WriteNOW! 2023 Saturday Faculty

TORI ELDRIDGE is the national bestselling author of the Lily Wong mystery thriller series—The Ninja Daughter, The Ninja’s Blade, and The Ninja Betrayed—nominated for the Anthony, Lefty, and Macavity Awards and winner of Suspense Magazine’s Crimson Scribe Award for Best Book of 2021. Her shorter works appear in the inaugural reboot of Weird Tales magazine and other horror, dystopian, and literary anthologies. Her short story, “Missing on Kaua‘i,” appears in the 2022 Mystery Writers of America anthology, Crime Hits Home. Her horror screenplay The Gift, which inspired Dance Among the Flames, earned a semi-finalist spot for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. Tori’s fourth Lily Wong book, THE NINJA’S OATH, comes out on September 12th, right before the conference.

Before writing, Tori performed as an actress, singer, dancer on Broadway, television, and film, and earned a 5th degree black belt in To-Shin Do ninja martial arts. She is of Hawaiian, Chinese, Norwegian descent and was born and raised in Honolulu where she graduated from Punahou School with classmate Barack Obama. Tori’s deep interest in world culture and religions has prompted her to visit nine countries, including Brazil.

HALLIE EPHRON is a NY Times bestselling author of suspense novels reviewers have called “deliciously creepy.” Careful What You Wish For is a mash-up of Antiques Roadshow and Strangers on a Train. Never Tell a Lie was adapted for film. A five-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, her Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel was an Edgar finalist. Lee Child called it “the best how-to guide I have ever seen.” Hallie blogs on Jungle Red Writers. The crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe for years, she won the Ellen Nehr Award for mystery reviewing.

Hallie Ephron’s workshop: 

Back story and how not to shoot yourself in the foot with it

Backstory, what it is, and why it matters. For instance, though characters are what they do, we pride ourselves as crime fiction writers on surprising our readers. Every surprising action has to make sense in light of the character’s backstory. The challenge for the novelist is finding “Page One” and then revealing backstory without bogging down the front story.

Topics include:

• • What is backstory, and why backstory matters to the front story
  • Identifying the various possible sources of backstory (character, setting, situation, context …)
  • How to formulate backstory and determine how much the reader needs to know
  • How to find your Page One
  • Strategies for layering in backstory so that it enhances the front story
  • Methods for avoiding the ‘backstory dump.

Christina Estes

CHARLAINE HARRIS is a true daughter of the South. She was born in Mississippi and has lived in Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. After years of writing poetry and plays and essays, her career as a novelist began when her husband told her to stay home and write. Her first book, Sweet and Deadly, appeared in 1981. When Charlaine’s career as a mystery writer began to falter, she decided to write a cross-genre book that would appeal to fans of mystery, science fiction, romance, and suspense. She could not have anticipated the huge surge of reader interest in the adventures of a barmaid in Louisiana, or the fact that Alan Ball would come knocking at her door. Charlaine is a voracious reader. She has one husband, three children, two grandchildren, and rescue dogs. She leads a busy life.

Mia P. Manansala

Hank Phillippi Ryan