Judith Ancer

I trained to be a clinical psychologist and I really love my work as a psychotherapist. It isn’t always easy, and it is often tiring and sometimes really heavy-going. And I always feel privileged to be offered views into the private, often opaque, internal worlds of my clients. I share people’s lives, their joys and achievements and losses and terrors. But my focus is always on how I need to help this person – whether it is to think, or to understand, or to grieve, or to speak or to celebrate. My job is to help people heal and to help people grow.

Through the Growing through Writing workshops I have been able to see how writing can be used as a powerful tool in both these areas – healing and growth. Some of the techniques we might suggest, when a client is using writing to heal, might be more directive or specific than when working with writing as a tool for personal exploration and growth. Of course when people heal, when they process painful and traumatic experiences and gain some sense of mastery and distance from them, they do, inevitably, grow.

The role of writing as a tool to facilitate growth was powerfully reinforced for me through the experiences of someone close to me who is now living in Australia. She lost an adult child to suicide and through her suicide counselling service was, in late 2011, invited to join a pilot programme funded by the state.

This was a series of writing workshops called “Nothing prepared me for this”. In her words: “It is to show us how to express some of what we are feeling in words to help us deal with it. One of the things that (the counsellor) has told me is that, especially as far as the flashbacks are concerned, it helps to write about them because that takes them from the right side of the brain (where they can go wild as it is all imagination) to the left side of the brain where it becomes more manageable. I guess that is the purpose of the writing course, to take control of the wild untamed emotions and tie them down.”

Some months later she wrote: “The writing is an amazing outlet for all the emotion and hurt. … We have explored poetry, haiku, short story writing and creative non-fiction writing together. ”

Last week she wrote, after the programme ended: “The course has been truly inspirational and I have worked through so much of my angst by writing.”

Of course, whether or not there is counselling or psychotherapy, writing can be a powerful and accessible tool for enhancing healing and promoting growth in even the most challenging and bleak of circumstances.

Pierre Brouard

Not unlike Judith, I’m finding that since we started these workshops we’re noticing more often how writing has been an agent for change, growth and healing. I have been counselling a young student and in our therapy it was agreed that he would start keeping a diary to reflect on the issues we were addressing in our counselling work. He said this was the first time he’d ever written about himself and was nervous about the task. He mentioned that he was anxious about how these private musings would be taken, and whether he was “doing it right”. This anxiety is not uncommon, many people who start a writing practice worry about the rights and wrongs of grammar and technique, or feel they need to conform to some template, or fear the judgment of the reader or listener, where they share what they have written.

This young man also said that as he started writing he was amazed that he was putting down ideas and thoughts which were either previously hidden from his awareness, or only poorly formed. The writing process seemed to uncover new material, consolidate ideas and give him a sense of release and self acceptance. It was almost as if he was saying “Ah so this is who I am, and it’s ok”.

Of course these insights are incredibly useful to bring into therapy but it is clear to me that there are benefits which come from the writing alone. It seems writing it down “puts it out there” and gives us some distance and perspective. Most forms of writing can bring growth and healing – and our Growing through Writing workshop covers a range of techniques and ideas. But we also draw on James Pennebaker’s “expressive writing” research which has shown that writing about a particular issue of concern for 4 sessions in a row (4 days or even 4 weeks), for 15-20 minutes at a time, brings significant long-term emotional and physical health benefits.

We draw on all these ideas, and the testimonies of clients, friends and colleagues, to take participants through a journey of discovery. Previous participants have found it a rewarding journey. So have we.

Pierre Brouard and Judith Ancer will be running their one day Growing through writing workshop in Johannesburg on Saturday 26 May.

Image courtesy AlbinoFlea

Both Jo-Anne and I know that writing can be a fundamentally lonely pursuit – and that it helps to know that there’s always someone who’s interested in what you’re doing and, perhaps as important, understands how difficult it can be to do it.

Most non-writers just don’t get it: agonising over which word to use; the conviction that there is a word just beyond our grasp that could nail what we’re trying to say; the knowledge that, however good the day’s work may have been, there’s no doubt it could have been much better…

We work in solitude (even if we write in crowded coffee shops) and sometimes doubt that anyone’s going to read a word we write. Our words, we fear, are as grass, destined to spend no more time on earth than we do…

We might, of course, join a writers’ group, and share our joys and disappointments with others of like disposition. We might talk earnestly to our partners about the struggle we’re having finding a way forward in our story. We might seek professional help.

