Voice. Sympathetic characters. Narrative pace. Dialogue tags. Emotional arcs. These are the sorts of topics we tackled at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In January 2011, I graduated from the low-residency MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults there, and I’m going through serious withdrawal. Maybe blogging will help…
Vermont is a place where critique doesn’t mean line-edits, but means discussing theme and desire-lines and narrative structure and how a writer intensifies or slows the pace. It’s a place where students are encouraged to play while being pushed to write the novel that comes from the heart—the one only you can write because it’s so you—the one so personal and particular that it touches on the universal—on what it means to be human.
Vermont changed me. It changed my writing. It changed the way I read. During residencies, we called it our own little Narnia. Such a magical place. In this blog, I’ll only skim the surface, and will apologize in advance for my “you had to be there” tone which is so hard to block, because, well… yeah…
Great website, A.B.! And you’re right; you had to be there. So thankful that I was!
Anne, this is a beautiful web site. Beautiful art, great style, and good, solid words. Those are the things we found in Vermont, good solid words. They came in voice, in lectures, and in late night wine pit sessions. Some of my favorite words of yours after reading your “about me” section on the your web site were these: “Dont do what comes easy, do what you love.” Yes. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that before. So thank you for those words, friend. I have a feeling I’ll visit here often.