2017 Mystery Writers Pre-Conference Class
$90 for Conference Participants, $125 for General Public

Writing the Wave: Investigation, Suspense, Action, Reflection

Typically, mystery novels unfurl in accelerating waves of establishing narrative (often investigation), building to suspense, building to action, resolving reflection, and then thrusting forward to the next wave. In this workshop we’ll examine each element of this “ISAR” wave, and learn how to construct scenes that end with a hook, grab readers, and move the story forward. Topics include: dissecting the waves in a mystery/thriller; strategies for writing investigation; strategies for writing suspense; strategies for writing action; strategies for writing reflection; hook and grab scene structure; writing the waves across a book length work, modulating the pace, building to a dramatic climax, and resolving in a final coda.

Hallie Ephron is a bestselling author of Never Tell a Lie; Come and Find Me; There Was an Old Woman; and most recently, You’ll Never Know, Dear. She is also the mystery reviewer for the Boston Globe. The daughter of screenwriters, she grew up with her famous writer sisters, Nora, Delia, and Amy.

2017 Mystery Writers Pre-Conference Class
$90 for Conference Participants, $125 for General Public

The crime-mystery-thriller genre is often thought of as principally a form of entertainment, but it is also a great deal more. In this pre-conference class, award-winning author and conference co-chair David Corbett guides students through a number of techniques and thematic considerations to reach deeper into the material of their stories. The goal is to reach the more meaningful and dramatically powerful elements within the genre. Topics will include moral argument and the Unity of Opposites, the will to justice vs. the will to power, realism (and its limits), the elusive nature of truth, what is a just society, individual freedom vs. social responsibility, Satanic Villains vs. Monsters, and (as Conrad put it) man’s “miserable ingenuity in error.”

David Corbett worked 15 years for the famed private investigation firm of Palladino & Sutherland. He is the author of several novels including Done for a Dime (A New York Times Notable Book), His latest is Thirteen Confessions: Stories. His writing text, The Art of Character, has been called “a writer’s bible.”

This event is part of the 2016 Travel Writers & Photographers Conference, but is open to the public. Conference participants recieve preferred seating. 

Suzi Eszterhas is an award-winning wildlife photographer best known for her work documenting newborn animals and family life in the wild. Suzi's unique ability to earn the trust of her subject leads to touching imagery including groundbreaking work with tiger cubs at a den in India, newborn cheetahs on the African savanna, and brown bear cubs seeing the world for the first time in the Alaskan wilderness. Her photographs have been published in over 100 magazine cover and feature stories in publications such as TIME, Smithsonian, BBC Wildlife, GEO, Popular Photography, Ranger Rick, and National Geographic Kids.

Suzi has won awards in many competitions including the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition, National Wildlife Photo Contest, and Environmental Photographer of the Year Competition. She now serves as the jury chair for the prestigious Big Picture Natural World Photography Competition.

As an author, Suzi has nine books in print with another four in progress. A Future for Cheetahs, created in collaboration with Dr. Laurie Marker, is an intimate portrait of the cheetah's life and its race against extinction. Suzi's series of children's books, Eye on the Wild, follows the lives of wild baby animals from birth to adulthood. Her new book series, Wildlife Rescue, debuts in late 2015. Her books have been featured on GoodMorningAmerica.com and TodayShow.com.

This event is part of the 2016 Travel Writers & Photographers Conference, but is open to the public. Conference participants recieve preferred seating. 

Anthony Marra is the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which won the National Book Critics Circle's inaugural John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and appeared on over twenty year-end lists. Marra's novel was a National Book Award longlist selection as well as a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and France's Prix Médicis. He is the author most recently of The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015). He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in Oakland, California.

Don George (Travel Writers and Photographers Conference Chair) is the author of Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing and editor of ten anthologies, including A Moveable Feast, The Kindness of Strangers, Better Than Fiction, and An Innocent Abroad. George is Editor at Large for National Geographic Traveler, where he writes feature articles and the monthly Trip Lit column. He is also Editor of BBC Travel’s literary travel site, Words and Wanderlust.

In conversation with Jacqueline Winspear
This event is part of the 2016 Mystery Writers Conference, but is open to the public. Conference participants recieve preferred seating.

