Events and Meetings

March 1-31, 2021

Quilting 101/Plotting with Suzanne Johnson

$30 ($25 for HCRW members)

Do storyboards, sticky notes, spreadsheets and index cards give you hives? Does your manuscript wander in circles – yet you’re afraid a detailed outline will suck the heart and soul out of your writing?

All you need is a simple word-processing program to stitch together the perfect quilt of a plot to keep your novel on track and moving in the right direction – while still giving your muse room to play. We’ll use a step-by-step technique to plot a novel from start to finish and give you a huge head-start on your first draft (and the dreaded synopsis).

This will be a working course! Bring your best idea (the one that’s been bubbling in your brain for six months) or a manuscript that’s wandering in the desert, and we’ll shape it up and get it moving. We’ll also be deconstructing one of my own novels as part of this class as well as using examples from a variety of books in different genres.

About the Instructor: Suzanne Johnson was happily ensconced in New Orleans as a university magazine editor and veteran copyeditor when Hurricane Katrina sent her adopted hometown underwater. She took her Katrina experiences, added wizards and magic (and the sexy undead pirate Jean Lafitte), and began what has become the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series published by Tor Books. Writing under the name Susannah Sandlin, she also writes award-winning paranormal romance, including the popular Penton Legacy series for Montlake Romance, and romantic suspense and thrillers, including two series, The Collectors and Wilds of the Bayou, also for Montlake. She was the founding copyeditor for Entangled Publishing, leaving when her own writing career needed more TLC. Suzanne grew up in Alabama halfway between the Bear Bryant Museum and Elvis’s birthplace and lived in New Orleans for fifteen years, so she has a highly refined sense of the absurd and an ingrained love of college football and fried gator on a stick. She currently lives in Auburn, Alabama, where she is a full-time author and does copyediting work for other authors both as a freelancer and on Reedsy.com

Register for this workshop.


April 5-30, 2021

What is Conflict?

$30 ($25 for HCRW members)

Conflict is what keeps someone reading or watching your work from start to finish. But how do you set up conflict throughout your script or story pages without slowing the pace or being repetitive? Join this interactive class where you’ll explore internal and external conflict, and:

- Sharpen your awareness of conflict in the work of others (if you see it, you can do it!).
- Discover different ways to diagnose “flat” scenes.
- Strengthen your understanding of the changing layers of conflict in the three-act structure (conflict isn’t the same on page 1 as page 50). Which can be used to develop conceptual conflict journeys for your characters.
- Employ learning into your key scenes.

About the Instructor
Melinda Curtis, an award-winning USA Today bestseller of over 35 romances, is a writing craft geek. Before turning to writing as a career, she worked with a cultural anthropologist and a marketing psychologist on how to create more compelling packaging at the shelf. One class short of a psychology minor, Melinda believes that "knowing more about what makes people tick can add depth to your writing."

Register for this workshop.