Gulf Coast Writers Association:

We’re excited to welcome award-winning author Joni M. Fisher as our featured speaker in September for an instructive writers’ workshop. Her writes suspenseful stories about heroines who don’t wait to be rescued and her work is centered on friendship, family, faith, and crime.

This workshop presents suspense and thrillers as carefully engineered experiences of anticipation, dread and uncertainty. Rather than relying on constant action, it shows writers how to build tension through high stakes, ticking clocks, foreshadowing, dramatic irony, red herrings, sensory detail, dilemmas, cliffhangers and strategic pacing so readers keep turning pages. The workshop emphasizes that suspense works best when readers care deeply about the protagonist and understand what is at risk. It explains how to deepen that emotional pull through character vulnerability, deep point of view, unresolved fears and impossible choices that force the hero into painful decisions.

A major focus of the workshop is controlling what the reader knows and when they know it. By withholding information, layering clues, using unreliable perception and ending scenes at moments of danger, writers can create a steady escalation of curiosity and anxiety that feels both thrilling and inevitable.

We hope you’ll join us. The meeting will be held on Saturday, September 19 at St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church in Fort Myers from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.