I’ve made it back from my second VCFA residency!

I’m exhausted, inspired, in love with my class, and ready to dig in to a new semester of writing. Overflowing with insight and inspiration, I’m hoping the acclimation process (back to “normal” life) is slow and tender. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few quick take-away’s from the last eleven days of stick-toffy-pudding-VCFA-Awesomeness!

1. Never let your character’s cry more than once in a manuscript! If you do, you’re being too sentimental and force feeding your audience sticky-toffy-pudding (which is just too sweet).

2. Writing a picture book is not just about the text. You must leave room for the illustrator, but you must also leave room for the performer!

3. When writing multi-cultural literature, beware of perpetuating the one story that speaks for a culture. There is never a single story that encapsulates a whole group of people.

4. Trust your readers to pick up on the clues and details you leave for them. Trust your audiences ability to intuit.

5. Learn to hesitate, question the nature of things, and be the writer who creates riddles out of answers. Sometimes the questioning, the searching, and the ability to see things a-new is more the profound than finding an answer.

6. It’s not always about “show not tell.” Sometimes, careful and informed telling can deepen the showing.

7. Beware the abstract word. Be specific and vivid. “Beautiful” is abstract and means nothing. We want a world with pearl buttons, spiced rum, and creased wax paper.

8. The metaphorical is sexy! Discover the action of your story by finding the metaphor for the emotional core of your story.

9. The landscape of your story is not just place and earth and dirt. The landscape of your story is overlain with memory, expectation, and thought.

10. There are lots of not-so-good books that get published. The reason they are published is because the author FINISHED THE BOOK! You can talk all you want about writing, but until you finish your book, your writing will never get published.

Tags: VCFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts