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Vermont College of Fine Arts is a global community of artists continuously redefining what it means to be an arts college. They're accredited by the New England Commission on Higher Education and offers the Master of Fine Arts degree in a variety of fields, including Writing, Writing for Children & Young Adults, and Writing & Publishing, along with an International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. With low-residency and fully residential options, VCFA has the graduate program to fit your needs. Be sure to learn more about VCFA by clicking here!
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Amy is the award-winning YA fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery author of The Lost Coast, Echo After Echo, The Brilliant Death, bestselling novel Once & Future co-written with her partner Cori McCarthy, her highly anticipated novel The Storm of Life (her sequel to The Brilliant Death), and more. She's also the co-founder of the Rainbow Writers Workshop, the first-ever workshop for YA and middle-grade LGBTQIAP writers.
In our conversation, Amy shares how she fell in love with storytelling and turned that passion into her writing career. She spills plot structure exercises that will help you see the bigger picture to move past roadblocks in your story. We dive into how a writing MFA helped Amy discover confidence in recognizing and trusting her writing voice, strengthen her revision process, and find a supportive writing community that’s very similar to the arts communities that she loves. Further into our conversation, we discuss the inspiration behind Amy's past novels and her writing process. She shares crafting advice on how to begin a story when you have too many ideas in your head. She gets into the nitty-gritty about writing a large cast of supportive characters and how to not distract the readers from the main story, shares incredible tips for aspiring queer writers, and explains her world-building method for developing complicated plots.
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