The John Hay Lyceum at The Fells is offering a selection of its writing workshops in a limited series. Classes will explore the theme of The Power of the Pen. The writing craft masterclasses will combine technique, inspiration and hands-on exercises designed for a variety of genres. All are welcome to this supportive environment!
Session 1: The Power of the Pen to Animate — Short Skirt, Long Jacket: Creating Characters from the Outside (Tracy Wood)
What is your protagonist’s favorite ice cream? How does your villain feel about cats? What type of pajamas does the evil stepmother wear? Before a writer can bring her characters to life on the page, she needs to know them like her own family, and even the most original story will fall flat if it isn’t populated with fascinating characters. Master the art of character development through this innovative approach to crafting memorable characters.
Session 2: The Power of the Pen to Shape Experience — Using Structure, Setting, and Genre Expectations to Guide the Reader's Emotional Journey (Susanne Dunlap)
In this interactive session, we’ll explore how writers shape the reader’s experience through structure, setting, genre expectations, and emotional movement. A story is more than a sequence of events: it is a carefully guided journey that influences what readers notice, anticipate, feel, and remember. Whether you write romance, mystery, historical fiction, fantasy, or literary fiction, the choices you make about pacing, world-building, conflict, and revelation determine how fully readers enter your story and how eagerly they continue.
Through discussion and hands-on exercises, participants will examine their own works in progress, identify the experience they want to create, and consider how individual craft choices support — or undermine — that goal.
Session 3: The Power of the Pen to Entertain — The Speed of Story: How Pacing Keeps Readers Turning Pages (Seth Harwood)
The difference between a story that pulls readers forward and one that loses them isn't plot — it's pace. In this workshop, writing coach and author Seth Harwood draws on Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode to explore the variety of speeds available to fiction writers: when to slow down and linger, when to compress and skip, and how to read your own work to find where the pace is working and where it isn't.
Through examples and hands-on exercises, you'll learn to recognize the difference between scene, summary, and gap — and how to use each one intentionally to build momentum, deepen character, and keep your reader fully engaged. Whether you're drafting or revising, this session will give you practical tools to make your story move.
Session 4: The Power of the Pen to Transcend — From the Finite to the Universal: Writing Toward the Ineffable (Ewa Chrusciel)
How do writers use images of the intimate to transcend the immediate and capture the universal? Flannery O'Connor wrote of "a sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality." O'Connor breaks through the grotesque and the shocking to expose grace. In poetry, too, "the particular and the strange can," according to Jorie Graham, "storm the walls of mystery." Both fiction and poetry reach toward what exceeds them: toward the unsayable, the luminous, the transcendent.
This relationship between finite and infinite, mystery and reality will guide our time together. In this session, we will examine how literary texts move from particulars to universals, and we will attempt to draft our own poems, prose, or flash fiction that lean into the ineffable.
Session 5: The Power of the Pen to Illuminate the Past and Understand the Present — An Exercise in Empathy: Bringing Characters and Their Times to Life (Mary Kronenweter)
A number of literary genres, including historical fiction and memoirs, weave together authentic details about the past while simultaneously sharing timeless stories about the human condition. Where historians are limited by historical record, historical novelists and memoirists are free to employ imagination in plot and character arcs within well-researched historical context and factual timelines. Authors can also be deeply inspired by en plein air writing in historical settings (like the Fells!). Reading and writing historical fiction and memoirs is an exercise in empathy. The characters are impacted by their surroundings and time period, but their universal feelings and expressions of love, hate, jealousy, pride, and fear are timeless. Such works can also provide a powerful lens to give voice to the voiceless. Our ultimate responsibility is to help the reader and ourselves make sense of both the past and the world we live in today. This session will include discussion, a case study, and a historical artifact writing activity.