As of last weekend, I have turned in all my schoolwork, portfolio items, and evaluations necessary to complete this first semester of my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults (WCYA) program. I have put miles between who I was up in Vermont at July residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts (read my residency recap here) and who I am today, and not just because Montpelier is 406 miles away from me right now. When I think back to the writer I was just five months ago when I sat in Cafe Anna sketching out a semester plan and the writer I am now, I realize just how much I’ve started growing into the writer I’ve always hoped to be. In this recap of my first semester in VCFA’s low-residency WCYA Master of Fine Arts, I share how this life-changing opportunity to study writing more intensely has already transformed me into a stronger, more confident writer and critical reader. In Part 1, I go over the various components of my study that I’ve produced this first semester. Part 2 is a visual essay: how this semester felt in 10 pictures. Last, in Part 3, I talk about how this semester impacted me in the big picture of what kind of writer I want to be and nerd out about writing topics like organic story flow and craft awareness. I end by considering how my illness issues have made me realize I will need to be strategic about growing as a writer and positioning myself to write professionally by putting the bulk of my efforts into this program and growing my writing career. (Beware: financial transparency talks!)
Part 1: What I produced this semester
In this first semester, I’ve completed substantial critical and creative writing as well as read widely for my annotated bibliography, including:
Critical work
This semester, I read 49 books, a combination of picture books, chapter books, early readers, middle grade novels, and young adult fiction.
I wrote several critical essays a mix of short CEs and long CEs that examined:
- Characterization, with a focus on epiphany, awakening, and motivation in books like Dear Rachel Maddow and Radio Silence.
- Advantages that graphic narratives have in creating a visual language to describe indescribable feelings, such as invisible pain from mental illness or disability.
- Language at the line level (or “microlevel” as my advisor, Amanda Jenkins, describes it). I did a close read of passages from Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and the first and second chapters of The Catcher in the Rye.
One of the best critical assignments Amanda gave me was to do a close read of the first chapter of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, my favorite book in high school and undoubtedly one of the most influential books on my writing.
I took my beat-up copy from my teen years and typed up the first chapter so I could print it out on computer paper and mark up the text with highlighting and glossed notes.
Amanda told me to look specifically at Grounding, Flow, and Feeling. After I got done working on the paper printouts, I went back into the Word document where I typed up the text and began marking it up with comments and track changes.
I added 71 comments! And then in a separate document, I broke out some of the analysis in more depth.
The whole experience really opened my eyes to looking at the line level to see the sum impact of different micro craft choices Salinger (and Holden) make. (Also, it felt pretty cool to be marking up The Catcher in the Rye as if it were a manuscript I was editing or a workshop submission from Salinger.)
Creative work
This semester I produced several creative works, including:
- Three short stories: “Cursed,” “Virginia Tucker Cooks Magic,” and “Let Your Heart Be Light”
- I completed a full revision of “Cursed” for Packet 4.
- My short story work grew in complexity, in length (from 7 page short stories to 14 and even 22 page-long stories) and depth of character journey. I learned to shape the story around the character’s epiphany so that twists, payoffs, and character change felt organic.
- The first five chapters (and a few illustrations) of a middle grade novel, Boom and Blink.
- Side work and exercises to lay the groundwork for drafting my YA novel, Swing Love. I also wrote the climactic scene of the novel.
- A first draft of the opening chapter of a new epistolary YA novel, Trust Your Story, later revised completely for the fourth packet.
Part 2: What my first semester was like in 10 pictures
I think to describe this semester best, I’ll have to do it in pictures. So here’s a visual look at my first semester.
1 – One of my first reads of the semester was Dear Rachel Maddow by Adrienne Kisner, a VCFA alum who coincidentally also had Amanda as an advisor. I wrote a critical essay on political awakening using this book as the source text. I’m also writing a YA novel where politics plays a big role.
2 – I went to see the movie Eighth Grade and was so moved at how intensely I felt drawn to write children’s literature for this age group. It was a visceral experience being dropped into an awkward, socially anxious girl’s life in the last weeks of eighth grade before graduating to the high school. I recognized a lot of myself in her.
3 – I worked on my cat book, Boom and Blink: Finding My Shadow. It was interesting to write from an animal point-of-view!
4 – I got reacquainted with marking books up with notes, glossing them like I was scribbling insta-reactions in my high school copies of Hamlet. Here you can see the rainbow of stickies I used to signify moments in Courtney Summers’ Sadie that felt emotionally gripping on a writing and/or storytelling level.
5 – I obsessed over every detail of each packet, but I still felt scared to submit them. Many times, after I pressed “Send” in Gmail, I hit the Undo button and panicked over something, tweaked it, and then sent the files off for good.
