These recordings of the 2020 603 Conference are available to members at $20 per session. Select the video you are interested in seeing and click on the “view now” button. You will be taken to the NHWP registration page (just as if you were signing up for a webinar or workshop). Once you register, you will receive a system email response that contains the link to the video. You will have unlimited access to any video you pay to view until December 21, 2021.
We hope you find these resources helpful in your writing journey.
Brunonia Barry is the New York Times and international bestselling author of The Lace Reader, The Map of True Places, and The Fifth Petal, which was chosen #1 of Strand Magazine’s Top 25 Books of 2017, a Boston Magazine Must, and a Massachusetts Book Awards Must Read. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has been an Amazon Best of the Month and a People Magazine Pick. Barry was the first American author to win the International Women’s Fiction Festival’s Baccante Award and was a past recipient of Ragdale Artists’ Colony’s Strand Invitational Fellowship as well as the winner of New England Book Festival’s award for Best Fiction. Her reviews and articles on writing have appeared in The London Times, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post. Brunonia served as chairperson of the Salem Athenaeum’s Writers’ Committee, as Executive Director of the Salem Literary Festival, and as a member of Grub Street’s Development Committee. She lives in Salem with her husband, Gary Ward, and their dog, Angel.
Martha Carlson is a developmental editor of literary and upmarket fiction — character-driven stories with an emphasis on craft. She offers editing services through her business, Martha Carlson, Editor, LLC (marthacarlsoneditor.com), and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in British and American Literature from UNC–Chapel Hill. She has published several collections of poetry as Martha Carlson-Bradley and is currently writing a novel of her own.
Strong writing requires creativity. Powerful writing requires revision. Making the reader want to turn the page requires knowing the tools that sharpen your prose.
All creative works of prose—fiction, essay, nonfiction, memoir—benefit from knowing the underpinnings of robust writing. This workshop will use lecture and in-class writing to teach and illustrate:
Gledé Browne Kabongo writes gripping, “unputdownable” psychological thrillers—unflinching tales of deception, secrecy, danger and family. She is a National Indie Excellence Award Winner, and the author of The Fearless Series, Swan Deception, Conspiracy of Silence, and “Mark of Deceit,” a short story. Her love affair with books began as a young girl growing up in the Caribbean, where her town library overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. She was trading books and discussing them with neighbors before Book Clubs became popular. Gledé holds a master’s degree in communications and conducts workshops on writing and publishing. She dreams of winning an Academy Award for screenwriting one day. She lives outside Boston with her husband and two children.
Conflict is at the heart of every story, and the conflict between your protagonist and antagonist if done right, will grip readers until the final page. In this masterclass, award-winning author Gledé Browne Kabongo will break down key steps in creating the tension and conflict between your two principal characters, and how their opposing goals can make your story “unputdownable.” You will learn:
R W W Greene is a New Hampshire writer with an MFA and a former NHWP chair. His work has seen daylight in Metaphorosis, Stupefying Stories, and Jersey Devil Press, among other places. His novel The Light Years was published in 2020. Greene keeps a website at rwwgreene.com and Tweets @rwwgreene.
Realistic fiction types have it easy. Open the door, look outside, there’s the world they’re working with. Sci-fi and fantasy writers, though? They have to tell stories against and within backdrops that only exist in the imagination: deep-space outposts, hobbit caves, glass castles, hyperspace tunnels, and yellow-brick roads. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Who pays for those yellow bricks and what kind of infrastructure exists to haul them into place? Who among the hobbits had the industrial-mechanical means to build the spring-winding clock on Bilbo’s mantlepiece? Does all of that matter? No. But a lot of it does, and in this workshop we’ll talk about how to pick and choose the right details to create a world.
Another gadget for your promotions-and-marketing tool chest: The Book Trailer. Writer R.W.W. Greene will take you through his “One Minute to Win It” method of creating an A/V trailer for your baby book and getting it in front of hungry audiences.
Robin Baskerville is the owner of Baskerville Editing. She is equally comfortable working on New York Times best sellers and editing first drafts from first timers. She is the creator of the “Working with an Editor” workshop geared to writers who plan on self-publishing or submitting their work to editors, publishers, or agents. She is the former editor of Business NH Magazine. For more information visit www.RobinBaskerville.com.