Has Laurie R. King followed in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s footsteps and killed off her protagonist? Sherlock Holmes is back in the latest in the New York Times bestselling series that Lee Child has hailed as “the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today”—but is Mary Russell?

When The Murder of Mary Russell opens, the shabby carpet of 221B Baker Street is drenched in blood—and no one knows the fate of Mary Russell. Could this be the final performance for the world’s best-known Holmesian author?

Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the acclaimed novels The Bones of Paris, A Darker Place, Folly, Keeping Watch, and Touchstone. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

This event is part of the 2016 Mystery Writers Conference, but is open to the public. Conference participants recieve preferred seating. 

From New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart comes a riveting new novel of legal suspense featuring Dismas Hardy and his daughter, Rebecca, now grown up and an associate in Hardy’s law firm.

Late one night, a teenage African American foster child named Tanya Paulson plummets to her death from the overpass above San Francisco’s Stockton tunnel. But did she fall…or was she pushed?

Rushing to produce a convictable suspect in the glare of the media spotlight, homicide inspectors focus their attention on a naïve young man named Greg Treadway. Greg is a middle school teacher and he volunteers as a Special Advocate for foster children. At first, the only thing connecting him to Tanya’s death is the fact that they shared a meal earlier that night. But soon enough, elements of that story seem to fall apart…and Hardy’s daughter, Rebecca, finds herself drawn into the young man’s defense.

By the time Greg’s murder trial gets underway, Dismas and Rebecca have unearthed several other theories about the crime: a missing stepfather who’d sexually assaulted her; a roommate who ran a call girl service; a psychologically unstable birth mother; and a mysterious homeless man who may have had dealings with Tanya. Or Greg Treadway himself, who is perhaps not all that he first appeared. But how will they get these theories in front of a jury? And if they can, what price will they have to pay?

With signature suspense and intricate plotting, The Fall puts Dismas Hardy and his only daughter in the middle of one of John Lescroart’s most complex and thrilling cases yet. 

John Lescroart is the author of twenty-five previous novels (seventeen New York Times bestsellers), including The 13th Juror, Damage, The Hunter, The Ophelia Cut, and The Keeper. His books have sold more than 10 million copies and have been translated into twenty-two languages in seventy-five countries. He lives in Northern California. 

Registration: $125 ($90 for Conference participants)

In this pre-conference lecture and workshop, award-winning crime novelist David Corbett will guide students in exploring the key roles that make crime fiction work, with specific focus on the specific demands of the three major subgenres of crime fiction—mystery/detective, crime, and thriller—and an emphasis on maintaining dramatic tension, creating moral complexity, and avoiding cliché.

In particular, students will learn:

• How to create strong, compelling protagonists who push the action forward and serve the story’s theme—instead of victims of circumstance, intrepid boy scouts, ciphers, stiffs, or sleepwalkers.
• How to create equally compelling opponents or villains who aren’t just another iteration of Lucifer or the Creature from the Black Lagoon—with the purpose of gaining an understanding that the hero’s only as compelling as his enemy, that evil must be justified to be dramatically interesting, and that there’s “no beast so fierce” as man.
• How to create secondary characters—from sidekicks to gunsels to femmes fatales to sympathetic heavies—who elicit nuance and subtlety from the main characters, flesh out the values in conflict in the story, create moral complexity through ‘four-corner conflict,” serve the hinge points of the plot, and bring to life the story world.

David Corbett worked as a private investigator for fifteen years before becoming the widely acclaimed author of four novels, with short fiction twice chosen for Best American Mystery Stories. He has taught at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, 826 Valencia, Chuck Palahniuk's LitReactor, and the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.

Reigstration: $125 ($90 for Conference participants)
 
When your character plans and executes “The Perfect Murder,” he always, always makes a mistake or two. These errors ultimately lead your sleuth to the solution. In this session, attendees will plot the perfect murder. They will then “deconstruct” the crime while considering the many variables that make plotting a murder fun for the writer and a disaster for the antagonist. D.P. Lyle, author of Howdunit Forensics and Forensics and Fiction, discusses the perpetrator’s behavior from the social, psychological, forensic, investigative, and motivational points of view.