But whatever you do, you remain a writer working on a text in the lofty but deserted halls of your own imagination…

Or do you? What springs to mind is a fact I learned at the Dickens bicentenary exhibition at the Museum of London. Dickens created two thousand characters, each with their own idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, and “self-hood”. Which tells me that the lofty halls of Dickens’s imagination were crowded with jostling throngs of his own creations, jabbering away, each intent on his own goals or wrapped in his own obsessions…

In other words, while Dickens might have worked alone at his desk, scribbling his thousand words a day, he was accompanied by these processions of his own devising. In fact, there must have been days when the great man was plagued by too many voices vying for his attention.

Lonely? Shmonely!

It’s precisely because we’re able to create entire worlds and a cast of thousands, and set them off on journeys to Mt Doom or the Land of Oz, that we’re never entirely alone. The trick is, of course, to commit ourselves entirely to the truths of our inner worlds. Don’t doubt them, or ourselves. It’s as simple as that.

So keep writing – in company

Richard

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Get published in Getaway in our first readers’ issue

We’ve come up with the idea of doing a whole issue of Getaway written and photographed by our readers – because we know you guys get around Africa more than we do. Our first-ever readers’ issue will be published in January 2013 with stories submitted by you, and roundups of your favourite destinations and places to stay on the continent.

To help us compile the issue, we need you to fill out our readers’ issue survey. Some of you could see your answers and names in the issue! If that’s not enough incentive, we’re giving away a two-night stay for two people at the Thornybush Game Lodge in the Greater Kruger National Park (including meals and game drives) worth R20 000 to one lucky survey respondent.

You can email your travel stories, tips, tales of (mis)adventures, secret spots and favourite camping recipes to me –sarahduff@ramsaymedia.co.za and you could see them published in the issue!

We’re also looking for a reader’s photo for the cover of our readers’ issue! Send us your cover photos togetawaycovercomp@gmail.com before 31 July 2012.

Looking forward to reading your stories!

Click here for more travel writing opportunities.

And if you need some help honing your travel writing skill then why not join widely-published travel writer Fred de Vries for his next Travel Writing Workshop in Johannesburg and learn the skills to write top-quality travel articles .

Please click on the link for more information about Fred’s Travel Writing Course, click here to read a Q and A with Fred and check out his favourite travel books - Essential reading – travel writing

Featured image courtesy twocentsworth

Screenwriting skills can of course be learned by taking a course and you can hone your craft by reading extensively,  but it is as important to watch classic films and great television and to read the actual scripts. Here are a few of my personal heroes.

• Dennis Potter, who wrote such UK classics as The Singing Detective, The Blue Hills of Home, etc etc.
• Paul Abbot, also English,
• who wrote, inter alia, Shameless, State of Play, Clockers, etc etc etc.
• David Chase: originator of The Sopranos, and writer of some of the series’ best episodes.
• Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There will be Blood.

(And many more.)

The next Allaboutwriting Essential Scriptwriting: The Scene workshop will be held in Johannesburg on Saturday 9 June 2012.

Image courtesy Thomas Hawk

How did you get into writing for film and television in the first place?

I worked for a well-known Johannesburg daily newspaper. A new editor was appointed, and it became very clear, within weeks, if not days, that his notion of my future in journalism, and mine, were at odds. So, with just the suggestion of a possibility of writing opportunities at a film studio in Lonehill, I abandoned journalism and embraced the chancier business of freelance television writing. I sometimes wonder whether, had I not made that choice, I’d now be a venerable editor, or an alcohol-sodden hack, turning in my copy every day before retiring to the nearest wateringhole to lament the opportunities I passed up as a script-writer.

What have some of the highlights of your long career been?

Highlights of my career? I guess high on my list has to be a children’s series I wrote in the ‘90s called Rockbottom and Company. Not because the programmes as they turned out (on an inadequate budget – this is South Africa, after all) were particularly outstanding, but because I wrote them with my own sons, aged about 10 and six at the time, in mind. Next was, I suppose, the work I did on a feature film commissioned by HBO called, unimaginatively, Mandela and de Klerk about the negotiations between the two leaders that led up to the release of Mandela from prison. I didn’t write the first draft of the script – but I did write the final draft, and that’s the one that counts. And finally, there are the 79 episodes, recently rebroadcast, of S’gudi Snaysi, which were, really, the biggest fun I’ve ever had as a television writer.

