All in! – Young Writers Seminar

WRITING AND THE NEW MEDIA (Admission is FREE)

Come join the All In! Young Writers’ Seminar 2010. For writers in the new media.

TARGET AUDIENCE
Students from junior college, polytechnic and university.

WHAT YOU’LL GET
This seminar will provide an insight into:

• How the Internet and web technologies have evolved and are evolving
• How has the traditional publishing value chain been affected by IT and the new media
• Writing in the larger context of Digital Media
• How to keep up to date with new developments
• Future trends like e-books, e-readers, interactive and multimedia content
• Responsible blogging

DATE and TIME
20 Feb 2010 (Sat), 9.30am to 6.00pm

VENUE
The Arts House
1 Old Parliament Lane

ADMISSION IS FREE!
We just need you to register before coming.

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COURSE ADMINISTRATION

Ways to register

1. Register online by visiting www.bookcouncil.sg
OR

2. Complete the registration form and fax it to (65) 6742 9466
(Please download details and registration form HERE)

Enquiries

Email: jade@bookcouncil.sg

Honing Your Observation Skills

Shut up…and just observe. No interviews. Just observe. What do you see? How does it sound? Is it sweet? Is it foul? Is it smooth? Is it moving? Boring?

We are endowed with five basic senses – smell, sight, taste, hear, and touch. These senses, which we use to carry out our daily mundane routines, are writers’ bestfriends, too. If we use them more consciously, we see more action, more life, more movement, more voices in the things, faces, and places that we daily look at and find no expression at all.

“Honing Your Observation Skills” (HYOS) is one of the activities I have enjoyed in my Feature Writing subject when I studied Journalism at the University of San Jose-Recoletos (Cebu City, Philippines) few years ago. Thanks to my mentor Maylaine T. Cerna who introduced this to my class.

It was fun to have my fellow writers here at Writers Coffee Lounge do the same activity. We stationed ourselves in our chosen places (home, kopi tiam, etc) to do this exercise. Below are some of our outputs for the first HYOS activity shared to the group last 15 May 2009. We decided to do this again and for the second round, we will focus on observing a character, a person.

7th Floor
by Aurelia L. Castro

Kopi tiam
By Angeline Koh

Coffee shop complaint
By Cecilia Mahendran

7th Floor

(Honing your observations skills assignment by Aurelia L. Castro.)

Buildings that look like boxes. Columns and rows of tinted glass windows that stare like lifeless eyes. A slow movement of vehicles coming in and out the parking lot. A few people passing by and a cat or two strolling around the well-swept path – these are the usual sights from my window at the 7th floor in my flat.

The 15-storey home buildings before me look so still. They seem to have stood there for years. Their walls’ weak and fainting colours of yellow, pink, and maroon tell me they are old and have lost their smell long time ago. Their gray-white coloured air-conditioning units are like uniform badges attached to their chests.

It’s quiet and slow, boring and almost deserted in the daytime. Cars and motorcycles are neatly parked, some almost kissing each other, on their numbered spots. Even the clothes hung on some of the windows look tame and calm. The trees are orderly arranged as well. Their leaves gently flip with the occasional soft blow of wind.

The sight of the sky takes only about a quarter from the whole screen view in my window. Yet it’s the one that seems to command life to this rather nostalgic and perhaps unappreciated place. It creates movement as it breaks from darkness to gray in the morning, to orange when it’s shone by the sun, to blue, till it turns slowly back to gray, then to darkness again. At six in the evening, it is still bright and dominant.

As the sky begins to cool down and welcome the stars and moon at night (which are usually overshadowed and unseen because of the city’s bright light), the lamp posts at the parking area start to light up. The darker the sky goes, the more light comes out from everywhere – cars, buildings, and streetlights. The windows that were like lifeless eyes finally blink and smile at night.

Coffee shop complaint

(Honing your observations skills assignment by Cecilia Mahendran.)

It was about eleven o’clock when my daughter and I reached Bedok Food Court. Only a few stalls were open. Consequently, and also because it was still too early for lunch, only a few tables were occupied. The whole food court seemed to be shrouded by a shadow except for the middle, where the sun shone through.

My eight-year-old daughter wanted to eat carrot cake. I scanned the whole line of signboards for the one advertising carrot cake.

“Sorry, no carrot cake,” I told her pointing to the stall’s silver shutter that was still drawn down.

She reluctantly settled for minced meat noodles, which was also what I had chosen. I paid the stallholder after telling him my order and my table number.

Back at my seat, as we were waiting for the food, I noticed a blue poster glued onto our table. I noticed also that there was a blue poster on every table in the food court. The same blue posters, bigger in size, could also be seen on almost all the pillars as well. I took a closer look at the poster on my table and saw that it was a campaign to get customers to return their empty bowls and glasses to the collection stations after their meals. I looked all around to see where this collection station was. Not being very observant by nature, I could not at first spot any. It was after I mentally told myself, “Good, we can just leave our bowls here,” that I noticed the first mobile shelf tucked discreetly behind a pillar. Then I noticed another, then another. Almost all the pillars had one – a metal casing, taller than a tall man, with groves along the insides that enabled food trays to be slotted in.

Writer’s voice

In writing, there is something known as ‘voice’. No, I am not referring to active or passive voice. And, I am not referring to the voice as in first person singular, first person plural, third person subjective, third person objective etc. A good understanding of these voices is essential for those who aspire to become good writers, no doubt. However, the voice that I want to discuss here is the writer’s voice.

As budding writers, most of us are capable of writing an article, a story, or a book. Writing is the easy part. Convincing publishers that our works of fiction or non-fiction are worth publishing is the tough part. As we all know, publishers will not publish anything that they can’t sell. Their business is to publish material that will sell and generate profits. They want not just first-time readers for their newly published authors; they want repeat readers. That means they require authors who have something unique to offer as writers. That unique something is the writer’s voice.