Sign Up For the Next McDaniel Romance Writer’s Program
McDaniel College’s Romance Writing Program is a five-course (introduction, structure, character, unity, and publishing) program that focuses on writing romance fiction. I’ve taught it for two years, and it’s been amazing how much I’ve learned. Yes, I know I was the teacher, but spending months talking about romance writing with smart people who respect the genre and who are working hard to write it has taught me as much as I taught them. The friendships formed in the program are long lasting (see Eight Ladies Writing), and the tools acquired help already good writers make the stories they love better. Now in its third year, the McD program has a great new teacher, Alisa Kwitney, a terrific writer who’s also a former graphic novel editor, and who’s bringing a new level of professionalism to the program (because, let’s face it, I am erratic and opinionated). Here’s what you need to know:
Reading the Romance, the first course in McDaniel College’s online, asynchronous five-course romance writing certificate program, begins this August 18, 2014. Readings will focus on different subgenres and forms of romance as well as on story and scene structure, but there will be a good amount of writing, too: Students will get to work on their romance novels and receive prompt and constructive feedback.
The instructor, Alisa Kwitney, received the Horgan Prize for writing at Wesleyan University as well as a scholarship of merit from Columbia University’s MFA program. Her thesis novel, Till the Fat Lady Sings, was called “A delicious confection, as tart and spikey as a lemon meringue pie,” by Newsday and “a compulsive read” by Upstairs, Downstairs author Fay Weldon. Alisa went on to work as an editor at DC Comics, where she worked on The Sandman with Neil Gaiman (Stardust, American Gods, The Graveyard Book) and discovered Mike Carey (X-Men, The Felix Castor novels, The Girl with All the Gifts). In addition to writing comics (including the Eisner-award nominated series Destiny), Alisa’s novels have been published by Avon, Atria, Ballantine and Marvel and include The Dominant Blonde, which is listed on Dear Author’s Top 100 Romance Novel list.
“I’ve always loved genre,” says Alisa. “When I was in Columbia’s MFA program, I felt as if most of the other students were reading a steady diet of New Yorker stories, but I was reading science fiction and horror and comics and romance. Now all of these other genres have become socially acceptable, or even fashionable. Yet when the New York Times runs a big book section on summer reading, there’s no mention of romance. Or else NPR will run an article with the headline, “Romance Novels Sweep Readers off Their Feet with Predictability.” That article began with the statement, ‘One thing that you have to understand if you’re gonna get into writing romance is that the things that are valued in that genre are not the same things that are valued when we read something like literary fiction.’ That’s just plain wrong, and it feeds into a misconception that writing a romance novel is easy and that romance readers aren’t discriminating. Writing a good romance novel requires just as much work as writing a so-called literary novel – but it’s worth it, because romance readers are as discerning as they are passionate about the books they love.”
You can see why Alisa and I are pals. If you have any questions, please sent them to Alisa at akwitney@gmail.com or Pam Regis at pregis@mcdaniel.edu. If you put them in the comments, I’ll give them a head’s up, but you’ll probably get a faster answer by going straight to the source(s). Also try the McDaniel webpage for the course; it has links.
This really is an amazing program. If you’re writing romance and you want to learn the tools to write better romance, if you want to talk about writing romance with people who take it seriously, if you want to forge relationships with other writers for support, brainstorming, and networking, there’s no better place to do it than the McDaniel College Romance Writing Program and no better person to study with than Alisa Kwitney.
