MASTERCLASS WITH DAN FESPERMAN
Less is More: Building suspense from the get-go by withholding and writing ‘small.’ ($10)
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Lord Baltimore Hotel
Royal Board Room – 19th Floor
PARKING
Download a map here.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED:
https://citylitproject.salsalabs.org/CLF25MasterclasswithDanFesperman
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With the attention spans of readers and prospective publishers growing ever shorter, the pressure to create immediate interest in your characters and quickly build suspense in your plot has never been greater. DAN FESPERMAN, whose fourteen novels of intrigue have made Best-of-the-Year lists of The New York Times, Oprah Daily, and USA Today, offers a workshop which, by example and by advice from more than 25 years of experience, will demonstrate how to hook your readers from the first sentence onward, partly by focusing on what to leave out as much as what to put in.
It will also show how refining your first broad strokes down to the smallest of flourishes can produce bigger payoffs without sacrificing the rhythm, grace, or fullness of your prose. The workshop will include a writing prompt, a brief reading, and an audience Q&A, with a special focus throughout on those vital first pages of your novel. Attendees will receive a multi-page handout, “Getting the Most Out of Your Research Trip,” a rough guide based on Dan’s travels to various locations and archives while doing groundwork for his novels. Dan Fesperman is a novelist and former foreign correspondent who lives just north of Baltimore. His fourteenth novel, Pariah, will be published this July by Knopf.
Dan Fesperman began writing about dangerous and unseemly people and places as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Now traveling on his own dime, his fourteen critically acclaimed novels of intrigue and suspense draw upon that experience. His books have won two Dagger Awards from the UK Crime Writers Association and the Dashiell Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, and have been selected as the year’s best mystery/thriller by USA Today. His new novel, Pariah, will be published this July by Knopf, and his previous novel, Winter Work, was one of Oprah Daily’s Favorite Books of 2022, as well as an Editor’s Choice selection of Amazon and the New York Times Book Review. He lives just north of Baltimore.
www.danfesperman.com
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CityLit Project in partnership with Lord Baltimore Hotel and Red Emma’s present CityLit Festival: Our Stories Give Light To Our Future. This celebration of the arts showcases a bevy of leading poets and writers on April 5, 2025. We’re talking fiction, nonfiction, poetry galore, and ways to up the ante on your craft.
Download the CityLit Festival: Our Stories Give Light To Our Future flyer.