Don’t lose out to another writer because unprofessional errors and clouded meaning speak louder than your creativity. Robin Baskerville shares how to choose the right freelance editor for you, how much it costs, what to expect, and what to watch out for. The workshop also explores what it’s like to work with an editor at a publishing house, the basics of proofreader’s marks, self-editing tricks, and why Chicago style isn’t just a pizza.
You’re someone who writes a first draft as if every month were November, laying down words at a blistering pace, promising yourself to catch your mistakes later; or, perhaps you rework each paragraph as you go. Punter or polisher, every writer can use help in turning a first draft—whether it’s solid or squishy—into a second draft that sings. Join writer and editor Robin Baskerville as she explores the self-editing process, including tips and tricks for catching the smallest error while never losing sight of the big picture.
Bonnar Spring writes mystery/suspense/thriller novels with an international flavor. Her first novel, Toward the Light, was published by Oceanview Publishing in January. Her short story Payback appeared in the New England crime anthology Landfall and was nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award. A nomad at heart, Bonnar hitchhiked across Europe at sixteen and joined the Peace Corps after college. She currently divides her time between cottages on a New Hampshire salt marsh and by the Sea of Abaco. You can find her on Facebook, on her website www.BonnarSpring.com, or on Twitter.
Bonnar’s debut novel sold out its entire first print run in less than a month—largely as a result of the book tour she organized. Bonnar will talk about her process and go over the essentials of planning a book tour. Time permitting, we’ll walk several participants through the steps of creating their own book tour, so bring your questions. You’ll leave with a checklist of tips and a better understanding of how to increase visibility and boost sales. If you have new book or a manuscript nearing readiness, this workshop is for you.
Now what? Well, you want people to read it, don’t you? You came up with the idea, did the research, and spent endless hours writing and re-writing your creation. If you don’t want your pride and joy to sit on the shelves of a bookstore or remain a lonely digital file, you need to promote it. Immediately.
Dariel Suarez is the Cuban-born author of the novel The Playwright’s House (forthcoming, Red Hen Press) and the story collection A Kind of Solitude (Willow Springs Books), winner of the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories. Dariel is one of City of Boston’s inaugural Artist Fellows and the Director of Core Programs and Faculty at GrubStreet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Third Coast, Southern Humanities Review, and The Caribbean Writer, where his work was awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize. He holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Boston University and currently resides in the Boston area with his wife and daughter.
Whether it’s a character, a place, an image, or a single line, stories need a concrete seed from which to grow. But once you have your beginning, how do you know where to go next? How do you determine the characters and circumstances with the most potential for conflict and nuance? How do you structure and layer your narrative toward an evocative ending? In this session, we will discuss some key strategies to move your process from a place of ideas to a fully realized draft. Through craft lecture, examples, and group conversation, we will look at some important writerly tools you can apply so that you can be more productive, focused, and efficient in mapping out and executing a successful story.
K.R. (Kate) Conway is a bestselling YA novelist, boutique publisher, graphic designer, and blogger. When she’s not running in circles, she can be found teaching fiction craft to both teens and adults at writers conferences and schools throughout New England (or virtually visiting distant schools through the power of the Internet). She is the founder of the Cape Cod Teen Writers Conference and Writers Around the Block as well as a faculty member of NESCBWI, and standing member of YAAR and MASFFA. She can be found at www.CapeCodScribe.com.
Are you stuck in your storytelling journey? Is there a hole in your plot? A character missing a motivation? A scene you can’t twist in just the right way? If you are ready to throw in the towel over a manuscript or story idea, have no fear: the Fish of Destiny is here! Utilizing a group mentality, the Fish becomes the engine that drives the story, being tossed to different people who ask critical questions of the author so he or she can uncover new twists, motivations, and plot points. Hands down, this one storytelling tool will entirely change how you write, and might just save a manuscript from the trashcan. Additionally, this class will briefly touch on other fabulous writing tools such as Scrivener, mini-manuscript, and storyboarding.
