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Writers of fiction, don’t miss this weekend FICTION WRITERS’ MINI-CONFERENCE designed just for you! Take classes from award-winning authors TESSA FONTAINE, JACQUI CASTLE & KIM WRIGHT, show off your literary knowledge at a Literary Trivia Happy Hour, exercise body and mind on a Fiction Writers’ Scavenger Hunt, socialize with other writers and enjoy quiet writing time at the Flatiron Writers Room! Space is limited to 12 participants. 

If you’ve loved our day retreats, you’ll love this mini-conference!

SCHEDULE: 

Saturday, February 20, 2027:

9:30am: Doors open. Settle in, enjoy a coffee and pastry, and get to know your fellow participants.

10:00am-noon, Class #1: POV (Point of View) with Tessa Fontaine (see below for details).

Noon-1:00pm: Lunch break. Bring a brown bag lunch or get takeout from one of West Asheville’s nearby eateries, and join us on the FWR porch or dining room for social time.

1:00pm-2:30pm: Your choice:

—Join Heather Newton for a guided writing prompt or free-form writing time at the FWR with an opportunity to share with others; OR

—“Fiction Writers’ Scavenger Hunt” - we will supply you with a journal and a worksheet with which you can take a self-guided walk down Haywood Road or the surrounding streets of vibrant West Asheville, utilizing what you see and hear as prompts to record your experiences. Your goal: to come up with as many elements of a story that you can, inspired by what you see, (over)hear, taste, smell, and touch. Grab a seat in a coffee shop where you can “accidentally overhear” a conversation, engage in a chat with a shop owner, detour down a residential side street and imagine a life lived in a house that captures your imagination, observe and record snatches of conversation of people passing, descriptions and character studies of pets ambling along with their humans…the possibilities for inspiration are endless! Each “touch” on the local community should provide you with the tools to shape a protagonist, antagonist, setting, piece of dialogue, plot twist, time peried, genre touchstone, etc. We’ll give you a worksheet to keep it all organized, then come back and share along with the onsite prompt group. The writer with the most “scavenged” story components will win an FWR swag bag full of cool stuff!

2:45pm-4:45pm, Class #2: Character Development w/Jacqui Castle (see below for details).

4:45pm-6:00pm: Literary Trivia Happy Hour! Jacqui Castle will host one of her stellar Literary Trivia sessions - “General Lit with a Local Spin.” We’ll supply the wine and cheese, you supply the brilliant answers to all things literary!

Sunday, February 21, 2027:

9:30am. Doors open, grab that coffee and pastry and find your seat.

10:00am-noon, Class #3: Story Beats w/Kim Wright (see below for details).

Noon-3pm: We’ll wrap up at noon, but our space is yours for quiet writing time until 3pm! We have prompts, craft books, and a screenplay library to inspire you to get words on the page before you head home.  

Class Descriptions & Instructor Bios:

Point of View w/Tessa Fontaine

So much of how we understand a story comes from how close we are to the teller. Who is telling the story, and what do they think about it? Are they telling the whole thing, or leaving parts out? What is gained by a first person narrator, and what's lost? How do we move in and out of close third? What do we gain and lose through omniscience? In this class, we'll look at examples from published literature and try our hand at different points of view.  

Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS (FSG 2018), a New York Times Editors' Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors', and The New York Post.  THE RED GROVE (FSG 2024), her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, People, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa has taught in jails and prisons, community centers, and currently teaches in Warren Wilson's MFA program. She runs Accountability Workshops with writer and pal Annie Hartnett, and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her daughter, goofy dog and sassy cat.

Character Development w/Jacqui Castle

Do you really know your characters? In this workshop, we'll dive deep and get to know our protagonists on a visceral level. Their fears, their desires, their favorite tea, their most embarrassing moments, and the smells that bring back painful memories. Through various generative, prompt-based exercises, we'll explore the corners of our protagonists' psyches and leave with a firm grasp of who they are, what they want, and the lengths they will go to get it.

Jacqui Castle is an educator and novelist living and writing here in Asheville, North Carolina. Her novel The Seclusion garnered Castle the title of 2020 Indie Author of the Year through the Indie Author Project, and the 2022 sequel The Chasm was hailed as “Not only necessary in school libraries but also a solid choice for a class read” by School Library Journal. Jacqui is the proud owner of Lit Local Mini Bookshops, which brings the work of local authors and literary events to Asheville establishments. Jacqui currently teaches creative writing through the Great Smokies Writing Program, Redbud Writing Project, and Story Parlor. When not writing, she can be found hanging out with her family and consuming far too much caffeine.

Story Beats w/Kim Wright

Loosely based on Blake Snyder’s famous screenwriting guide Save the Cat, this workshop will help you improve the plotting and pacing of your novel or memoir. Focusing on such pivotal scenes as the catalyst, the midpoint and the finale, Wright will explain how eight key scenes (or “story beats”) support the entire structure of a book. Get them right and the rest will follow. Get them wrong and no matter how beautiful your line-by-line writing may be, your book will lack unity and dynamism.

And if you’re more of a pantser than a plotter, not to worry (Kim is too). Story beats only set the outline of the plot and don’t hem in your creativity. They may serve as a road map but your imagination is still driving the car.

If you have a work in progress, bring it, and have your opening scene handy for analysis. If you’re still just thinking about your next work, be prepared to brainstorm potential story beats around your central idea. Either way, the class is designed to be practical, not abstract, and the goal is to apply the story beats model to your own work in progress.

Kim Wright turned to fiction ten years ago after a career in journalism. Since then she has published four novels:  LOVE IN MID AIR (Grand Central), THE UNEXPECTED WALTZ, THE CANTERBURY SISTERS, and LAST RIDE TO GRACELAND (all Gallery). LAST RIDE TO GRACELAND was the 2018 winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Kim teaches at Charlotte Lit and offers developmental editing through her Story Doctor service (kimwright.org). You can find Kim on her YouTube channel GROWING BOLDER.