WEBINAR | The Art of the Cinematic Close-Up: Crafting Details that Immerse Readers in Your Story
July 23 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT
Learn to use your writerly “lens” to focus on the solitary details that open a narrative universe of fluid, truthful, and seamless prose.
For Creative Nonfiction and Fiction Writers
Included in the upcoming Season Pass
Writers of fiction and nonfiction alike understand: we can’t use ostentatious or flowery language, nor vague or abstract moments, if we want to truly grab our readers and immerse them in the world of our story. Learn how to focus your scenes with concrete details, vivid imagery, original language, and apt metaphor that is scaled to the task at hand.
In this webinar, we’ll use the metaphor of photography and cinema to focus our writing lenses on the art of the close-up—the particular, singular, and sustained. Looking at writers from Cheryl Strayed to Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien to Zadie Smith, we’ll examine how to describe physical things and people, places, as well as discreet moments in time, states of high emotion, and interiority with rigor and specificity. From “close-ups” like a dying moth on a windowsill; the way a drunken father stumbles around the house; the moment you tossed your second hiking boot off the mountaintop; a feeling of foreboding partway through a quest; you’ll discover how to use language beautifully and truthfully to create what John Gardner called a “vivid and continuous” dream in the reader’s imagination.
You’ll leave having written some new passages that you can use in any writing project.
In this webinar, you will:
- EXPLORE the craft of sustained, vivid description
- DISCOVER how to manipulate your writerly lens of focus with intention
- LEARN the difference between the particular and specific vs. the vague and abstract
- PRACTICE writing new passages using close-up techniques you can immediately apply to your own work
This webinar is ideal for writers who:
- feel their work is flat or lacking depth, focus or specificity
- are finding their writing voice
- struggle with writing description
- want to move beyond generic imagery and find the singular, unexpected detail that brings a scene to life
Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔
ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER
A sharp, funny presenter, Ethan Gilsdorf is a writer, teacher, performer, and a huge nerd. The author of the award-winning memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, his work appears in the New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Wired, Salon, O the Oprah Magazine, Huffington Post, Brevity, Electric Literature, Poetry, and The Southern Review, among other publications, and has been named “Notable” by The Best American Essays.
Ethan teaches workshops in essay, creative nonfiction, and memoir at GrubStreet in Boston, where he leads the Essay Incubator program, and at LitArts RI. He is also on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University. At Hampshire College, he studied filmmaking and creative writing and received an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Louisiana State University. He presented the TEDx talk “Why Dungeons & Dragons is Good for You (In Real Life)” and offers workshops teaching adults, children, and organizations how to play Dungeons & Dragons.
REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.
There are no refunds after the replay is sent.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
