By Gina Catanzarite, Teen Writer! Director
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
I suppose kids who go to summer sleep-away camp – the kind
with tents and hikes and campfires and cabin mates – come home exhausted, but
in a good way. Fresh air, lively activity, a few new skills, a lot of new
friends.
I like to think the kids who participate in Luminari’s Teen
Writer! camp come home the same way. True, we don’t have the tents or the
campfires but don’t think “writing camp” means kids spent days on end hunched
over a desk in a dimly lit room, laboriously cranking out sentence after
sentence.
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
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Enthralling fiction requires enthralling details and the
only way to do that is to get away from that desk!
For writers, the world is our research lab.
Career counselor and author Barbara Sher said, “When you start
using senses you've neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely
fresh eyes.”
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
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That is the kind of camp our Teen Writers
attended during the last week of June, traipsing around Oakland with tablets in
hand, literally stopping to smell the flowers. . . and study the sculptures,
and eavesdrop on the conversations, and observe the surroundings, and examine
the exquisite little features and facets of the people and places around them.
With a few tweaks, those details can artfully find their way into a piece of
fiction and infuse it with authenticity.
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
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Don’t believe it?
We passed a preschool girl in a princess costume walking
past the Carnegie Library with her mom. She was licking a lollipop and when she
noticed us looking at her she beamed back, waved the lollipop in the air, and
cried out, “It tastes blue!”
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
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I assure you, even the best writer in the world could not
dream up such an exquisite line of dialogue.
We searched for inspiration for story ideas, too, on our
daily walking tours of the city, asking the most useful question in a writer’s
toolkit: What if. . .?
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
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What if. . . that elderly man doing Tai Chi in Schenley
Park was really a spy?
What if. . . that sculpture on the lawn of Carnegie Mellon
University was really a portal to another dimension?
What if. . . the woman in that 18th century painting came to life and
joined us for the day?
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| Teen Writers in Oakland. Photo credit Cooper Kusbit |
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And here’s another one: What if . . . we all lived our
lives this way
every day?
Maybe you aren’t a teen writer but you are a person with an imagination and
you, like we did, would probably smile for an hour after a little girl dressed
like a princess told you her lollipop tasted blue.
You owe it to yourself to get away from your desk and
see the world through completely
fresh eyes.
Fresh air, lively activity, a few new skills, a lot of new
friends.
For a writer—for anyone
– that’s a pretty good way to
spend a summer day.
***
Gina Catanzarite, owner/operator of Arania Productions, and an award-winning television producer, author, media consultant and teacher who has worked both nationally and locally in her fields since 1987.
Gina Catanzarite, owner/operator of Arania Productions, and an award-winning television producer, author, media consultant and teacher who has worked both nationally and locally in her fields since 1987.
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