Hazel Denhart

Thousands of years ago, Heraclitus taught that the most powerful force in the world is conflict--without which life could not exist. The very definition of a story is the setting to life of an irreversible and utterly transformative conflict. The more perfect the conflict, the more powerful the story. The conflict of any story begins with the storyteller choosing a single, perfect adjective to describe the hero. Its opposite will then become the villain. When forced together in the small space of a story these opposing energies create a nuclear fusion that, when done right, is unstoppable. In this presentation, we explore how to choose that first, critical word out of which all the other words flow.

Altering how you use a few different categories of words can stimulate new neural pathways in your brain to bring about novel ways of thinking. A simple shift in the way you speak, even in the most mundane conversations, can easily open your mind to new veins of creativity.

Stories bubble up into a writer’s conscious mind from deep wells in the unconscious just as dreams do at night. In this talk we will discover the role stories play in helping us untangle banished unpleasantries and how collaborating with the unconscious, instead of ignoring it, releases exactly what you need to write and write well.