Writing Intensive Workshops with Julie Jordan Scott

"Discover the Power of Writing & Telling Engaging, Enlightening Stories to Communicate Clearly + Increase Profit" begins February 7 - Register Now ~

 

It never fails to surprise me.

I look into what looks like a sea of faces and each eye is on me. They are not only listening, they are listening with an unrelenting aliveness. It happened in the middle of a Summer day when I taught about being a better writer to a room full of college students. It happened on a Thursday evening when I stood on stage at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, sharing a brief moment of my life with an eclectic group of listeners and story lovers. It happened around a coffee table with friends at a party.

It happened without the visual of “eyes on me” in a teleclass when the participants did not want to leave when the class was over,  they wanted to hear another story.

Why does this happen again and again? Because a simple story is being told with unrelenting aliveness. The story is being told with passion and offers the hope of connection.

This doesn’t only happen to me. It may have happened to you or your Aunt Shirley or the guy making millions on a comedy tour or the woman who suddenly becomes successful because she finally told the truth of who she was an voila, people wanted to hear more.

Here’s a question-fact for you:

Did you know you can begin right now to make more money because people are much rather willing to listen to stories than they are to sales pitches?

We have moved past the information age.  We are now in the conceptual age.

People are tired of the sideshow-style marketing-barkers promising hype and not delivering on their overinflated promises.

If you learn how to tell stories imbued with passion, hope and connection, you will be able to reach more people who have yet to hear about your cause or your business or whatever it is you are up to be it art or changing public policy or introducing yourself as a life coach or working toward a job promotion.

It is so elemental.

Stories have the power to change and transform lives.

Stories help create memorable a-ha moments for listeners. What happens when people have memorable a-ha moments?

They want more. People remember you as a co-creator of their a-ha moment and they are naturally drawn back into your sphere. They will hire you or recommend you or vote for you or tell the rest of the world who doesn’t know about your product or service because you told it to them so distinctly it left its mark upon their heart.
Exceptionally well done, these people will become your personal ambassadors, sharing your well-told, passionate and alive story to others, spreading your impact and increasing your bottom line even more.

Become a more effective life coach, marketer, writer, poet, boss, world changer and leader now through the power of writing and telling engaging and enlightening stories.

You are familiar with this Native American Proverb, right? It says “Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

Readers, viewers, students and people receiving coaching services remember the effective stories we tell.

Not the hum drum, disconnected stories, but the engaging stories.

They remember the well told stories. The stories that connect to them on a visceral level plus ones which make them laugh in recognition.

They don’t need standup comedy to remember these stories, what  works best is an almost indescribably genuine flair only you can offer to them.

This seven week teleclass (or self study multi-media ecourse) begins Tuesday, February 7, 2012 with live lessons at 9:30 am to 10:30 am PST. We will run for 6 consecutive weeks with the final session taking place on March 13, 2012.

Live sessions will all be recorded and posted within 24 hours and available here, on the Writing Camp blog.

The Self Study Multi Media ecourse will roll out the following day, February 8, 2012

A sampling of what you will experience includes:

The Nuts and Bolts of Story Telling:

~ How to Make Your Stories Engaging, Enlightening and Effective (Three different yet similar lessons).

~ Story Arcs ~ How to Tell an Effective Beginning, Middle and Conclusion (and how not to get hung up in the "Have-to's" of Story Telling.

~ Creating Effective Characters, including that ever elusive character, your self.

~ Story Telling for Teaching/Learning

~ Telling the Story of Your Business

~ Use a Story to Share Your (or Your Company's) Vision

~ You will have the opportunity to practice telling your story and may partner up with a Story Telling Pal with whom you will practice via Video, Skype or Telephone.

~ Passionate about Plot: It is SOOOO easy! so please, don't complexify it!

~ How to Tell a Story Live with only an outline in your head with confidence and boldness. 

~ How to Draw Your Audience Into Your Story.

~ Multiple ways to create a space of unrelenting aliveness.

~ 7 steps to filling your story with irresistable passion.

~ Re-ignite your audiences with hope, with connection and mutual understanding.

 You May Expect:

To communicate more clearly via word images, humor, humility as you tell your story in 30 seconds, five minutes or 30 minutes.

To learn how to make an effective story telling video.

To create no less than 3 powerful stories you may immediately use in both business and your personal life as well.

To have a really, yes incredibly good time while obtaining a new way of relating to others that is indescribably enjoyable for all.

To learn specific techniques to get over any lingering doubt or stage fright.

To be respected for both who you are and the stories you tell.

To write your stories for enjoyable reading as well as to verbally tell your story: why both work and are so very close to one another.

How to repurpose one story for business, teaching, speaking, coaching as well as personal life, essay writing and publishing.

Register now by simply paying your registration fees via Paypal below. You will receive an email within 24 hours to confirm your registration as well as some pre-first session materials: sort of the class before the class begins.

And What a deal ~ Some might say: You will learn to Write, Tell and Profit from Sharing Your Engaging, Effective and Empowering Stories for only $97.

Gather around for a final story:

This Summer, I went to visit a Story Slam here in Bakersfield. I wasn't going to compete but... I did.. after I listened to the other story tellers and thought, "I could do better!"... and I did.

I won the very first story slam I ever attended and from then on was absolutely hooked. If you want to read my recap of that story and see a video which is coordinated, please visit this blog post from Julie Unplugged.

Click the button below to join us in getting started with Telling Your Story Now!

As always, if you have questions prior to registration please call or text me at 661.444.2735 or email me at juliejordanscott at gmail dot com.

Announcing Winter Virtual Writing Camp with JJS: Celebrating January's Quiet & Loud + Barren & Expectancy

 Newsflash: January's Session's focus is:

Celebrating Winter:  The Quiet & the Loud ~

the Barren & the Bursting with Expectancy
January23, 2012 - January 27, 2012
8:30 am or 6:00 pm

Each teleclass session is approximately 30 - 45 minutes. Day One may run as long as 60 minutes.

But before we get to all of the nutsy boltsy details, let's do like we always do at Writing Camp: settle in around the Writing Camp Fire:

My favorite part of my camp experience was always the Campfire at the end of the day.

Darkness descends, dinner has ended and a hush filters through Camp. Everything somehow becomes calm yet there is also a certain electricity that flickers through the air.

We may be remembering horseback riding or that swimming session gone bad: I was so afraid to dive, headfirst. Exposing my brain like that, even though logically I knew it was safe there was something that always kept me from trusting enough to dive head first.

Perhaps the hush came from the recent remembrance of a hike, difficult yet satisfying.

Or maybe it was a conversation with a counselor or a new friend on that hike or the singing of songs on or after the hike that were the grist of our thought as the sacred evening quiet became the sacred evening quiet Campfire.

We gathered there and stared into the light in the center of the darkness, our friend’s faces illuminated and glowing, no matter what the skin color might be. By the Campfire, everyone was automatically beautiful. Beside the Campfire we all sang beautifully, we all treasured each other’s viewpoint, we all suddenly and spontaneously “got” what we hadn’t gotten in the past.

We sang songs in round: I remember one that went like this:

Rose, rose, rose, rose

Will I ever see thee wed

I will marry at thy will,

Sire at thy will…

Which I never understood until now it was two voices, a conversation.

That’s what Campfire always was for me: a Conversation

I hear this a lot: Writers have a desire to write in community, but they are tired of groups that are either too critique heavy or groups that lose focus because they aren’t organized or facilitated well.

Maybe you are like many other writing campers who you been looking for a committed writing group whose purpose goes beyond word counts or submission numbers: while we recognize these are important, we know there are many writers who are also looking for a community of writers that is also passionately committed to bringing elements of adventure and child-like exuberance into the experience.

Writing Camp is this and more. 

Bring your writing projects (or your wishes/plans/hopes) for projects and settle into a week of intense inspiration, enlivening discussion and passionate creativity which will give your writing exactly the boost it needs to take it to where you (and the writing itself) desires to go.

Imagine receiving buckets, no - make that boatloads -  of inspiration, fresh insights and ideas to plug into your current project or your writing-project-waiting-to-be.

This week long experience of Writing Camp will be dense with material - super dense - so that you may pick and choose what fits for you and above all, WRITE, write, Write!

 We will use writing exercises and writing prompts to get your juices flowing.

We will set goals and intentions - and do some camp/retreat style rituals around those goals and intentions.

I will not tell you what to write or what precisely to work on - although I will be glad to coach you around this. If you want to book a coaching session during camp and a follow up, I will have special rates for campers for that service.

How Writing Camp works: 

Every day we will an hour long campfire writing session on our conference call line to provide you with a combination of inspiration, writing instruction along with sharing and discussion. You will be working on individual projects throughout the day and reporting about the projects at our daily campfire.

