Pat Conroy Literary Festival

We’ll take a good look at dialogue that takes off with examples from the masters, including Raymond Chandler, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and, of course, Pat Conroy. We’ll question how realistic dialogue can and should be, and we’ll explore how many ways there are to weave speech and action and description together.

This workshop will explore that process of taking a story from bad to good to great. We’ll analyze the toughest problems in backstory, dialogue, and description (by “leaving out the parts most readers skip” says Elmore Leonard), the vexing issues of character and plot, and challenges to quality writing time.

I'll explain that talking about "process" is antithetical to how I think and work, or play. My "process" involves remembering as much of what I see and hear as I can and trying to describe it; for me the process of writing means getting lost in watching something or someone, rarely knowing what will happen next, and then writing about it.

In this workshop, we will excavate memory to build poems that stitch together a new quilt of experience. We will examine ways in which we can structure a memory poem around time and space.

Learn from one of the top editors in New York on how to structure a persuasive introduction to you and your work. What in your biography or experience is likely to get an agent or editor’s attention? How much plot description is enough or too much?