Kathryn Craft
Kathryn Craft will be conducting one of the Friday half-day workshops to explore MAXIMIZING THE EMOTIONAL POTENTIAL OF YOUR NOVEL, and two additional working sessions on Saturday at the GLVWG WriteStuff Writers Conference™ , March 24 and 25, 2017. Kathryn writes stories that seek beauty and meaning at the edge of darkness. Rich with material for further thought or discussion, her novels make a great choice for book clubs.
Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, Kathryn served for more than a decade in a variety of positions on the boards of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, and volunteers as time allows with the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. Kathryn also hosts writing retreats for women and speaks often about writing. She writes a monthly series, “Turning Whine into Gold,” at the Writers in the Storm blog, and freelances as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com. She is a proud member of the Tall Poppies Writers, a marketing cooperative of women’s fiction writers.
Kathryn states a novel is, above all else, an emotional experience. From the safety of their armchairs, readers want the protagonist to take them along on a journey that will help them benefit from the process we humans fear most: change. The last thing you want is for your reader to slide your manuscript back across the desk and say, “Hmm. I remained curiously unmoved.” Part story structure, part narrative arcs, and part sentence-level examination, this three-hour class will explore craft that will help you create—within any genre—the kind of heart-thumping tension, heart-breaking consequence, and heart-warming resolution readers crave.
Kathryn’s Saturday sessions on the craft of writing are:
ENGAGING BACKSTORY TECHNIQUES. Backstory can be an important ally to a storyteller—or an obstacle that tries a reader’s patience. We’ll talk about when to use it, what to include, ways to handle it, and problems that can arise.
FINDING THE STORY IN TRUE EVENTS: CREATIVE NONFICTION. In fiction, writers seek the truth in imagined story; in creative nonfiction, writers seek the story in true events. In this session we take a fresh look at story elements that can make your nonfiction read like a novel, and how popular works of creative nonfiction hook the reader with the same kind of entertaining, importantseeming, and heartwarming material that makes all stories linger in the mind long after the book is closed.
We look forward to seeing Kathryn again at the conference.
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Kathryn is the author of two books, The Art of Falling (2014, Sourcebooks), and The Far End of Happy (2015, Sourcebooks). You can learn more about Kathryn Craft at KathrynCraft.com, her Facebook Page, and follow her Twitter Feed.
Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group 