This document summarizes a creative writing webinar led by Dr. Alison Daniell. The webinar includes discussions on what makes impactful writing, focusing on writing truthfully and making writing resonate with readers through sensory details. Participants will spend time writing about a meaningful "home" memory using five descriptive words as a prompt, then share their creations in a group discussion at the end of the webinar.

1. Creative Writing Webinar
Dr Alison Daniell

2. Webinar Content
• Heart and Home discussion (10 minutes)
• Explore what makes impactful writing (5 minutes)
• What is at the heart of every good piece of writing (the truth) (10
minutes)
• How do you make your writing truthful? You make it
RESONATE (10 minutes)
• Writing session (45 minutes)
• Come back together and share our creations (35 minutes)

3. Heart and Home
• What is home? How have you experienced it?
• What ideas are related to ‘home’
• Family, refuge, prison, freedom, safety, illness
• Have your ideas changed over the past twelve months?
• Do you have any metaphorical or non-literal ‘homes’?
• Have you ever felt immediately at home in a strange setting or with a
strange person?
• If you wanted to communicate ‘home’ to someone, how would you do
it?

4. Life Writing Golden Rule:
If it’s not true, it can’t go in.
• Does not need to be literally true – certainly for fiction – but it has to have a core within it that your reader recognises
• What is the truth within the characters and stories we have just talked about? Do we know people like them/are they us/are they what we want to be?

5. …but true doesn’t mean boring
The job of the writer is to ensure that the reader is entertained
and drawn into the piece. This is the case even when it’s non-
fiction – it is still a story, except everything in that story happens
to be true.
• What would you include?
• Emotion, character, development, story, description
• Find a hook – the kernel of the idea

6. What Makes Impactful Writing?
• What do you need in order to
communicate an idea to someone else?
• What is the most powerful piece of writing
you can think of? Why did it work so well?
• Memorable characters/memorable stories

7. How to make your writing resonate: show
not tell
• Summon up the emotion you felt at the time
• Focus on how that felt in your body (we experience emotion
physically)
• Which senses are involved? What can the ‘then you’
hear/see/smell etc
• Was anyone else there?
• How did that make you feel?
• Did anything change as a result of this moment/incident?
• How can you find a way ‘in’ for your reader/listener? Is it visual,
sensory, what?

8. Meet Kiki and Bobo
wordpower!

9. This picture in five words
03/05/2021

10. Over to you…
• Choose a ‘home’ memory to which you have a strong emotional
response
• Spend some time getting ‘inside’ that memory, living it again. What
do you see/hear/feel/smell? How old are you? What do you
understand is happening? Is there a conflict between the ‘memory
you’ and the ‘you’ you are today?
• Write down five words that are the essence of the memory
• Create a short piece of writing about that memory using the five
words as your starting point
• Show not tell.

11. And we’re back…
•What did you enjoy?
•What did you find tricky?
•How did you overcome any difficulties?
•What are you most pleased with?