Afloat With Hooks and Lines

As we wind down summer, I’d like to tell you about the recent Hooks and Lines Workshop Series. In May and June, thanks to the initiative of Carteret Writers Secretary Autumn Ware and Carteret Community College (CCC) Continuing Education Coordinator Heather Boney, our two organizations partnered to offer a six-week series of writing workshops covering several genres.

Autumn, owner of Aware Copywriting, kicked it off with a session on Creative Play – doing writing exercises that felt like shuffling and dealing words in collaborative and individual creative writing card games. As a group we started “Thinking Like a Writer” and amped up our creativity for the rest of the series.

Autumn returned for two more sessions, one on creative nonfiction that had us explore what it means to be a writer and then encouraged us to braid in-class exercises into one cohesive creative nonfiction work. Carteret Writers member Amy Tilly took her in-class writing and turned it into a beautiful blog post “Letter Written by a Friend,” which we published on the Carteret Writers blog on June 13. In another session, Autumn led us through her specialty: copywriting. We talked promoting yourself as a writer, setting writing goals, and culminated by writing an attention-getting query letter to a fictional agent.

Emily Carter, Carteret Writers VP and the award-winning writer behind A Chick’s View, got even the most reticent of us to write insightful poetry that opened windows between participants. Condensing thoughts into six words and then expanding to 12 line love letters produced beautiful poetry from each member of her diverse audience.

Edgar Award-nominated mystery writer Tom Kies offered a slice of the fiction inspiration and guidance that he has offered previously in his six-week Creative Writing classes at CCC. Tom has recently jumped into the scriptwriting world with a play based on his Geneva Chase mystery series “Death of an Author” performed last fall at Carteret Community College’s Culinary Center and has another scheduled for winter of 2024. In his second workshop, he shared some scriptwriting concepts for formatting and writing a treatment, and then the entire class had fun collaborating on a scene for a sci-fi play titled “The Accidental Sister.” Check out the resulting scene below!

The accountability of showing up to class, the collective creative atmosphere, and the act of sharing one’s writing with fellow writers was a great shove-off from shore into the sea of writing. It gave regular writers new perspectives, aspiring writers new motivations and helped us all define and set sail toward our goals.

Don’t worry if you missed out!

• September brings Fear Factor: Decoding the Psychology at Work in Horror, another workshop series with Autumn Ware at Carteret Community College. Monday evenings from September 11th to October 2nd.
• For those of you closer to Craven County, Stanley Trice will be leading Spark Zone: Unleash Your Creativity monthly starting Sept 12th at the Craven-Pamilco Library Auditorium.
• Autumn will be teaching another workshop from October 16th to November 6th titled Creative Kinship: Tapping Into Your Literary DNA also at Carteret Community College.

Find these opportunities and more on our Events page!

Readers! Here’s your call to action:  What kinds of workshops do you want to attend? Comment below or email us at support@carteretwriters.org to help set the course for future offerings!