6 – In early October, I took a solo vacation to Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was nice to get out and clear my head, take in nature and see new places. I visited some great bookstores. I also got some work done on the creative pieces I was putting together for the third packet. The ocean and wind served as my soundtrack from where I was staying a few blocks from the beach. After Packet 2’s feedback earlier in that week, I really needed to do some soul searching to find the courage to create with my voice.
7 – In the fall, I started to take long walks into Swarthmore’s downtown. My house is a little over a mile away. I walked through Swarthmore College’s campus, which is actually an arboretum, during fall when it was in full bloom. I’d often end up in Hobbs Coffee, a cafe by the train station. These cleansing walks helped me soak up nature and tease out story ideas or think about how to work through blocks in my work.
8 – This visual essay could be comprised entirely of coffee, but I learned that I could not survive on this “writer fuel” alone. I had to eat a full breakfast if I wanted enough energy to write for the day. Here I made myself some steel-cut oats and paired it with a strongly brewed cup of Cafe Du Monde coffee, my brew of choice.
9 – I actually went to a bunch of movies this semester. I found it helped me think about writing and storytelling from a different perspective. Plus, it helped clear out the cobwebs, a technique I learned from Mad Men‘s Don Draper. First Man was one of my favorites from this year and got me thinking about craft and how to layer themes in from the beginning of the story.
10 – When I really needed to buckle down and write or read, I would go off the grid. I’d delete social media apps, sign out of accounts, limit my iPhone notifications to just the minimum (or put it on Do Not Disturb or Airplane Mode, or turn it off). One advantage (?) of depression making me isolate myself was being able to actually focus on reading and writing again, since they were the main things in my life. As the semester went on, I dropped off being so obsessed with the news. My nightly MSNBC binge was replaced by reading and writing time. In some ways, I felt cut off, and, being a news junkie, I worried that I’d feel out of the loop. But with a few select podcasts keeping me informed of what really mattered, I survived, and actually, I got so much more work done this way.
Part 3: I am a writer
Developing craft awareness
Starting an MFA program made me aware of how much craft mastery is involved to create storytelling magic. At one of my residency workshops, my instructor broke down a master plot into different stages. I asked them, “If great stories often follow this map, and thousands of stories get through production each year as films, TV shows, or books, what separates those thousands of stories we forget from the rare ones that rise to the top? What makes The Fault in Our Stars or Harry Potter any different from stories that follow the same plot journey?” As you imagine, there’s no clear answer to that except the best stories reach us deep inside, our hearts, our soul. They connect with us.
As the semester went on, though, I started to find my answer. I developed a new appreciation for my favorite writers because my eyes were opened to how many little decisions go into a story or book that becomes a work of art.
When I came home from residency, I felt totally humbled about the way I thought about writing. Sure, I knew great writing when I read it. But I never fully appreciated the craft level of what separates great writing from stuff that is merely good. Certain authors write prose that so effortlessly falls into place. Think about it. I’ve always felt the best writing doesn’t even make you feel like you are reading words—it’s a kind of magical transformation that happens where you just feel like you’re absorbing this totally immersive story that is firing on all cylinders: language, voice, character, plot, the payoff. I tend to get turned off from writing that’s almost too good. because it feels like writing. I have that problem with Rainbow Rowell sometimes—she’s got an incredible ear for dialogue and writing quotable lines, but to me, it just reminds me that I’m reading excellent writing and it takes me out of the story. Some of my favorite authors who manage to accomplish this kind of enchanted non-writing immersion are Donna Tartt, Michael Ondaatje, John Green, E. Lockhart, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Gabrielle Zevin, and Neil Gaiman.
Beginning the MFA showed me the level of craft mastery or craft consciousness required to write the stories that deeply affect readers and stay with them—to write magic, to write art.
As I learned to make these kind of decisions on the microlevel, I saw how they could add up to something unforgettable (after tons of revision!). My advisor really pushed me this semester creatively, and her pointed questions made me develop a kind of backbone and eventually a kind of authority to make tiny choices that affected the bigger picture. If was going to try out a bold, voicey narrator, I had to be sure that it made sense from a craft and character perspective, not just because I was forcing it. Similarly, if I was going to choose to revise a passage or not, I needed to feel confident about it. A lot of the time, I ended up revising pieces and throwing out just about everything. When I decided to revise the first chapter of Trust Your Story, I changed the format up to be an epistolary novel, a diary. I think I saved the grand total of two pages’ worth of material from the original 21-page long first draft. Sure, it kind of sucked to throw that work away (all those words!), but I knew it was the right way to go because that’s how the story really was taking shape.
And that’s one of the big takeaways I have of this semester, getting out of the way of the story’s natural flow, the idea of the writer as a vessel or medium through which the organic story comes through. The difference between achieving that effortless kind of storytelling was knowing how to craft that at the intricate word, punctuation, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter level until you’ve tamed it and shaped it into something organic.
When I finally got to the last packet, I knew this fortune cookie I got early in the semester at Margaret Kuo’s in Media was prophetic: “How can you have a beautiful ending without making beautiful mistakes.” This semester was all about making beautiful mistakes but growing from it and not being afraid to try something and miss.
