The MFA/MFYou Newsletter

New Blog!

2010-10-03T05:30:00.010-04:00

Alright, folks, my "brief" hiatus was a bit longer than expected, but I'm back, and my new blog is up and running. My new website . . . isn't . . . yet. But it will be. Soon. I swear.

Brief Hiatus: The End of an Era

2010-08-22T06:36:00.000-04:00

I’m going to take a brief hiatus from blogging—just maybe two or three weeks. I’m finishing up revisions on my book, finishing up the quarter for my summer class, and formulating plans to really market the book. In the midst of it all, I’m looking into and getting started on the application process for grad school programs—that’s right, my thoughts have turned once again to going back to school, but this time, maybe, for something a little different—but surely I’ll talk about that later. In the meantime, I need to take a very short break from blogging while I put together a new, even better, blog . . . and a website to go with it.

See, I decided a few years ago that whenever I got my first book published, I would create an author’s website. I believe that authors should have websites—I hate it when I read something amazing by someone I’ve never heard of and then go to look the writer up and can’t find any information about him or her online. But I also figured it would probably be unnecessary to worry about it until I actually got a book out there.

Well, the time has come.

So I’m working on putting together my website, and I decided that I should, first of all, condense and combine my current two blogs (I mean, really, do I need two blogs if both of them are just me talking about writing?). I also decided that, rather than having a blog that is primarily me being a spokesperson for MFA/MFYou, I would just create a sort of multi-purpose blog. It’ll be my author’s blog as well as my MFA/MFYou blog (which is really what this blog has been for some time now . . . I’m basically just making it official). I’ll post about my goals and what projects I’m currently working on; I’ll talk about writing issues; I’ll talk about the journal.

I’ll make an update on the old blog when the new blog is up and running. In the meantime, happy reading and happy writing. We shall meet again very, very soon.

Submissions, Submissions

2010-08-15T06:00:00.001-04:00

I’ve been wanting to talk about some interesting trends that I’ve noticed about the submissions we receive at MFA/MFYou. Like I’ve said before, from a purely quality perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between the work submitted from writers who have some sort of formal training verses those who haven’t. I still stand firmly by my belief that a large percentage of writers who are actually revising and submitting are sending out stuff that is of publishable quality.

What I have noticed, though, is that we get far, far, far more submissions from non-MFA writers than from MFA’s. This was actually kind of surprising to me at first. As someone who has been through an MFA program, where you’re constantly being asked whether you’re submitting, I suppose I just assumed that writers who have gone through these programs are submitting more—or at least as much—as writers who haven’t.

But then I remembered that a lot of MFA’s have a negative view of online journals. Some even have a negative view of non-paying journals (which just seems ignorant to me, since many good journals are non-paying or only pay a small honorarium; your payment is that your work is getting out there). I suspect that the reason for this marked difference in submission numbers has something to do with many MFA writers not wanting to publish online. I’ve talked before about why I think online journals are an important component to any writer’s career, so I won’t get into that here.

What I will say is that the result of these off-balance submission amounts is that we do end up receiving more good stuff from MFYou’s than from MFA’s. What? But she just said . . . I know. I know. For every issue the “seriously considering” pile from MFYou’s is stacked higher than the one from MFA’s, but the ratio (good to not-so-good) is about the same for each group.

I’ve also noticed that we get significantly more poetry submissions than fiction submissions, and I’m not even talking about the fact that each individual poetry submission includes up to three poems. Again, I wonder if our status as a small, online journal affects these submission rates, but it’s interesting to think that perhaps there is way more poetry getting sent around than fiction. I heard, for example, about a poetry book contest that had roughly nine-hundred entrants; compare that with the average four or five-hundred manuscripts that get submitted to the typical fiction book contest.

