When nothing feels at risk, readers stop caring. Learn how to build compelling stakes that keep readers turning pages.

for Personal Essay and Memoir

Low stakes are the #1 reason personal narratives get rejected. As writers, we’re faced with a dreaded question: So what? How do we get a stranger to care about our lives—and why should they? How do we encourage readers with short attention spans to keep turning pages?

Learn 5 key tools for building tension and emotional stakes in personal narratives. Using works by writers like Natasha Trethewey, Kristen Iversen, and Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, we’ll crack the code on how nonfiction writers build high stakes and sustain them throughout their narratives. Then we’ll apply these techniques to your own manuscript through hands-on exercises: defining internal and external stakes, creating obstacles that keep readers engaged, using strategic time shifts to build suspense, and more.

You’ll leave with a complete toolkit for building and sustaining stakes that keep readers engaged from start to finish.

Can’t make it live? No worries—a replay will be available to all registrants.

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In this webinar, you will:

• LEARN 5 tools for ramping up the stakes in your memoir or personal essay, making readers feel instantly invested 
• EXPLORE how nonfiction writers use stakes & suspense to keep readers turning pages 
• APPLY new stakes-building techniques to your own narratives
• BUILD a toolkit of strategies for defining stakes, seeding conflicts, and building suspense, to make your pages stand out to agents, editors, and readers

This webinar is ideal for writers at any level who:

• Want to ramp up the emotional stakes & tension in their story 
• Are getting rejections and need tools for making their work more compelling and high-stakes
• Are struggling to identify the larger “so what?” of their personal story

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

KATIE BANNON is a writer, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, ELLE Magazine, Narratively, and more. Her memoir manuscript, which charts her journey as a compulsive hair puller, was a finalist for the Permafrost Nonfiction Book Prize. A graduate of GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator, she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Emerson College. She loves helping memoirists and essayists tell their most vulnerable, taboo stories. She lives in Central Massachusetts with her partner and two cats.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

FULL REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

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