MFA Round-Up

For the past eleven days I’ve been in Vermont for my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In other words, I’ve been at writer’s camp, soaking up the wisdom of our faculty and having late night chats about everything from diversity in children’s lit to what exactly an objective correlative is. I love these days; they’re long, packed with more information and inspiration than your brain can absorb, each minute full of discovery and laughter and warmth. It is a second home, a community full of my fellow writer misfits and while I know I need to get back to work and life as usual, it’s hard to leave. This post is a round-up of some of my favorite Aha! moments during lectures. It barely skims the surface; this is just a taste of the magic that is VCFA.

 

In her lecture on metaphors, Martine Leavitt talked a lot about how to get your writing to express the particular, rather than the general. We joked about the clichés of “clenched fists” “hot tears” and “wildly beating hearts.” Martine reminded us to move our reader, not manipulate her. She encouraged to “refuse to express things in an old way” and that if our characters are crying and feeling sorry for themselves, the reader doesn’t have to use their emotion, just be passive observers. The thing is, we don’t want to tell our readers…