Past Faculty Interview:

Mandy Robbins Taylor

“I’m of the odd sort of highly extroverted writers—I get my energy from meeting new people and having great conversations,” Mandy says. “You can’t shut me up. I love exchanging ideas with my Vermont College classmates, sharpening my skills at writing workshops, mingling at conferences.”

Mandy—a Santa Cruz, California resident—is a graduate student at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) in the Writing for Children and Young Adults program. She travels to Vermont twice a year for her residency. In January 2012, she’ll give her graduate lecture on Romance and the YA Novel. (Sneak peak: She’s “sick of ‘hot guys’ and pat ‘happy’ endings. Give me ambiguity or give me death!”)

Mandy looks forward to the teaching possibilities that her MFA degree will provide. She’s already off to a great start. Mandy taught lively, innovative classes at the January 2011 TeenSpeak Novel Workshop. She has also done online critiquing of teen and adult manuscripts.

Mandy loves reading stories, and is actively working on two of her own teen novels. Below, her responses to our interview questions are sure to delight you. Come to our workshop and meet this writer who rocks!

Mandy, why do you want to write for teens?

I was so not cool when I was a teen. I was tall and awkward and shy around people I didn’t know. I watched my friends have all the fun and get all the boyfriends, while I got picked last every time in P.E. and couldn’t get a prom date to save my life. I was always wondering what was so wrong with me.

(I went alone to prom, which I’m now extremely proud of. Instead of staying home because I didn’t have a date, I chose to go alone because I didn’t want to miss out on that night of fun with my friends. I put what I wanted for myself above the worry of what others might think of me.)

As I’ve grown older and into myself, I’ve gained a compassion for that girl I was. I was different; I was deep and introspective and hated superficiality, which wasn’t a bad thing—far from it. It just made life really hard for awhile. I look at my old journals and think, how did I ever get through it? I’ve never been through more pain than when I was a teenager. Just getting through high school alive should earn every kid a full-ride scholarship through college; that’s how hard high school is.

So basically, I’m just writing my books as sort of love letters to the teen me. I hope other teens will love my books and relate, but when it comes down to it, I just have a lot to say to myself.

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I honestly don’t even remember. I learned to read before starting kindergarten, and I couldn’t get enough of books. I would hand-copy my favorites just for fun. Soon this turned into writing stories of “my own”—often composites of those much loved and copied books!

When did I start writing more original stuff? I have no idea. I do have a vivid memory of writing a sleepover story in my Barbie tent (my sacred space) when I was seven, then reading it to my mom and telling her I wanted to write books for kids when I grew up. When I was ten I got impatient and sent a manuscript to Random House—which led to an increased vocabulary when, reading the response, I had to ask what “unsolicited” meant!

Where’d you learn to write so good?

“Good” writing is a spectrum, and also subjective. What doesn’t work for one person may totally work for another; still, learning craft is very important. Balancing knowledge of craft with confidence in your own individual voice is a lifelong task for every writer. The most important thing you can do for both is read, which I have been doing almost as long as I can remember.

I remember crying when my older brother would go off to school when I was still at home. I was so jealous of him! I would beg my grandmother to please, please, please teach me to read. Learning to read was really the beginning of my life in so many ways. It was like being let in to the world I knew I was born to be a part of.

Also, I chose to take my writing seriously enough to pursue a master’s degree in it. I’ll receive my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, the best choice I ever made for my writing. Finding a huge family of talented, brilliant, hilarious, and incredibly supportive people who share my passion has motivated me beyond belief. And the quality of education I’ve received from my advisors is incomparable.

What are your favorite topics to teach in writing workshops?

I like talking about the most basic building blocks of writing craft—for example, showing versus telling. Does your story tell readers that your character rides horses, or do you take us to the ranch—to walk through the stalls, smell the hay, oil the saddle? In our workshop, we will explore how you and other authors can show readers the most tantalizing story elements.

I also like to work with writers on revision. The most essential lesson a beginning writer should learn is that revision doesn’t mean correcting spelling and grammar. Revision is re-vision, seeing your work again and learning to reshape the words with consciousness and care. This often involves ditching entire pages, chapters, or drafts. This process doesn’t [mean you’re] a bad writer.

