Tuesday night was the second installment of Caught in the Act, the creative writing workshop series I'm leading at 826DC. It went really well--class size doubled (to two!) and we produced an entire new draft, this time from the point of view of the person who did the catching.
My involvement with 826DC goes back to when I moved into DC in late 2007, when a group of us got together and founded Capitol Letters Writing Center. (A few months ago, Julia Sanders was kind enough to turn some of my rambling into a great article about my history with the organization.) By nature I'm not inclined to be a secondary educator--standing in front of crowds of young kids will never be my thing--but I like to write, and I like to challenge myself, so each year I lead and TA several student writing workshops.
This current workshop idea is based on a prompt from the book project last year. I really enjoyed the workshops and results it produced. When I applied for a DC Young Artists Grant this year, I themed my application around helping the development of DC writers, and one way I wanted to do that was by leading several workshops for young writers, from elementary age to high school. So I put my own twists on the getting caught idea and voila, this workshop series was born.
Hard to believe it's nearly over. I'm really looking forward to next week, when we incorporate the concrete detail & texture, point of view, and character motivation exercises we've been working to produce fully-realized final stories.