Confluence is Pittsburgh's longest-running literary conference with a focus on science fiction, fantasy and horror in literature, art and music. July 25-27, 2025.

In this class, we'll discuss tips, tricks, and techniques for creating the mood and atmosphere you want in your fiction.

Everyone tells you that a story needs a theme, but how do you figure out what your story's theme is? And once you know that, how do you go about conveying and underscoring that theme without hammering a reader over the head with it? How do motifs, symbols, and other devices work to enhance the theme? We will explore theme, motifs, and symbols from a craft perspective and develop skills with them through a mixture of lecture, discussion, and writing exercises.

In this class, we'll discuss tips, tricks, and techniques for creating the tension and suspense you want in your fiction.

Our characters have rich inner landscapes that help make them who they are. How does a writer go about figuring out what a character's history is like and how it affects their personality? How does a character's psyche affect what they do as well as how they do it?

In this class, you'll learn how to figure out your story's beats and use those to set the pace you want.

There's plenty of advice on writing love scenes, but what happens when the relationship's purely platonic? What special considerations come into play when writing friendships, and how do you convey all the shared history on the page so the reader can experience the friendship's depth? In this class, we'll talk about how to write friends.

How do voice and point of view work together to create an engaging character?