Many people are so afraid of being bad writers that the slightest criticism will send them into tears. Knowing you will always need to revise (no matter how many books you publish or awards you win) and going about it with a balanced mind, stalwart dedication, and an open heart—that’s a major hurdle. My former advisor, children’s author Uma Krishnaswami, once said that revision is less about revising the work and more about revising yourself. It’s about being a better writer than you were the draft before, and truly believing that you are a better writer who is up to the task.

If I can help even one person take one more step toward believing he or she is that kind of writer—the kind who can revise and reshape and make the manuscript better with each new attempt—it’s time well spent.

What are your favorite kinds of novels? What makes you love them?

I love an odd mixture. I find myself constantly reading YA contemporary novels; some of my favorite authors are Sara Zarr, Jandy Nelson, and Jenny Han. I love a great fantasy or dystopian as well. I adore funny, daring middle grade novels: Astrid Lindgren, Roald Dahl, Betty MacDonald, Alan Cumyn and Polly Horvath are among my many favorites. Yet a recent favorite, Words In The Dust by Trent Reedy, is more thoughtful and bittersweet than funny. My tastes are all over the board.

Honestly, the only thing I can’t stand is poor line-level writing—if I’m not stopping to constantly groan at a horrific turn of word or blatant inconsistency, odds are I’ll enjoy the book. Of course, there are authors who are brilliant, poetic prose artists who just never grab my heart. I’ve yet to pinpoint what it is exactly that makes me love a book, but when I figure it out I promise you’ll be the first to know!

Story ideas are everywhere.

Be on the lookout!

Where do you get your ideas for writing stories?

My ideas always start with just a thought, the kind of random thought everyone has all the time. Most people let those little oddities fly away, never noticed for the potential they hold, but if something really interests me I jot it down and save it. I’ll often write one page of story from that spark of idea, and then see if I can write another, and another. Sometimes an idea fizzes out after one page, or thirty, but sometimes I get a whole novel out of one thought.

For instance, my current novel occurred to me while watching a TV character yell at her parent, “I wish you were dead!” in a moment of anger. We all have those thoughts from time to time, even about people we love the most. Most of us have the sense not to say these things aloud, but we feel them. How would we feel if [this situation] actually happened? How would we deal if those were the last words we thought or said to someone we cared about?

So I wrote a page of a girl sitting at her boyfriend’s funeral, feeling indifferent about the whole thing. I was sucked into her story in a way I rarely am. Why doesn’t she care? What is her history? What are the other people in her life like? Where does she go from here? In answering those questions, I came up with an entire novel. (Not to make this sound like magic; it took me a year and a half to “come up” with a completely finished draft!)

What’s the scoop on your novels-in-progress?

My nearly-completed YA is about a girl who suddenly loses her boyfriend to a tragic car accident, and she feels... nothing. It’s a book about coming to terms with different kinds of loss, different kinds of love, and reconciling yourself with the things in life you just can’t undo and have to live with.

My middle-grade novel is much more of an infant, so I don’t like to talk about it much. I will say it involves gypsies (Romani people), an orphan girl who wears mismatched colors, a flying umbrella, a talking cat, world travels, and defining what “family” means for yourself.

I have a few more novels that I’ve abandoned and may yet return to someday...

What tips do you have for aspiring teen writers?

Read and read and read and read! Then superglue your butt to your chair and write and write and write and write. Yes, so much easier said than done, but here are tips on motivating yourself: find a community of like-minded people. Don’t be afraid to major in English or literature, and get a master’s in writing if you know in your heart that you’re a writer. Never believe the voices who tell you that wanting to be a writer isn’t realistic.

Recently I was talking with editor Arthur Levine about how long I’d been held back by the “It’s too hard” verdict I received from most people with whom I shared my dream of being a novelist. He rolled his eyes and said, “What isn’t hard? Everything worth doing is hard!”

I couldn’t agree more.

« Previous page