At Gen Con, we attended as a family a family writing workshop. We really had no idea what to expect but was excited about it. It was the only event all three of us attended together. Both my husband and I love to write. Our daughter loves to write and draw. We were hoping to gain some tips we could take home and practice.
I hate to say this but the workshop was disappointing. It just felt like they spent absolutely no prep time. We sat in a circle, looked at a picture, and wrote a sentence about it. Then we took our paper, waded it into a ball, and threw it into the middle of everyone. Then everyone grabbed a piece of paper and continued the story. Each round you had a few minutes to write your sentence.
What I didn’t like about this was that the panelists wrote long excerpts on their paper which I found odd. I mean this is not about your writing after all. Also for the younger kids to have to write (and some couldn’t write legibly) that much in a short amount of time was stressful. My child hated the workshop and wanted to leave.
It bothered me that an event that had so much promise from the title really gave us nothing we could take home to use as a writing exercise for the family. Right now my husband is finishing his novel. When he is done, his next project is going to be with our daughter and me. We plan to write a book together which I think will be a much better family writing exercise. I plan to take some notes on what we do and how we tackle it. My plan is to share it here for those people interested in doing a true family writing exercise and want to read how others approached such a project.
So stay tuned and hopefully it will not be another six – eight months before I blog again.