What keeps you at it?

I have now written something just short of 1000 television scripts, if my calculations bear any resemblance to the facts. Why do I write the next script offered me? Well, for the money (obviously, dummy!) – but also because I derive great pleasure from turning in a script that I know will work on screen.

 Is it possible to earn a living writing for film or television in South Africa?

Yes. Clearly. A back of the envelope calculation tells you that each of our ten or so daily soap operas need between six and ten writers. A young, beginner, writer can live on the money earned from writing two scripts a month. Veterans need more! And then there are the various drama series commissioned by the various broadcasters each year. So I’d imagine that there are somewhere between one hundred and a hundred and fifty writers subsisting on their television earnings at the moment in this country. Plus a couple who make their money entirely from writing screenplays for the big screen.

What qualifications are necessary? What skills would be helpful?

Mmm. A love of words and writing. An abiding interest in people. A willingness to work really hard in learning the craft by reading books and, perhaps more important, watching television and reading other writers’ scripts. Screenwriting demands the deployment of a wide range of skills. These can be learned (or deduced) from watching and reading. Easier, perhaps, is to take a course and/or read books on the subject. (I wish I’d had that option when I began my career – I was inventing how to do as I went along.) However, while you can learn the skills, both in theory and in practice, you can’t learn that passion: that’s something that simply bubbles up inside you.

So how does become a screenwriter/get a job on a soap?

Each soap, of course, has a full slate of writers already working for it. So it’s not easy for a new writer to wriggle her way in. Each soap also has a procedure for testing the skills and talents of new writers. Generally this comes in the form of a so-called “test script”. Once you’ve written the test script, the soap will read it and decide whether, if you’re demonstrably better than one of their existing writers, they should dump him and invite you onto the team. If you can show the production other scripts you have written (which might not have been commissioned), then you’ll have a better chance of impressing them. And then it’s just a matter of knocking on the doors of those ten productions until someone gives you a break. Oh, and did I mention that there’s no point in approaching the head writer of any existing soap unless you really have familiarised yourself with his soap. (There are no short cuts to this.)

Any advice for an aspiring scriptwriter?

The life of a freelance scriptwriter is not for everyone. You might earn a comfortable living, but in South Africa you are highly unlikely to become wealthy. It’s a life, also, of uncertainty and doubt. All writers doubt themselves from time to time. And sometimes an unkind critique of your work, however accurate (or inaccurate) can throw you into despair. You are reliant on contracts from producers who are themselves reliant on commissions from the broadcasters. Not all the broadcasters, as we all well know, are reliable. So that big contract you’d been promised simply disappears – and you cast about frantically for other work to put food in the mouths of your kids. So I guess, a critical piece of advice is: have a number of strings to your bow, more than a couple of irons in the fire. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

The next Allaboutwriting Essential Scriptwriting: The Scene workshop will be held in Johannesburg on Saturday 9 June 2012.

Image courtesy Steve Snodgrass

1.  Research your market
2. Don’t try and be what you are not
3. Respond to feedback positively
4. Do not dismiss any option ever
5. Work on your writing every day
6. Be led by business not emotion
7. Go for the best long-term deal, not a quick fix
8. Back up your publishing with real world activity like talks and columns
9. Keep an alert eye on your colleagues and competition
10. Don’t stop writing!

To find out more about getting published sign up for Allaboutwriting’s Publishing Workshop run by David Chislett in Johannesburg on 12 June 2012.

Click here to read more publishing blogs written by writers and publishers.

Image courtesy pedrosimoes7

Do you want to try your hand at travel writing? Why not get started with some of these opportunities?

South Africa

Become a Getaway blogger - Here is an opportunity for you if you do a lot of travelling in Southern Africa, and think you have a flair for writing and photography. Send a blog you’ve written and some of your photos to Getaway.

Go! accepts reader contributions of approximately 2000 words, about your latest adventure: a safari to Namibia or Botswana or Mozambique: a hiking expedition in South America; an interesting road trip in your old Volksie; a mountain climbing expedition; a motorbike excursion with your friends… whatever you do to get out of the daily grind. Who knows, maybe you will be rewarded with a prize! More info…

Share your story on the Porfolio Collection Travel Blog - Got a South Africa travel tale to tell? Discovered an off the beaten track bistro that wowed you so much you have to tell the world? Just tasted the best South African wine ever?  Or read a brilliant book by a hot new local author?

