Sessions & Details:

• Fall In Love with Writing Romance -- Summer Hanford

  • In this session you’ll learn how to launch your Romance Writing career and uncover what goes into a best-selling romance. Learn how to begin your novel, how to keep it going, and when to squeeze your readers’ hearts till it hurts. But don’t worry, it will all end happily ever after.

• Novel Writing Essentials -- Melissa Newman

  • This fiction workshop is for both beginning and intermediate writers. So you have an idea for a novel but how do you get started or you have some writing completed but you need your story to come alive. In this session, you will learn how to structure your novel, create lively dialogue among your characters, develop a timeline and how to create seamless flashbacks.

• Character Development – Susan Furlong

  • Learn to develop characters your readers won’t soon forget with Susan Furlong, author of Shattered Justice, a New York Times Best Crime Fiction Novel of the Year. During this session you will learn techniques for developing complex and intriguing characters along with practical advice for weaving emotion into each scene. Elevate your writing by mastering characterization.

• Non-fiction, Historical Non-fiction - Bringing Characters to Life - Pam Parry

  • This non-fiction session will explore how to write about historical figures and bring them to life. This workshop will provide research, writing tips and strategies for making historical figures three-dimensional. How do you write to make them authentically human? After this workshop, you should know how to enliven the characters in your books

• "Ask Me Anything Panel." -- All Faculty. Happens over lunch on Day 1. Join in casual conversation with AWC's experts on topics from writing romance, literary, crime, or cozy mystery. Or, tap into our panels' expertise on the Business of Writing with topics like contracts and legal questions to how to brand yourself as an author and how to develop and diversify your career as a writer. You choose the topics!

• Adaptations: From Book to Screen – Mark Daniels

  • In this session, Mark will teach us what it takes to bring a novel from pages to the big screen (or small screen) and outline the skills necessary to pull the essential scenes from our writing, scaling a 300-page book into a 120-page script ready for production. 

• Revisions and Editing – Sherry Robinson

  • This session will help writers, dig in to, perhaps the most important step in the writing process: revising. Writers will learn about the difference between editing and proofreading and be introduced to a framework for giving and receiving feedback that helpfully systematizes what should be cut and what should be kept from each draft.

• Your Epic Journey Begins: Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing - Summer Hanford

  • In this session, writers will learn how the experts make science fiction and fantasy believable. They will also gain insights on how to keep track of a newly created world, and strategies that aid in paying close attention to every element, from geology to weather, astronomy to biology.

• Crime Fiction - Susan Furlong

  • In this session writers will explore different types of crime writing, from cozy crime to psychological suspense and police procedural to better understand where your writing fits in this diverse genre.

• Building Your Brand & Marketing Your Work - Gery Deer, GLD Communications, Public Relations & Media Agency.

• Legal Contracts & Protecting Your Work for Authors, Publishers. Updates on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cases in Creative Work - Frank Newman, J.D., of Cole, Cole, Anderson & Newman

​