If journals receive fewer fiction submissions than poetry, I wonder if this has anything to do with the possibility that a lot of fiction writers are more concerned with writing novels than short stories. Or is it perhaps because poems are so much shorter—does it take less time to revise a ten line poem than it does to revise a twenty page prose piece? Or could it be that there are simply more poets out there than fiction writers? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting and unexpected submission trend, and something that might help poets feel a little better about rejections, as it likely follows that it’s probably easier to get a prose piece published than a poem (though I should add that it’s hard to get prose published, too).

So, just some interesting things that I’ve noticed about our submission rates. It’s difficult to draw any definitive conclusions since there are so many variables with these sorts of things, but I thought it would be interesting to pause and take a look at our submissions rates and what they might mean.

Always Room to Grow

2010-08-01T06:00:00.002-04:00

Something that I’ve always guessed was true and now I can say from experience definitely is, is that the process of working with an editor to publish a book is extremely similar to the process of working with a thesis committee to get an MFA thesis ready to defend. When I was working on my thesis, I would have the head of my committee read a draft (or sometimes just an individual section) of my thesis; then we would meet and discuss her feedback; then I would go home again and bang out another draft, and the process would begin anew.

A basic unspoken rule at the heart of our meetings was that, as the writer of the piece, final say would always be up to me. Her suggestions were just suggestions and were meant to help me see things that I might not be able to see on my own. Her feedback was also meant to help me improve overall as a writer. The process was a lot of work, and I loved every second of it. And I definitely came out of it all a much better writer.

This is almost exactly what it’s like working with an actual editor to get a book ready for publication (with the exception, in my case, that my editor and I don’t live in the same state and so can’t meet in person to discuss feedback—instead, everything is done through email). To start with, my editor and I each read through the manuscript separately, paying attention to the fact that this would soon be a book, which we would be trying to market to an actual readership.

Then, we began an ongoing back and forth through email, during which she gives me feedback that I’m allowed to take or leave, and I ask her questions and bounce ideas off of her. Every day when I sit down to work on the book, I keep her feedback in mind as I work through new drafts of these stories. It’s been extremely fruitful so far, and I’m watching the book transform into something much tighter and more polished than it was when I entered it into the contest a couple of months ago.

But perhaps even more exciting than that: her feedback is helping me to become a better writer. I have this proclivity towards what she calls “prose hesitation,” (I love that term; it describes the problem perfectly), and she’s helping me to see that when I recognize and cut those hesitations, the prose shines through much stronger and brighter. This new knowledge will help me not only tighten the stories in this book, but it’s something that I can take with me to future writing projects.

Exactly like with my MFA thesis, I’m gaining more from this experience than just a ready to be published book. It’s a reassuring reminder that the learning process is not over when you start publishing books—that you continue learning and growing with every new piece that you write, every new editor that you work with. And whatever you’re working on right now always has the potential to be the best thing you’ve ever written.

Pressure

2010-07-25T06:00:00.001-04:00

So I’ve been having a totally unexpected reaction to signing my first book contract: pure, unadulterated terror. For the first, oh I’d say, four or five days, I was riding a wave of absolute bliss, but once I got down to work with my editor, the fear began to set in. My deadline for having the final draft in the hands of the Editor-in-Chief is only two months away. I know I can do it—and, in fact, that I will—but I feel terrified that the stories won’t be as good as they could be and that any readers that I can actually convince to buy the book will read it and hate it and never want to read anything by me again.

I’ve spent more time in my life than I’d like to admit daydreaming about what it would feel like to get a book published, and the way it actually does feel never once entered into those fantasies. I think my fear comes, somewhat, from having read so many books in my life that I felt needed further revision, or that I felt had some strong elements and an equal number of weak ones. I don’t want readers to read my book and wonder, “How the hell did this win First Prize?”

