Kick off your Southern Festival of Books weekend with The Porch on Friday, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from celebrated authors as they pass through Nashville before the festival officially begins! Stick around for the rest of the day to take more writing classes with Ann Powers, Darnell Arnoult, and Justin Taylor. 

Elevate the emotional impact of your writing by mastering how to unpack scenes at the sentence level. In this class, New York Times bestselling author Shawntelle Madison will guide you through the delicate balance of building tension, heightening conflict, and evoking deep emotional responses. Learn when to “zoom in the camera” for richly detailed moments and when to pull back, letting the story breathe with minimal description. Through pre- and post-edit breakdowns of a published romance chapter, you’ll discover powerful strategies for making each scene resonate, whether in romance, thriller, horror, or women’s fiction. You'll leave with practical tools, including a handout, to refine your own work and keep readers emotionally invested from beginning to end. Perfect for romance writers, but applicable to any genre where emotion is key to a compelling story.