My Lack of Letters, or what I didn’t need an MFA to teach me, Part 1

I stumbled across this essay by an MFA graduate a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it for a bit. I do not have an MFA, though a few of my friends (both published and unpublished) do. I had been rather skeptical about them for many years, owing primarily to the fact that the one creative writing class I took in college was taught by an Iowa MFA (widely regarded as the best program in the country) who hated genre literature and was currently — when not teaching a bunch of 20 year olds to read Flannery O’Connor and write just like the good people at Iowa had taught him — getting his law degree from Yale (which is widely regarded as the best program in the country). I assumed once he mastered his JD, he’d be toddling off to a medical program at Johns Hopkins. But I digress. If he wanted to go around collecting degrees, that was his business (and Fannie Mae’s).

What bothered me was that he hated genre. He actually kicked a girl out of class once for turning in a fantasy short story. My first story for the class was, I now think, in the genre of what would later be called chick lit. The girls in the class loved it. The boys “didn’t get it” — spurred on in their mental block by the teacher. That was how the class worked. The teacher would deliver his judgment (“this is not a genre class!” “I’m not sure why this girl is having such a problem with her boyfriend, all he wants her to do is give up her personality and principles to impress his parents”) and then the rest of the class would be set along those lines, and it would take a lot for any of the students to disagree with his pronouncement — especially since he would argue every point a dissenter made, while just nodding and agreeing with one of his pets.

I became very skeptical about workshopping and basically wrote my final short for the class as a ghost story in protest. (In my meeting with him to discuss the story, I referenced Hawthorne and Poe, and he gave me a B+). But my friends with MFAs assure me that this dude was just not a great teacher, and that workshopping isn’t usually such a draconian situation. Indeed, my closest friend with an MFA wrote a magical realism book while in school.

Back in 2006, soon after I sold my first novel, two of the folks in my circle of friends got into MFA programs. All of a sudden I started reconsidering. I got as far as discussing the matter with my editor and agent, who both gave me the incredulous response of “but you’re already selling.” Four years on, I wish sometimes I had at least explored the possibility of some “master classes” like Clarion, though I suppose it’s never too late. And I have attended near-monthly workshops and more than a dozen craft-focused conferences for the past ten years which have also taught me a lot. I’ve also enjoyed the company of brilliant critique partners and received fantastic editing from my editors. So there’s that.

Living the writing life for the past decade has, in general, given me the opportunity to learn a lot of these lessons that the essayist lists on the fly.

1. Don’t play it safe.

Absolutely. This advice takes many forms: a) don’t write the hot genre you don’t like just to break in, because it’ll show, and if it doesn’t, you’ll be stuck there and once you start writing what you love, your backlist will be useless; b) don’t save all the “good stuff” for the next book; c) bleed on the page — make the worst possible thing happen; d) don’t give all your interesting characteristics to your secondary characters… the list goes on an on.

2. Don’t assume that just because one person hates your writing and the other person loves your writing that your writing is “confusing” or “conflicted.”

More like it’s a sign that you have a powerful voice. I’ve come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to like my writing. It’s a matter of taste. In today’s world of reader blogs, amazon “reviews” and Goodreads, you get the pleasure of post-publication “workshopping” — often from readers who perhaps are not the most discerning, or who aren’t quite able to put a finger on why a certain book didn’t resonate with them, and so cling to something they read in another book review or heard in an English class once. It’s okay. You’re not writing for someone who doesn’t “get” you. If you try, you’ll probably fail, and lose the readers who do get you at the same time. If you ever start feeling bad, go read the one-star reviews of your favorite novels. It’s not just you.

3. Don’t feel like you have to implement every suggestion into your work.

Coming on the heels of #2 above, I imagine this has a lot more resonance to someone in MFA-workshopping mode, but it fits even for me. I get various advice from my critique partners, editors, agent… and then there are the emails from readers, or, better yet, the book bloggers who choose to frame their “reviews” as if they are tutoring the author as to what they should do in their books. Writers can go on all day about these if you catch them at a bar. But one thing I’ve learned is that though editors and critique partners are almost always spot on about identifying what’s not working in your book, they aren’t always right in telling you how to fix it.The best thing to do, when tackling a revision letter, is to find all the problems, then implement your own solution. Sometimes what looks like two different problems (“it starts off slow” and “I don’t really feel like I understand the main character”) are actually the same thing (“if I make her plight more relatable, you’ll be on board with her sooner”).

4. Don’t read just for fun.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t agree with this one at all. Further, I’m surprised that anyone in an MFA program even believed its converse to start with. The educational system in this country is massively good at drumming “reading just for fun” out of you. Many people who think nothing of watching seven consecutive episodes of Law & Order or going to see Avatar or being a devotee of a weekly sitcom or buying a tabloid to read on the beach would balk at buying a paperback mystery, science fiction or romance novel. Television shows or magazines are “escapes” but popular fiction is “trash.” I’ve attended parties and watched folks chat at length about the latest Judd Apatow, then turn around and call chick lit “trash.” Apparently, if entertainment comes in the form of black text on a white page, it’s held to an entirely different standard.

I think people should read “just for fun” (not least because it’s how I pay my mortgage). I think that writers, especially, should read just for fun, or they risk losing the joy in their work. Writers who read only what is “good for them” may get some screwed up notion in their head that they should only write a certain kind of book, maybe not the kind that is the best fit for their voice and their passion. I know this happens. It happened to me when I was in college and was being told that “genre” was a dirty word and that if I wanted to be a writer, I’d had better go after a Pulitzer and not a paperback romance.

In terms of “reading for craft” — which is the essence of her point — I think that comes with the territory. If anything, it’s hard to turn that off once you’re in the business. I relish the books that make me forget that I’m a writer, that are so compelling I forget to look for the man behind the curtain, to keep stock of the tricks of the trade the writer is using. Those are my favorite kind.

There are six more items on the essayist’s list. I’ll be back tomorrow to tackle those.