Jeff Deck is an indie author who lives in South Berwick, Maine, with his wife, Jane, and their silly dog, Burleigh. He is the author of the urban fantasy / mystery series The Shadow Over Portsmouth (City of Ports, City of Games, City of Notions), the supernatural thriller The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley, and the sci-fi gaming adventure novel Player Choice. Deck is also the author, with Benjamin D. Herson, of the nonfiction book The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time (Crown/Random House). His stories appear in The Dystopian States of America (Haverhill House), Robots and Artificial Intelligence (Flame Tree), Corporate Cthulhu (Pickman’s Press), and Murder Ink 2: Sixteen More Tales of New England Newsroom Crime (Plaidswede). Deck is also a fiction ghostwriter and editor who helps other authors tell their stories: visit www.jeffdeck.com to learn more.
With enormous competition on the Amazon storefront, there’s almost no chance of your self-published book being discovered organically. You need to take luck out of the equation as much as possible. Amazon Ads is a useful tool for reaching readers — at a lower cost than Facebook Ads and with fewer steps to your sales page. In this workshop, Jeff Deck will demonstrate setting up the different types of Amazon Ads and how to effectively monitor them. You’ll learn methods to find keywords to micro-target customers, and about the different levers to pull to experiment with ads and perform A/B tests… so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Meg J. Petersen is a writer and teacher of writing at Plymouth State University. She is the founding director of the National Writing Project in New Hampshire. She has more than 25 years’ experience as a teacher educator in English. She has twice been awarded Fulbright Scholar Grants to work with teachers in the Dominican Republic on the teaching of writing, where she has consulted in the formation of the Proyecto de Escritura Nacional.
In this workshop, participants will learn different ways to approach memoir writing using various structures and exercises that free us from established patterns of storytelling. We will look at episodic formats, artifact-based approaches, shimmering moments, as well as techniques for writing outside of the stories we tell in order to enrich and expand their meanings, even for ourselves. This is a participatory workshop. Come prepared to write.
Margaret Porter is a recipient of the 2019 New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Fiction for Beautiful Invention: A Novel of Hedy Lamarr. She is the author of twelve other historical novels for various publishers. Her works include bestsellers, award-winners, and many foreign language editions. According to Publishers Weekly, she is notable for presenting “vivid historical figures and events . . . rigorously researched and faithfully portrayed.” Margaret regularly presents workshops on historical research and writing techniques at national and regional writers’ conferences, and is included in Who’s Who in Authors, Editors and Poets and Who’s Who in Entertainment. More information is available at her website, www.margaretporter.com.
Historical novelists depend on many types of research to create believable characters, appropriate to their time and place, and to effectively immerse the reader in a specific era and setting. To make people of the past come alive and present them more fully, the author can move far, far beyond Google and Wikipedia and delve into their attitudes, habits, restrictions, and concerns. Explore the various techniques for gathering necessary information and accurate details without getting lost in a bottomless research rabbit hole. How much is too much—or not enough? To what extent can we tweak the facts to serve our fictional plot? Discover how you can conduct research with maximum efficiency, leaving more time for actually writing your book!
Working for many years as a freelance substantive editor and being a multi-genre author herself, it is no surprise that Jessica Reino has a wide variety of tastes when it comes to storytelling. She’s a member of SCBWI New England, The Women’s Fiction Writers Association where she was a Webinar Program Leader. She has also been a contributor for The Children’s Writer’s Guild Online Magazine as well as a reviewer for Story Monsters Ink. She has experience as an author coach and freelance editor with Pandamoon Publishing. She also runs a monthly Twitter chat #thewriterszen. Jessica is a Senior Literary Agent for Metamorphosis Literary Agency. Whether the story is tackling tough topics, or serves solely to entertain, Jessica is looking for manuscripts that are well-written with a strong voice in order to make that emotional connection. www.metamorphosisliteraryagency.com
While each author’s writing is unique, there are industry norms that must be followed to gain the attention of a literary agent and/or editor. This workshop is designed to help authors in preparing their manuscript for submission. Topics to be covered are pitching, using hooks, query letters, and synopses, with the goal of helping authors to submit a polished product when they’re ready for publication.
Peter Biello, who moderates the panel discussion, is the host of All Things Considered and The Weekly New Hampshire News Roundup on New Hampshire Public Radio and a writer of short stories, novels, and radio journalism. His work has appeared in Gargoyle, Lowestoft Chronicle, and various NPR programs. He’s the founder of the Burlington Writers Workshop, a nonprofit writing workshop in Vermont, and co-founder of Mud Season Review, a national literary journal. He lives in Concord, New Hampshire.
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