Lessons from Writing Historical Fiction (Afternoon)
with Priya Parmar
and Stephanie Cabot
This is a working, immersive class for writers who want to make their stories feel alive on the page.
While we’ll draw on the tools and challenges of historical fiction—writing into lives, worlds, and moments beyond your own—the focus of this class is broader: how to create fiction that feels immediate, vivid, and impossible to put down. Whether you’re writing historical fiction, contemporary work, or something inspired by real events, these techniques apply.
We’ll focus on what matters most: voice, character, structure, and momentum. How do you create a voice that feels unmistakably your own? How do you build characters who feel specific, contradictory, and real? How do you shape a story so that it moves—so a reader can’t look away?
Each day combines discussion, practical tools, and in-class writing. There will be exercises designed to unlock new approaches and challenge your instincts, along with dedicated time to work on, share, and discuss elements from your own manuscript. You’ll be able to test ideas, take risks, and refine your work in real time.
We’ll explore how to bring a world—past or present—fully to life on the page, how to handle point of view, how to control what you reveal and when, and how to build tension and narrative drive. Above all, this class is about helping you find the version of your story that feels most urgent and true to you.
On select days, I’ll be joined by my longtime agent and first reader, the brilliant Stephanie Cabot. Stephanie works with me closely as I write—helping to shape, edit, and push a manuscript toward what it can become—and she’ll also be available to answer questions about the rapidly evolving publishing landscape, including how historical fiction is positioned, sold, and read today. Together, we’ll offer a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the editorial process as it actually happens: intuitive, rigorous, and deeply collaborative.
4 Afternoons: Monday 11/2–Thursday 11/5 | 1:30-4:30pm
$895.00
In stock
Priya Parmar is the author of Vanessa and Her Sister, a New York Times Notable Book that was also named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” selection, a People Magazine Book of the Week, and an editor’s pick across major publications including O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Elle, New York Magazine, US Weekly, and USA Today. She was also selected for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program.
Her new novel, The Original, will be published by Ballantine/Penguin Random House in April 2026.
Educated at Mount Holyoke College and the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, Priya divides her time between Kauai, Connecticut and London. She is also the co-author of the hit musical Sylvia, which premiered at London’s Old Vic Theatre, was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best New Musical, and is currently on tour in the UK.
Stephanie Cabot
We are pleased to welcome Stephanie Cabot back to the Kauai Writers Conference. With her wide-ranging literary interests, Stephanie found a good number of authors to represent when she attended KWC in previous years, some of them with great success.
Stephanie is half French, half American and grew up in London, Paris and New England. She attended Harvard, where she studied History, and first worked in New York and London with JP Morgan. Her career as an agent began at WME in London, where she spent nine years and ran the office for the last five, before relocating to the US and to The Gernert Company in NYC, where she worked for fifteen years. Stephanie joined Susanna Lea Associates in the Spring of 2020.
Stephanie’s interests are a reflection of her own reading tastes, which have always been wide and far ranging. She represents authors from all over the world and is drawn to the international narratives whether told in story, memoir, or essays, as well as literary fiction reflecting diverse, global voices, speculative fiction, upmarket commercial fiction, crime and thrillers. Stephanie is generally not the right fit for science fiction.
Stephanie has spent the past ten years involved with a small internationally focused social justice NGO, World Connect, whose mission is to empower grassroots leaders to initiate change in their communities.