UK

Each week the Guardian  give a prize of a camera for the best tips posted on a particular theme. The top ones will be printed in the Saturday travel section of the Guardian, with the ultimate tip – chosen by Tom Hall from Lonely Planet - winning the Jessops camera.

Enter the Telegraph ‘Just Back’ travel writing competition. The winner of weekly competition will receive £200and the writer of the ‘Just Back; article of the year will receive £1,000.

A great ‘Writing for UK Travel Magazines’ resource by Rachel Newcombe, UK-based writer, editor and researcher who contributes news, features and reviews to a wide range of publications.

And enter your travel story in the Bradt Travel Guides competition and you could win you a holiday for two in Abruzzo, Italy, he chance to have your travel story published in The Independent on Sunday and a commission from The Independent on Sunday for an article based on your prize trip.

Australian and New Zealand

Write a guest blog for Fossick about a topic of interest to our audience aimed at Australian and New Zealand women who travel locally.

USA

Submit your travel articles and travel photography to inTravel Magazine. The article or photography showcase in each issue with the most votes (at least 10) wins $100. Anyone can vote. And enter the  inTravel Magazine Incognito contest too!

Other opportunities and snippets

Sign up for the Lonely Planet weekly newsletter for the chance to WIN the Ultimate Travel Library!
Start your own travel blog now on gotravel24 Blogs.

Join widely-published travel writer Fred de Vries for his next Travel Writing Workshop and learn the skills to write top-quality travel articles .

Whether you hope to freelance for magazines and newspapers, write a travel blog, or entertaining accounts for family and friends, this course will enhance your future travel while it provides the skills to write articles of publishable quality.

Our aim is that everyone, experienced or not, should at the end of the course have a publishable piece.

Please click on the link for more information about Fred’s Travel Writing Course, click here to read a Q and A with Fred and check out his favourite travel books - Essential reading – travel writing

Image courtesy Sinead Fenton

Five writing tips for ‘growing through writing’

1. Just start – don’t over prepare. A journal is a good first step.
2. Put your inner critic on mute – this is about growing not publishing.
3. Be honest about your feelings – this is the time to let it all out.
4. Reflect regularly – you will be amazed at the patterns you see.
5. Make sure you have the time and space to be free and let go – this is for you!

Five ‘growing’ tips for writers.

1. Just observe life around you – there are a million stories out there.
2. And the one you know best is yours – mine it for all it’s worth.
3. Speak to psychologists or read books about and by psychologists – I think psychologists really “get” complexity and contradiction. They also have to find ways of empathising with their clients and a writer should always do the same.
4. Allow your characters to grow and evolve but their core should remain the same – I believe by adulthood we are “wired” into our personalities.
5. Allow for multiple “truths” of a story – there is no one truth about anything.

Pierre Brouard and Judith Ancer will be running their one day Growing through writing workshop in Johannesburg on Saturday 26 May.

Image courtesy Andrew Hefter

- Richard Beynon

Some writers of  fiction regard ideas as the gems on which their fortune will be based. I believe, on the contrary, that ideas are a dime a dozen, available in such profusion that you’re never likely to run short of them. If this proposition sounds ludicrous to you – if ideas, or the lack of them, are the stumbling block in your creative path – then this short series of articles is for you.

Where do ideas come from? Well, we’ve all heard stories about great ideas occurring to writers under a hundred different circumstances. All Coleridge needed to dream up his masterpiece, Kubla Khan, was a pipeful of opium…  X dreamed up the central idea of his best-seller on the underground, when his eye lit on a deadbeat asleep in a corner… The entire plot of her magnum opus occurred to Y when she was on the verge of sleep one night…

These and similarly stories abound. But these are lucky accidents. They certainly happen. They’ve happened to me. But the point is, it’s difficult to make them happen.

The four mechanisms I’m going to suggest as prolific sources of ideas are all within your control. You can return to them time and again, milking them for smaller or larger notions.

