Another great webinar with Marcy Kennedy

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.