I discovered any piece of writing is only as good as the sum of its words—each and every word, stacked on top of the others, to create a multilayered, complex, and vividly alive story you connect with in a gut, emotional way because you are present to its art as it unfolds in the moment.
You almost had to know when to get the writing out of the writing’s way, to tame both the story in its natural form and your own desire to force on it craft choices that didn’t make sense—like trying something flashy or clever that ultimately wasn’t the best fit for the story the story wants to be.
Okay, so that’s a lot of craft talk for one day, haha.
Leaning into a writing life
As the semester went on, though, and I developed more of an awareness of this level of craft consciousness, I was also dealing with my bipolar symptoms. Brutal depression, distracting mania… I saw how my illness was sucking every bit of energy out of me, and whatever I had leftover went towards my MFA work. Many days, it felt like all I did was get out of bed (a victory itself), write or read all day, swallow some pills, and go back to bed and repeat. I eventually abandoned my rule about not wearing sweats before five. Loungewear became my friend. Anything that would make writing more comfortable and easier.
If I didn’t know it before I started the MFA, I knew it the first morning of my first residency: I want to do this, badly, full time. I only want to write—and a myriad of other gigs I love, like teaching, criticism, blogging, freelance writing for Book Riot/Electric Literature/NoveList etc., and author assistant work—or I want to get to the point where this is all I need to do each day, to focus primarily on my writing.
I battled against the bipolar issues—along with med side effects, the increasingly more debilitating and severe episodes, and the ghost of my cognitive decline of this illness as it takes its natural course across the lifespan. It made everything harder. Each word felt like it took an hour to write, then add another two hours for a paragraph, stringing this all along like beads on a string until you get a bracelet, or a page. That made throwing away more than 6,000 words of the first chapter of Trust Your Story devastating, knowing how much I fought to write each one of those words against my illness. Creating 40-50 pages of new or revised material for each of the four packets felt like climbing Mt. Everest. So daunting. And I know that writing is like that for everyone, that it takes enormous effort and time. Writing is not easy!
But I learned that I only have room for writing in my limited energy and bursts of productivity when I can either work alongside my illness or manage to climb above its severity. To me, this period of study (and beyond, because I’m pretty sure I want to apply to PhD programs after this), is a time to throw all of that energy, passion, and time to becoming the writer that I want to be, not just in a craft way, but as an author best positioned to make a career out of this. I don’t want to do anything else, but I’ve also seen this semester that I don’t think I can do anything else, not with bipolar disorder being a full-time job of its own. I have to really start making good choices about my craft and career.
It all sort of came together when I was watching a movie at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute (my second home) one afternoon with a bunch of seniors and retirees (the only people besides grad students who see matinees at an art-house theater, presumably). I looked around at the people there, and realized in bipolar years, with my life expectancy cut by 15-20 years, according to studies, I might not have a lot of time or “good years” left. I’m middle-aged at 30! At least now I know what I want to do so I don’t waste my life anymore on things that aren’t part of that passion.
To make that happen, in the new year, I’m planning to step up my passive income products, go into blogging coaching and consulting, and being much more proactive about going after fellowships, residencies, scholarships, and so on. Because my energy is so limited at this point, I’m going to be more strategic about expanding my freelance writing, sending pitches, following up on ideas with editors, and staying on top of my game with expanding my presence. For now, I’m channeling my all—time and money investment—into my MFA years, looking at this not unlike law school or med school and that level of effort into training for a skilled trade. It means I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself and allowing a small margin of error, but I believe I feed off that intensity, focus, and ambition (total Capricorn).
I know it all sounds icky to describe things that way, but I think we need more transparency in our industry. Writing isn’t just a fun hobby for me… It’s what I want to do as a professional, and be able to support myself doing it, which means making better decisions about my ambitions and prioritizing my energy into activities that will get me there. So yeah, I have to consider the commercial side, too. Am I gearing up for another year of making less money than just about everyone I know? Of living at home? Of avoiding making big financial “adult” decisions so I can continue to live at poverty level but be in school? Of taking out loans? Yes, I guess. It’s a sacrifice in the short term, but I have to do it; I can see how it will pay off down the road—not by magic, but with real effort. I’ve already seen so much progress in just this one semester going beyond schoolwork and just thinking about this as an art in a deeper way I never had before. I have to believe in myself and my want to do this and passion and love for it. And I do.
I feel it in my bones, my blood.
This is it for me, all it’s ever been all along: writing.
Now, at last, I know I’m on the right path forward. My wandering years are over, and my compass isn’t spinning anymore. Writing is steering me home, towards the future I want. This is my story and how I believe it’s going to flow. I just have to make barriers I can control get out of the way as much as possible so it can take its natural form. I’m excited. I have a good feeling about the ending.