Yes, these are not "in person" campfires these are VIRTUAL campfires.

 We don’t meet face to face in a nature setting, we meet via a telephone bridge line for our “Campfires” and communicate in between Campfire sessions via email and/or social networking.  At the Campfire time, each Writing Camper dials the same telephone number and we are connected voice-to-voice.

When people first come to this form of Writing Camp, they are curious and unsure, perhaps, how this works. What we have found repeatedly is the connection becomes so deep and profound that we “don’t even need skin” to clearly see and understand one another.

I like to think of it as gathering around the fire of our hearts, each heart in our circle reaching to the other hearts in our circle. We fall in love with each other via the Writing Camp fire and deepen our love for words, even though there is no “in person” connection.

It is nothing short of remarkable.

** Note: we also have live sessions which I usually schedule according to interest from Campers and my travel schedule. All you need to do is let me know what you want and then… I work/play to make it happen.** 

If you are not able to attend live camp-fire sessions, each Campfire session will be recorded and uploaded before the day is over onto our Writing Camp blog so that you may participate according to your schedule.

Yes, Writing Camp is individualized. We work to make it work for you as best we can. Spreading Word-love is one of our primary reasons for being here, after all ~

You may have hit a wall with your writing project and intuitively know that through changing the way you approach your writing will move your writing back into forward motion.

1. Writing exercises to teach word flow so that more words will be born, more stories told, more marketing materials, more awakening and you’ll feel better.
2. Be a more confident writer so that your words will be more likely to get published AND READ.
3. Balanced exercises between left and right brain: Organizational, list, outline format plus mindmapping, using visuals as well as language.
4. We use nature metaphors and “Camp” metaphors which keep this very serious to many of us, topic fun.
5. Plentiful Visualization exercises you may continue to use later to fuel other writing experiences.
6. Tools to use later so that Writing Camp lasts longer than “a week at camp”.
7. Community creation to increase self confidence.
8. You don’t need insect repellant or travel to have a retreat/camp experience.
9. It’s year round!
10. Write in a community of like minds, hearts, souls.
11. Discover how to communicate even more clearly.
12. Express yourself well, effectively so that people will hear you.
    
13. Learn tools to becoming more succinct with your writing.
14. Practice ways to improve your writing.
15. Get consistently better and better and better.
16. Receive validation for what you are doing well in addition to encouragement to improve the writing which works less well.
17. Receive permission to play with words, to write and erase words, to be childlike yet fully grounded in adulthood with your words.

Who is best suited to attend this unique, Writing Intensive Program?

*  People who need an extra bit of oomph to complete or move forward on a writing project. 

* People who are experiencing blocks with writing.

* People who want to write more than they are currently writing but can’t seem to get the impetus to put the pen to the page.

* People who want to hang out with other cool people and think a Writing Intensive Program sounds like an intriguing way to do exactly that.

* People who have a long standing love affair with words and think this would be a great way to keep that love alive.

* People who would enjoy having a love affair with words and haven’t yet figured out a way to romance words.

* Artists of any kind who would like to add more writing to their artistic strengths.

* People who are curious about having a Camp over the telephone from anywhere in the world!

I want to support you in your writing endeavors, I want you to have lasting writing breakthroughs that you will find satisfying.

Discover how to "Show rather than tell" with your writing: an essential skill for a successful writing career.

Learn 7 effective tools for sensory writing so smooth your readers won't even notice how well you are writing.

See for yourself how fiction writing skills will help you in Non-Fiction writing, too.

Write in a Community of Like Minded, Souled and Deeply Caring Writers.

PLUS there will be more individualized lessons, depending upon what this sessions writing campers bring to the fire ~

  ~ ~ ~ ~

Please join us for Writing Intensive Camp, a week-long session of Writing in Community. If you would like to get discounts on future Writing Camp sessions, look below the A la Carte registration for those details. 

Remember Dates and Times for the January Session:

January, 2012:

Celebrating Winter:  The Quiet & the Loud ~

the Barren & the Bursting with Expectancy
January23, 2012 - January 27, 2012
8:30 am or 6:00 pm

Register for January Writing Camp -

5 powerful days to change your writing experiences forever

for only $49.Virtually unheard of low pricing.

 

As always, if you have any questions or concerns please call or text me at

661.444.2735 or write to me at juliejordanscott at gmail dot com.