Kimberly Jentzen's Acting With Impact offers a toolbox for actors and writers alike.

If you know of Stanislavsky, Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Linklater, if you studied their methods, and are serious about booking a role, you'll want to add Kimberly Jentzen to the fold. Jentzen's Acting With Impact is like a good witch's brew, a fizzy, fruity punch drawing from earlier magicians' potions, spiced with her own magical kick. Jentzen helps the actors access emotions by tracing feelings to their source. 

An actor herself and a true storyteller, Jentzen's tone and presentation in print are entertaining. If you already know her from YouTube or TikTok, you'll recognize her voice on the page.

Jentzen's Technique will be interesting and helpful to actors, the author's fellow coaches, anyone in the industry, as well as to writers who want to deepen their characters' motivation. 

"Your eyes are like pools of water, in which your very essence,

depth, emotion, and energy communicate something specific. If your

focus is engaged in the character’s thoughts, the expressions become

more authentic and believable." ~ Kimberly Jentzen

The titles of each of the eighteen lessons are followed by content details (ingredients for success) and one or more exercises. Every so many chapters offer an example of the author coaching a student. 

These sessions are great lessons in how psychological analysis and emotional intelligence help develop a deeply believable character, whether on the stage, screen, or the page. 

Throughout the book, Jentzen adds many wonderful examples to illustrate her teaching. In Lesson Eleven: Want vs. Need, for instance, it is Eli Whip, a character in the Amazon/BBC limited series The English. "Difference between what you need and what you want is what you can put on a horse."

For those who already own a copy of the first edition, it's not just the *Coaching Notes* that are added; according to the author, this is not just a second edition, but a complete rewrite.

If I were you, I'd make room for this book in your saddlebag.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Wizard of Earthsea - | - Always Coming Home Ursula K. Le Guin * Writing Women

Top of the morning, 5:02 a.m. PST a day after falling back. Last Saturday it would've been 6 a.m., not an unreasonable time to start the new week. Simon and Schuster surprises me with a special offer:

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the timeless and beloved A Wizard of Earthsea, this complete omnibus edition of the entire Earthsea chronicles includes over fifty illustrations illuminating Le Guin’s vision of her classic saga.

My mind drifts, didn't I own an earlier special edition of one of Le Guin's titles? Wanting to read an excerpt, to get a taste of A Wizard of Earthsea (this links to Indie bookstores), I click on the Amazon link. Look Inside takes me to the author's list of published works, the table of content and a map of an archipelago. I scroll on to the "Introduction". The voice on the page triggers a memory of Le Guin's lecture, years ago at Centrum's Port Townsend Writers Conference. Scanning the first two pages, I'm grabbed by a sentence at the top of the third, "I've written so often of how and why it took me so long to write ..."
Intriguing and relatable.


Just a hop and a skip to the fiction book shelves and I spot the box that holds a fat paperback and old-fashioned cassette tape. Will I be able to play that? Do I still own a cassette deck? Until this moment, I have't even bothered to look inside the box. Opening Always Coming Home, Le Guin's 1984 novel, taking in the illustrations, white space, the multitude of approaches between the covers, I feel a tickling sensation in my underbelly, reminiscent of childhood excitement, of my early reader's love for books that took me away from my ordinary, to unknown worlds and places.

What Le Guin writes in the introduction about a certain literary coming of age later in life, speaks to me. I recognize the initial learning from male writers, informed by the Canon of Literature. Not until her sixties Le Guin felt the need "to write of and from my own body, my own gender, in my own voice. I'm tempted to say the latter isn't really true for me, my first published book after all was a memoir. I writing about my parents however, I've neglected my mother's point of view. High time to write of and from her body, our gender, in our voices. And time to look into Always Coming Home.



This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Write On! - Follow Your Instinct Writer

May 17, 2011 marks the first time I used Scoop-it to share articles and blog posts on writing.
Seven years later I've shared a good 900 posts. Along the way "Write On!" received a silver badge. 

The times they are a changing, I need to make room or won't be able to keep adding new material to my Write On! Scoop-it. So I'll attempt to republish many, if not all of my previous shares. 

When relevant, I'll add a note to the previously published one.

Dee White writes about following your instinct as a writer and creating the story you need to write. The analogy of the big apple growing in the wild makes me hungry for more.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Writing is War

Imagine this turned left

As a potential housemate I had to take the Keirsey personality test, the owner and builder of the house in Austin, Texas, said. Odd, I thought, I had local references, and they were good. He explained it wasn't about whether I was cheerful and trustworthy, but whether I would fit in with the geeks who occupied the other rooms in the bee-hive-like structure he had designed and build himself.

If he had his concerns, I had mine. No AC because the house was build to funnel air from top to bottom? No heat either (it was February and cold), because he had calculated one light bulb combined with the body heat of the occupant would warm the hexagonal cells? Yes, he was a mathematician. His former fellow students, friends, and housemates were computer freaks, and I had to promise I would not share —outside the walls of the beehive— what was created inside. As though I would understand what I saw, I thought. I, who tried to grapple the MS-DOS code of my Commodore 64. That I used a laptop was a plus point in the household though, that much was clear.

The outcome of the test said I was a Field Marshall. Not bad, my future landlord said, not bad at all, as long as I would keep everybody's stuff alone and mind my own business and not try to re-organize. With that he handed me a key, no need to sign a contract or pay a deposit. It wasn't that he had no business sense —for goodness sake, the guy financed a local upstart, started by fellow students at U.T. called Whole Foods— he knew about watching his nickel.

Looking into The 4 Temperaments I can see how being an Abstract Utilitarian or Rational Field Marshall affects my way of writing. And it somewhat explains how I've been able to work on different books within one manuscript. What would drive any other person crazy comes to me naturally. Which doesn't mean it's easy.

I've been working on three projects, overseeing developments across-the-board, moving each forward. Probably makes no sense to others, but since all of the material comes from the same source, a monster manuscript, it makes sense to me.

Right now some troops are on furlough, and I'm proceeding with just one commando. Yes, there's a war-like strategy to my way of writing! I'm deepening my novel's main character's love interest's part for greater balance in the book. At the moment I'm writing the whole story from her p.o.v. instead of the previous M.C.'s. We'll see where this leads.

I have a feeling this strategic move will help me win one of my word wars not to long from now. Are you following me?

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.