I asked my friend and fellow moderator hotgrits from the Writer's Forum to talk a little about her experience in an MFA program. It's something I've thought about applying to and I think the perspective of someone who's been there would be helpful to all of us.
There are many reasons I pursued an MFA in Creative Writing. Per my journals and edited a bit for relevance, these are a few
- I'm a romantic. When I started working on my MFA I dreamed in idylls. I imagined myself reclining on spring lawns immersed words seeking the stories that were buried inside me.
- I'm passionate about words. Reading and writing give me the kind of satisfaction that some live a lifetime without ever achieving. So it would only make sense that I purse the art with a graduate degree, right?
- I could spend two(ish) years concentrating on my writing, crafting new and better ways to tell my newly excavated stories. I was a good writer, sure, but an MFA? Then the world would know I was a great writer.
- I didn't really understand what an MFA was. Now, I'm a smart girl - I knew it was an artistic and in some respects a terminal degree. I knew it was about improving my craft. But I believed it was so much more: the golden ticket to happiness. It meant earning a living doing what I love - I could teach and earn tenure, it would wow editors and convince them to publish me.
So when people I loved told me to go for it, I applied to several competitive programs and was accepted into all of them.
My program (most programs) could (predictably) be divided into two sections: the workshop and the writing.
Workshops: My best loved and worst hated parts of the program were the workshops. Similar to workshops in undergrad, you read and critique the original works of others. Getting first peeks at what may be great American novels in the early stages, the dialogue between students genuinely interested in each other's work and receiving feedback taught me so much about the writing process. Nothing can replace the benefit of raw/unfiltered feedback from a community of strong independent writers. And nothing can cut as deep. In my program the community could be divided into two camps: the gregarious extroverts and the more hesitant quiet types. I was the latter. Fighting for my position regarding source material, defending opinions on my work and that of others was exhausting. At times the workshops left me feeling stripped and emptied, lost in the energy.
Writing: I love writing and expected much of it but even still, I grossly underestimated the volume. As well as being responsible for 25 - 50 pages of new and revised work each month, I was also tasked with 6 critiques a semester and working on what would be my final thesis. Night after late night, I was hammering out page after page of edits, critique after critique with my child asleep in my lap.
Well, that's how it was on the nights I could actually come up with something to write. Some nights I just stared at a blank doc with the flashing cursor mocking me and the minutes on the clock egging it on. I would go days without writing; digging up dozens of distractions - message boards, online word games, soduku - anything that I could find within the confines of my prison that would divert my attention.
- Four semesters into seeking my degree, working full time professionally and as a wife and mother, I looked around my house. The laundry never got folded, there was a stack of dishes chest high on the counter, there were piles of mail on the dining room table. I didn't clean, I didn't pay bills and I never wrote. What's the first rule of writing? Writer's write? So if I wasn't writing that meant...? I didn't know. I couldn't even think about it. I was buried.
- Writing was making me unhappy. I'm not afraid of work or lots of it but suddenly writing was a burden. For my entire life it had been my escape, the way I climbed out from underneath when it all got to be too much. Now it was getting to be to much. I wanted the euphoria, the delight it used to bring. I needed it.
- I got real good at writing badly. I woke up at 3 in the morning to write stories I cared about so that I would have the balance of the day to write fluff n' stuff for school. It is never the goal for any program to homogenize the voices of the writers attending but when working in close proximity with a small group for five or six semesters it can happen. You see, it was easier just to write what the others in workshop wanted to read than it was to write something I was madly passionate about and have the workshop shit all over it. I went from writing stories about people the audience could care about, people they couldn't get out of their heads to writing drivel about characters I couldn't separate from one short to the next. Most everybody told me is was great but I knew I was writing to pass - it was only good enough.
- I finally understood what an MFA isn't. Pursuing an MFA gives no guarantee of forming a helpful network, no guarantee of a teaching position with tenure, no guarantee that you will publish and honestly, no guarantee that you will come out the other end a better writer. In fact, the only guarantee is that you will work. Hard. But you're working at...what? Assessing my stories that resonated with others and the ones that they could put down and forget I found that my best writing was drawn from stuff I did, a life I lived, things I felt. Spending such an incredible amount of time studying and writing for school prevented me from going out and doing. Instead I sat at my computer hour upon hour trying to figure out a convincing way to describe all the stuff I wasn't doing anymore - and hopefully it would sound pretty.
And those are the reasons I quit.
And when I quit, I wrote.
And I loved it.
And I got published.
(sans MFA)
Posted by Ben Corman at 8:06 AM