Curious to learn how to push past roadblocks that are preventing you from crafting your story? How about tips for developing complicated plots? Or ways to discover confidence in your writing voice? We talk about it all and more with Amy Rose Capetta!
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.
Books and resources:
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende and Ralph Manheim
Ash by Malinda Lo
Author Alex London
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, and About a Girl by Sarah McCarry
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Did you know we collaborated with VCFA’s MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults to curate a thoughtful series of intimate essays and podcast episodes so you can feel empowered throughout your writing journey? Click here to explore the published pieces.
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!
Check out these highlights:
- How Amy fell in love with storytelling (4:50)
- Why everyone has the potential to develop their talents and become a writer (10:20)
- How to overcome writing roadblocks and find the way back to your story’s central theme (12:00)
- The plot structure exercise that will help you stay focused on your story during your drafting process (15:00)
- Amy shares the steps she took to make becoming an author a reality (17:17)
- How Amy found confidence in her writing voice and became part of a supportive art community in her MFA program (20:30)
- The key to cultivating your voice and trusting your story during the revision process (26:14)
- She shares the inspiration behind a handful of her novels and a peek into their publishing process (35:00)
- How to choose and stick with a story when your mind is full of new ideas (39:20)
- We learn about the Rainbow Writer’s Workshop, the first-ever workshop for YA and middle-grade LGBTQIAP writers, Amy co-founded with her partner Cori (53:40)
- And she answers some of our very own listener questions:
- “Do you have any tips for writing a large cast of supportive characters, and how do you balance their development without taking away from the main plot?” (40:38)
- “What challenges did you face while writing Once & Future?” (44:50)
- “I was wondering about the amount of world-building that goes into your novels. Do you keep bibles? How much info do you include?” (47:15)
- “I was wondering if being openly queer has affected your journey to publication and if you had any tips for aspiring queer writers like myself?” (49:36)
“I think one of the most delightful things about writing is that everyone is bad at it when they start.”
-Amy Rose Capetta
“Everyone has the potential to develop their skills and the ability to tell stories because it’s wired into our brains. It’s wired into the way we see the world and think and process, it’s how we shape our experiences, it’s how we shape our memories, so everyone has an innate storytelling ability and if that’s something you want to develop, you can.”
-Amy Rose Capetta
“Words just made sense to me in a way that nothing else really did.”
-Amy Rose Capetta
“I was not revising well because I wasn’t trusting what my stories were in the first place and so I was revising everything for other people. I was revising the heart right out of my work because I was so untrusting of the stories that I wanted to tell.”
-Amy Rose Capetta
“The more you let characters play off each other, the more you learn about all of them. And the more you let their relationships evolve, the stronger everybody’s character arcs get.”
-Amy Rose Capetta
“If your personality was like a crystal, you need to break it with a hammer and give a shard to each character.”
-Amy Rose Capetta
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Learn more about “The Lost Coast”
The spellbinding tale of six queer witches forging their own paths, shrouded in the mist, magic, and secrets of the ancient California redwoods.
Danny didn’t know what she was looking for when she and her mother spread out a map of the United States and Danny put her finger down on Tempest, California. What she finds are the Grays: a group of friends who throw around terms like queer and witch like they’re ordinary and everyday, though they feel like an earthquake to Danny. But Danny didn’t just find the Grays. They cast a spell that calls her halfway across the country, because she has something they need: she can bring back Imogen, the most powerful of the Grays, missing since the summer night she wandered into the woods alone. But before Danny can find Imogen, she finds a dead boy with a redwood branch through his heart. Something is very wrong amid the trees and fog of the Lost Coast, and whatever it is, it can kill. Lush, eerie, and imaginative, Amy Rose Capetta’s tale overflows with the perils and power of discovery — and what it means to find your home, yourself, and your way forward.
Learn more about Amy Rose Capetta
Amy Rose Capetta (she/her) is an author of YA fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery, including Echo After Echo, an ALA Rainbow List selection, The Brilliant Death, a Locus Recommended Read and Kirkus Best Book of 2018, and the bestselling Once & Future co-written with her partner Cori McCarthy. The Lost Coast, a magical mystery about a group of queer teen witches, was just released this May. Amy Rose is also co-founder of the Rainbow Writers Workshop.