Part of it, too, is that I’m addicted to revising. I’ve never looked at a story and felt absolutely, positively certain that the story is as good as it could be, that this is the final draft. It’s one of the main things I struggle with as a writer: how do you know when something is done? And yet in two months, I have to be sure about an entire book’s worth of stories. Even though about half of these stories have already been published in journals, I’ve revised most of them since their respective publications and probably would have continued to revise them forever, except that having them out there as a book feels very final to me. I could continue to revise them after the book comes out, I suppose, but there’d be no point. This is it. In two months, I’ll hand in the final draft of the manuscript, and, with the exception of proofreading, that draft will be the one that readers read for as long as the book is in print.

But now for the upside: I’ve decided to embrace the fear, to let it push me to really whip this book into shape. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback from the press’s fiction editor, and I’ve enlisted the help of a few friends to give me more. And then there’s my husband, who is diligently going through the entire book with me line-by-line, in spite of having read and given feedback on most of these stories before. I’ve put all of my other writing projects on hold for now and am focusing as much energy and attention as I can on trying to polish this book until it shines. And maybe this will be good for me: to be forced to call something officially finished. Maybe this is a leap that all writers must eventually take.

News

2010-07-18T06:00:00.000-04:00

This post to the MFA/MFYou Newsletter, which is usually full of my own rants and reflections on all things writerly, will actually be a genuine newsletter. First of all, Issue Four of MFA/MFYou is up on the website, and it’s a good one. The MFA/MFYou website has officially been up and running for about two years now, and sometime soon I plan to talk here a little bit about some of the trends I’ve noticed in our MFA versus non-MFA submissions.

However, I’d like to put it out there right now that our MFA/MFYou experiment has pretty definitively proven, from my perspective anyway, that whether a writer has gone through formal MFA training or not doesn’t make any significant difference in his or her writing abilities. This is certainly not to say that I’m no longer an advocate of the value of the MFA. I still fully believe that going through an MFA course of study is extremely beneficial. My point here is that there are other ways to achieve that training, and what might work for one writer might not be right for another. As long as a writer is really working at it—is studying the craft, taking revision seriously, and seeking and openly receiving feedback from trusted readers—that writer will, I believe, continue to improve and eventually get published.

Yes, that’s right. I said it. I don’t think natural talent counts for much. If you want to be a writer, it’s all about working at it and working some more and working yet more still. And then, when you think you’re finished, go back and work even more. I believe that most people—I suppose I should qualify that and say most people who are fairly intelligent, and who like to read and write, and who are actually willing to acknowledge that their first drafts aren’t golden—have the ability to become published writers. The real question is, which people are going to stick with it and put in all the work necessary to actually get there? Most of the people who fit into that first vast group will taper off somewhere on the road to the second, and those of us who are left are the ones who get to be “writers.”

And now some more news . . . I’M GETTING MY FIRST BOOK PUBLISHED!!!! My short story collection Peter Never Came was awarded first prize in the Autumn House Press Fiction Contest, and the book will be published by Autumn House next spring. This is a huge and important step in my career as a writer, and these next few months as I work with my editor ("my editor," how good it feels to write that!) to get the manuscript ready to print are going to be some of the most exciting of my life, I bet. I’m also already thinking ahead, trying to plan out how to get copies of this book in the hands of as many readers as possible. I’m well aware that getting a book published is really only the beginning of a huge marketing process—after all, it doesn’t really count for much if you publish a book that nobody buys.

In the coming months I’ll be able to bring some new experiences and perspectives to the table here in the old MFA/MFYou Newsletter, and I hope you’ll all stick around for the ride.

Self Publishing Part 2: A Calculated Risk

2010-07-11T06:48:00.001-04:00

At the Columbus Writing Works Conference this year, one of the presenters was a novelist who had self published a handful of books and had finally landed a real publishing contract for her next book. She was doing a talk about marketing yourself, and she was urging writers to consider self publishing “a calculated risk.” She didn’t seem to have much faith in anyone’s chances of getting a real book deal for their first book, and felt that, as long as you’re willing to do all the legwork yourself, self publishing is a good way to get started as a writer.

