Program

1:00 Welcome

1:05 Key Note Speaker: Steven Manchester, #1 National Bestselling Author

Title: Finding Your Strengths as a Writer 

Content: The first step in figuring out your strengths as a writer is to understand what inspires you as a writer. For me, it’s my family, and the thoughts and feelings I want to share with them—the things in my life that evoke the most emotion and passion.

To discover your true inspiration—your muse—ask yourself two simple questions:

• What do I really want to write about?
• If I were writing only for myself, what would I write?

Once you have the answers to these, follow it up with an honest assessment:

• How comfortable (and skilled) am I with this sort of writing?

In order to truly identify your writing strengths, you must find the central point between what you really want to write and what you can write comfortably.

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1:40 James E. Wadsworth (J.W. Elliot)

Title: Story Craft: The Anatomy of Story

Content: Most would-be authors have a good sense of what a story is and can identify stories that do not work. However, when asked to explain what went wrong, they may struggle to describe clearly what they perceived intuitively. Knowledge of story structure and how to apply it to our own writing is key to improving our craft and creating stories that readers find satisfying. In this presentation, I will explain why story structure matters and provide a practical analysis of the three-act story structure so common in Hollywood films and best-selling novels. Understanding story structure is more than simply having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Story structure gives us the tools to organize, analyze, and revise our stories to produce the maximum emotional impact on the reader. This presentation will include a PowerPoint presentation and a handout describing the most common story structure paradigms.

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2:15 Kaitlyn Abdou

Title: World-Building in SFF: Hard vs Soft

Content: What is World-Building and why is it important? A key factor in Science Fiction and Fantasy writing is allowing your reader to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves into your world. In this workshop, I’ll be discussing specifically Hard vs Soft World-Building—comparing examples of Hard and Soft, and discussing how to get started.

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2:50 John Morse

Title: Anatomy of a Thriller

Content: The Thriller genre is the fiction writers' Big Tent. Under the tent you will find all shapes and sizes: Psychological (Paula Hawkins), Action (Lee Child), Crime (Michael Connolly), Military (Tom Clancy), Political (Nelson DeMille), Mystery (Ruth Ware), Spy (Daniel Silva), Legal (John Grisham), SciFi (Michael Crichton), National Security (Vince Flynn). If you are seeking to create a strong emotional connection with the reader, nearly every writer can benefit from adding thriller elements to their work. I will present some examples of the Inciting Incident, Plotting Strategies, Setting the Stakes, Building Suspense, and Creating Characters that will keep your readers turning the pages.

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3:25 Ken Brack

Title: Narrative Nonfiction: Initial Choices From a Tool Belt of Strategies

Content: How can we best engage readers while creating drama out of the observable world of real people, places, and events? Multiple forms and hybrids thrive that essentially combine the art of storytelling and journalism. I will guide writers starting down this path to consider their options including a range of points of view and how creative or narrative nonfiction differs from long-form and book-length reportage. Key techniques we will explore include scene building, reconstructing dialogue and events, immersion journalism, layering varied accounts of pivotal scenes, and how nonfiction writers research. We will also examine approaches to literary memoir, writing about loss and trauma, and incorporating fiction techniques. This presentation will include a PowerPoint presentation and a handout with suggested models.

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4:00 5. Panel Q&A 40 mins.

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4:45 Conclusion