Blueprint Your Book: Building a Solid Book Structure, with Susanne Dunlap

Whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, your story’s structure is crucial to creating a book that will keep readers turning the pages. But how do you find the structure for your story? In this workshop, you will discover the right structure for our book by examining the ‘present timeline’ of your stories, identifying the narrator’s place in that timeline, and determining where the story should start and end.  We’ll also discuss various narrative-shape examples from literature, in order to inspire and inform your work.

This workshop is part of the Blueprint Your Book series, which is designed to help writers stack the building blocks of their book in a way that provides structure while allowing for plenty of space to modify and hone as they write. Writers of all genres are welcome to register for all four workshops or as many of the workshops appeal to their current needs!

Saturday, August 8, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)

Susanne Dunlap is the author of nine historical novels for adults and teens. Her young adult novel The Musician’s Daughter was a Junior Library Guild selection and a Bankstreet Children’s Book of the Year, and it was nominated for the Missouri Gateway Readers Prize and the Utah Book AwardHer latest novel, Listen to the Wind and The Spirit of Fire are the first volumes of a medieval trilogy for adults, The Orphans of Tolosa. Listen to the Wind is a semi-finalist for the Chaucer Awards for Pre-1750 Historical Fiction and a Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Awards. Susanne has a PhD in music history from Yale University.

Susanne Dunlap