Here they are:
• Characters bring their stories with them
• Daydreams
• Real life
• Your clippings file

Start with a character and everything else will follow…

Characters come with their stories in invisible knapsacks on their back. All you’ve got to do is make the acquaintance of the character, and she (or he) will tell you her tail.
So, let’s do a little imagining…

I think of… A red-haired woman with a knot of hair and a wild look in her eyes. Where do you spot her? Across a crowded room at a book launch. Is that panic you see in her expression, or the sort of wildness that attracts some men and frightens others? What is she murmuring to the man beside her? You edge up to her and eavesdrop. She needs to leave at once, she’s saying. Her daughter’s in trouble.

Right. That paragraph was written at breakneck speed on my laptop without much thought. The seed that provoked the scene was the image of the woman. I see now that she lies at the heart of a mystery. Her daughter’s in trouble. What sort of trouble, I wonder. Who is the man she’s speaking to? Why is she at a book launch? Is it her book, or his?

I feel myself trembling on the verge of a dozen possibilities. Where is her daughter? Trapped by an intruder in her apartment? Pregnant and abandoned in Bali? In the hands of the police at Heathrow who claim to have discovered four kilograms of cocaine in her baggage? Each of these versions of reality lead to a dozen lot possibilities. I must choose one.

She’s in Bali. She’s pregnant. The father of her unborn child is an Australian drug runner (the edge of one idea seeps into another) who’s scarpered with the drugs, but has left her with a briefcase full of money. Or who’s scarpered with the money, but has left her with a briefcase full of cocaine.

Now, let’s stand back from that story and consider the process by which it got whipped into existence.

I thought of a character. In no great depth. Just “red hair” and a “wild look in her eye.” But it was enough to prompt a small avalanche of ideas.

The beauty of this technique is that you don’t even have to make up your character. You can sit in your favourite coffee shop, note book open in front of you, and check out the characters in your immediate vicinity. That teenager with the ironware studding her nose and ears and lip, for instance… Or the prim housewife in the slightly-too-tight jeans, gazing down into her coffee cup… Each of them is the kicking-off point for a story that will, at least to start with, tell itself…

That’s the point of characters. They cry out for stories. Dream up (or observe) a character, and you’re already half way towards uncovering her story.

It’s as simple as that.

Learn more about building characters on the Allaboutwriting  Character Course. This four module course blends psychology and writing to create a unique plunge into the process of creating memorable and larger-than-life characters. It looks at the skills and insights needed to make these characters leap off the page.

Image courtesy laura db

Is it possible to make money out of writing a book if you are not J.K Rowling or John van de Ruit.

Yes it is, but it requires work and for you to understand who you are selling to and how. A normal publishing deal only makes you money if you sell a lot of books, but there are other ways to make money through publishing and not all of them involve books!

Is it best to go the self publishing route or stick it out for the holy grail – a mainstream book publishing deal?

This really is a horses for courses situation. Some markets are so niche that to go for a mainstream deal is just a waste of time, you would be better off going for that niche yourself. But in some cases the financial and distribution muscle of a publisher is a great weapon to have on your side. But you have to make sure you have a good deal and know what you are letting yourself in for.

In the end is it just about clever marketing? And can a good book fail?

A good book CAN fail if no-one knows about it. But that does not mean that marketing is the B all and end all of publishing. As the saying goes, you can’t polish a turd. But good marketing can turn your sales around and make more out of a steady book than you might expect.

Who do you think sets a great example as far as self publishing goes and why?

Obviously Cory Doctorow is the guru of self-publishing! But in South Africa, Aryan Kaganof has been doing it for years… and has even dabbled with main stream publishing. It really is all about where YOU are going and what you need to get back. I self publish because then I get the timelines and the look and feel I want and I get to run my own marketing,. These things are important enough to me to do it all myself.

Any other little gems you might like to impart?

Like any other opportunity in life the key with writing and publishing in any form is that you need to know how the game works before you can really get a grip on what is possible and not. It’s no good crying and sulking if you haven’t done this. Truth is there are many grey areas and places that an author even with a bad publishing deal can make a success of themselves. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself, Do I really want this to work? If the answer to that is yes, stop complaining about your publisher and get up and act yourself. Once you are doing more things you will soon see your publisher change their tune… if you really want it, go out and get it!

To find out more about getting published sign up for Allaboutwriting’s Publishing Workshop run by David Chislett in Johannesburg on 12 June 2012.

Click here to read more publishing blogs written by writers and publishers.