebble in the Water and the book about the Easy Company guy (Easy Company is the company in Band of Brothers, which is a book I've read and also a mini-series I have not seen).
We also got free stuff! YAY! A t-shirt that says, "Metaphors be with you" (lolz) and a notebook-binder with lots of stuff in it. Wheeee! Also a paint chip. *nods*
Saturday we went through his ten tips for writing, which was kinda hardcore, and then did the whole lunch thing. Besides worksheet-ish stuff in the notebook, we wrote two short pieces during the weekend for various purposes, but kinda overall before and after things. My first one had to be based on a fortune-cookie fortune, which was "You will soon find your treasure." My brain was SO dead that night so somehow I wrote about a girl who was on an angsty road trip by herself and the car broke down. Yeahhhh.....that's what I said too. My second one was about Oregon vs. Ottawa weather. :P
Yeah so more of Saturday was writing and critiquing each other's writing. What I think is interesting is that the main comments I got was that I was very descriptive and I did a good job of wrapping stuff together into one thing. I think I was so nervous about my atrocious descriptive skills that I overcompensated? Ah well.
The people at the workshop were a variety of nice, odd, and strange. lolz. Everyone was prettty old (like 30 and above) except for me and this one guy who I didn't speak to. But Beverly, Mary, and Jan were my friends. <3 But in general it was just REALLY AWESOME to get together with people like me who don't write for a living (yet) but really want to get better at it, and most of them loved writing as much as I do. I'm hoping to get into some regular correspondence with some of them, and I'm more inspired than ever to get involved with a writing group in my area.