Creative Wordshops Newsletters March 2025

Your Life as a Movie

Life is a tragedy viewed closeup and a comedy in the long shot.
(Charlie Chaplin)

Imagine directing/writing your life as a movie. We are engaging with this
theme in the Somerset West Magic Carpet writer’s group and also in a
Windhoek wordshop (see radar ‘what’s on’ at end.) What can close movie
watching teach us about writing? How can we absorb these techniques into
our texts?

This opens to further questions. Title? Opening scene? Defining moments? Music score? Landscape/seascape? The architecture of the buildings? Synchronicities? Mysteries? Fellow creatures with fur feather fin? Recurrent themes …repeated patterns? What symbols carry power?
How to represent them? What angles, shots lighting? Close-ups? Zoom? Cuts? Over voice? What’s left off the screen/page? And the ending…
and rolling credits? What of novels and memoirs turned into movies? I loved versions of The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein)

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