Loading....
Less is More: Building suspense from the get-go by withholding and writing ‘small’
Lord Baltimore Hotel, 20 West Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD
Royal Board Room, 19th Floor
10:00 am - 11:30 am
$10 to be paid at registration.
With the attention spans of readers and prospective publishers growing ever shorter, the pressure to create immediate interest in your characters and quickly build suspense in your plot has never been greater. DAN FESPERMAN, whose fourteen novels of intrigue have made Best-of-the-Year lists of The New York Times, Oprah Daily, and USA Today, offers a workshop which, by example and by advice from more than 25 years of experience, will demonstrate how to hook your readers from the first sentence onward, partly by focusing on what to leave out as much as what to put in.
It will also show how refining your first broad strokes down to the smallest of flourishes can produce bigger payoffs without sacrificing the rhythm, grace, or fullness of your prose. The workshop will include a writing prompt, a brief reading, and an audience Q&A, with a special focus, throughout on those vital first pages of your novel. Attendees will receive a multi-page handout, “Getting the Most Out of Your Research Trip," a rough guide based on Dan's travels to various locations and archives while doing groundwork for his novels.
DAN FESPERMAN served as a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, based in Berlin. His coverage of the siege of Sarajevo led to his debut novel, Lie in the Dark, which won Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel. Subsequent books have won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, the Barry Award for best thriller, and selection by USA Today as the year’s best mystery/thriller novel. He lives near Baltimore.
Pariah
“Dan Fesperman’s Pariah is a masterful blend of espionage, political intrigue, and dark humor with a plot that is as entertaining as it is breathtakingly timely. Fesperman crafts a gripping narrative of a man—comedian, actor and politician—caught up in international intrigue that explores the allure of power, the sting of betrayal, and the cost of second chances too good to be true.”
—Kathleen Kent, author of Black Wolf
Winter Work
"This masterful historical thriller blends espionage, domestic drama, and murder. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the final coda to the Cold War and ushered in massive geopolitical and social change. . . . This evocative murder mystery vividly captures what happened on the Eastern side of the wall on a political level—including how the cache of secrets ultimately found its way to the CIA—and a personal one, from the perspective of an unusual protagonist, a sympathetic East German spy with a complicated and messy home life."
—Oprah Daily, "Our Favorite Books of 2022"
Tickets are $10 and limited. The event is open to all. Registration is required.
22nd Annual CityLit Festival Partners:
Media Sponsor: Baltimore Beat & Bmore Art
Lord Baltimore Hotel | Red Emma's
Ivy Bookshop | Zora's Den
Many thanks to our generous supporters who make this event possible:
National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, National Book Foundation, Council of Literary Magazines & Presses, Amazon Literary Partnership, Maryland Humanities, Maryland State Arts Council, Motor House, Baltimore National Heritage Area, Baltimore Children & Youth Fund, T. Rowe Price Foundation, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Creative Baltimore Fund, Baltimore Office for Promotion & the Arts, insight180, Scribente Maternum, William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, Maryland Humanities, and Individual donors
CLF25 Master Class: Dan Fesperman
Saturday, April 5, 2025
10:00 AM EDT - 11:30 AM EDT
Need help? Contact
Please consider donating to our Festival Goal! CityLit Project's FREE programs serve various audiences to encourage and support a life-long love of literature. Since its inception, CityLit Project has presented 350 programs involving more than 1,000 literary artists and serving nearly 14,000 people (including 450 youth).
CLF25 Master Class: Dan Fesperman
Saturday, April 5, 2025
10:00 AM EDT - 11:30 AM EDT