Personal Narrative: The Craft of Revelation

Taught by Nina Wise
A 6-week writing adventure on Zoom

When we delve into our personal stories, be it the stories of our everyday life or stories from our past, we encounter the opportunity for revelation. Not only do we create our stories but also our stories create us. As we write, they reveal to us aspects of ourselves and our lives that have not yet surfaced in our awareness. Through writing personal narratives, we come to know ourselves and others; we become intimate with your experience.

In this workshop, we will write stories from our lives. We will focus on craft issues and discover how by improving our craft the possibility for revelation is heightened. We will also free our spirits so that we can write without self-judgment and allow the process to unfold with ease.

In a supportive and non-judgmental environment, we will come together each week to practice a particular element of narrative and allow our creativity free rein.

Each session will include teachings, visualization, writing practice, and time to read aloud in small groups.

Participants will be encouraged to join a cohort group for practice between sessions (optional).

All sessions will be live on Zoom. In the event you miss a session, you can watch the video, which will be made available 1–2 days after the session.

Week 1: What’s up for you right now?
The concerns that occupy our hearts ask to be expressed and are the best material for our personal narratives. In this session, we will explore what it is that hurts our hearts right now, what we fear, what we hope for, what rubs. And we will write from that place following some narrative guidelines that will transform our material from kvetching and whining to actual revelation.

Week 2: How sense detail can reveal emotion
We write from sense detail rather than our theories and opinions about things. This allows our readers to enter our story rather than witness it from afar. But we do not want to abandon the depth of our feelings as we tell our stories. How can we reveal our feelings through sense detail?

Week 3: Who is telling the story?
A writer of personal narrative must reveal who they are through the way they tell the story. How do we learn to see ourselves as a character in our own story?

Week 4: Going deep, going deeper
We can progressively discover layers of meaning and association as we practice going deep and then deeper within a single narrative.

Week 5: Conflict, longing
Conflict can be inner or outer, major or minor, funny or tragic. We will look at the way conflict arises in our narrative from our longing and drives our story forward.

Week 6: Assembling bits and pieces
Often we end up with bits and pieces of writing and are puzzled as to how they fit together. We will look at ways of assembling our material so that each bit builds on the ones that came before and leads to the ones that follow.

6 Wednesdays, 4:30–6:00 pm Pacific Time on Zoom
January 19 – February 23
6 weeks for $195
Discount for current students: $175

Refund Policy

We do our best to keep our fees very affordable and hope you understand that there are many administrative hours and costs that are involved in running our programs. We also understand that things come up for people and want to accommodate your change of plans as best we can. So here is our refund policy:

The registration fee for Motion’s online events is non-refundable. If you withdraw within one week prior to the first session, the fee you paid can be applied to a future Motion Theater workshop within one year (less 20% processing fee).

* All workshop sessions are recorded and available for 4 weeks after the final workshop session. The links will be sent to you each week (only for those registered for a multi-week series).

* Motion will consider refund requests due to an extraordinary circumstance or emergency on a case by case basis if you withdraw within one week prior to the first session. To request a refund of this nature, please contact us and explain your situation.