For much of my adult life I wanted to get an MFA in writing more than anything. Several things stood in my way: The MFA was expensive. I couldn't professionally (or financially) afford to drop out of my working life to attend school for a few years. I believed the MFA wasn't very practical plus there were a lot of good arguments for why the MFA wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Yet, I yearned to be around writers and to write, and I finally decided that, practicalities be damned, I would get my MFA. I was accepted at a low-residency program at VCFA. The school was still expensive, but the low-residency aspect made working while attending school possible. I spent a couple of years writing and reading to my heart's content, and it was mostly wonderful!
MFA programs—the ones I am familiar with, anyway—tend to revolve around a series of workshops, readings, and lectures. Elements of craft are explained (free indirect speech anyone?) but mostly you learn to write to please your workshop and advisor. (This is one of the searing arguments against the MFA.)
In my MFA program, we did not talk much about storytelling fundamentals. Perhaps the program assumed we, the students, would already know how to write stories since our writing samples were good enough to admit us. I can assure you that probably most of us did not know how to build a good story. I didn't, anyway. Not in a way that I could explain to someone else.
A couple of years ago, when I decided I wanted to work with other writers, I knew I needed to shore up the areas my MFA program didn't touch. Enter Author Accelerator. It was exactly what I needed and, I must say, just about as rigorous as the MFA.
This week I received the terrific news that I passed certification with Author Accelerator! As a newly minted certified book coach in fiction, I will be able to share the incredible storytelling tools Jennie Nash developed with clients. If you have an idea for a novel and either you don't know where to start or you've started and keep stalling, stay tuned. I'll have more on ways I can help soon!