We’d like you to join us for the Adding Depth to your Fiction Workshop. In this two-day retreat, you will have the chance to sit and talk about your work with two bestselling, multiple-award-winning novelists. You will bring some writing with you, explore it, talk about ideas to deepen it, try exercises for improving your work, and dig into the steps for improving your craft.
Leading our time together is Lisa Samson, perhaps the most
well-respected Christian novelist in the country. Lisa is the author of
twenty-one novels, including the Christy Award winning Songbird, and has
been called, "one of the best inspirational novelists in the market
today" by Publishers Weekly. Lisa is recognized for breaking ground in CBA
fiction with her novels Tiger Lillie and The Church Ladies, books that portray honest
characters 
who struggle with their faith. She has continued to offer her
readers an edgier experience with books such as The Living End and Women's
Intuition. Quaker Summer, the most decorated Christian novel of
2007, deals with social justice and mercy themes, and was Women of Faith's
Novel of the Year. That novel and her next, Embrace
Me, were both finalist for the Book of the Year Award. Her latest, The Passion of Mary Margaret, has
received rave reviews. Lisa lives in Kentucky with her husband Will and three
children.
Also
helping lead the workshop will be Susan Meissner, a multi-published author,
speaker, and writing workshop leader with a background in community journalism.
Her novels include the Rachael Flynn Mystery series, as well as A Window to
the World, named one of 2005's top ten Christian novels by Booklist
magazine. In 2008 she released The Shape
of Mercy with Random House, and it became the most decorated Christian
novel of 2008, making everyone’s Top Ten list, being named by Publishers Weekly
as one of the top novels of the year, and winning nearly every major award for
Christian fiction. A devotee of purposeful pre-writing, Susan encourages
workshop audiences to maximize writing time by planning ahead, mapping the
writing journey, and beginning from a place of intimate knowledge. She is a
contributing writer to the Christian Authors Network marketing blog and the
leader of a local writer's group.
This workshop is designed to help novelists understand what brings depth to a novel, and each participant will be asked to submit a writing sample before attending. This will be a small group, very hands-on, with lots of one-on-one time to help you move forward in your writing career.
There will be no hype with Lisa and Susan. You won’t find any
motivational speeches. There might be some prayer, but none of the
pie-in-the-sky stuff that sounds good in a classroom but won’t work in the real
world. The focus of this retreat is to help each participant come away with a
clear sense of how to make their writing
better, deeper, and more meaningful to readers.