Her lecture, for me, was the real low point of the conference, as I didn’t feel that she had a very firm grasp of the way the industry actually functions. Her history as a writer was strewn with what I would call mistakes (getting suckered in by a fake agent, for example, and publishing twice with Publish America). This would be fine if she was telling us about her own mistakes so that we might avoid making them for ourselves. The problem was that she didn’t seem to understand that these had been mistakes. In fact, she didn’t seem to understand that Publish America was a vanity press!

At any rate, she did successfully get me thinking about what benefits self publishing may offer the writer who doesn’t want to go the traditional route. Now first of all I think it’s important to make the distinction between the writer who can’t get his or her manuscript accepted by a real publisher and the writer who doesn’t want to publish with a traditional publishing house. If you can’t get a book accepted for publication, you should probably take that as a warning sign that there may be something wrong. The book might not be ready; it might not fit into the current market (which means, no matter how good it is, you’re going to have trouble selling it); or it might just not be any good. You need to realistically evaluate your manuscript and your goals as a writer before you even think about self publishing, in my opinion.

However, if you do decide that you’d like to take the “calculated risk” of self publishing, it is possible to make some money if you’re really able and willing to do some hard work. The lady at the conference, for example, did make a few hundred dollars a month from selling her self published books. In fact, Steve Almond’s account of the money he made from self publishing in the recent Poets and Writers article compared pretty closely with this random do-it-yourselfer’s financial gain from self publishing. The trick is that you have to get out there and really sell that book.

This lady did several readings, book store signings, etc per month. She actually retired from her full time job as an English professor to have more time to devote to really selling her books. She sets up tables at farmers markets. She does presentations at relevant museums (her books are historical in nature, but this might not work for everyone). She even does readings at cafes—she says that these places are usually willing to let you read if there is no cost to them and all you ask in return is that they let you sell your book. Her marketing savvy may well have contributed to her finally landing a book deal with a real publisher—publishers love writers who know how to get out there and market themselves. Many small presses these days even ask you to submit a marketing plan along with your query, so this sort of self publishing experience may look good to some publishers.

Some writers talk about self publishing as being more profitable than going the traditional route (unless you’re lucky enough to land a book deal with a major publisher, of course). As the writer, you see a very small percentage of the book sales if your book is published by someone else, but in self publishing the amount you take home for each individual sale is much higher. If you publish with a tiny publishing house, for example, and get say a $1000 advance, there’s a good chance that that’s all you’ll ever see. If you self publish that same book and really get out there and sell that thing, you could stand to make substantially more over time.

Now let’s not kid ourselves here. Self publishing is not considered reputable, it just isn’t. Virginia Woolf aside. However, if you’re willing to do all the work yourself and you don’t mind the stigma, self publishing may be right for you. It has opened doors for some writers (emphasis on the some) who really got out there and worked it and then turned the experience to their advantage, but please don’t forget that self publishing is not a free pass to a successful career. Proceed with caution, my friend. Make sure you calculate that risk.

Self Publishing Part 1: Think Before You Drink . . . er, I Mean, Self Publish

2010-07-04T18:19:00.004-04:00

Let’s have a chat about self publishing, shall we? But first of all, a disclaimer: I am not considering, nor do I think I would ever consider, self publishing a book. However, my lack of interest in the self publishing game does not mean that I don’t believe that self publishing is a viable option for some writers—it just isn’t right for me (in large part because I make the majority of my money from teaching rather than writing and I want my writing credits to count for something on my CV).

This discussion will have to be a two parter, and I think I will begin with the downside of self publishing. I believe self publishing can be—I’m going to go ahead and say it—dangerous, for a number of reasons. I’m going to lay out my biggest problems with self publishing here, although there are probably many other potential risks that I’m not touching on.

First of all, to state the obvious, if a traditional publishing house—even a very small press—agrees to publish your book, that carries a certain amount of weigh to it. There are numerous presses out there willing to publish a wide variety of books, so it can look bad for you if you weren’t able to get your book accepted by one of the many options out there. It may mean that your book simply isn’t that good, and you need to try to be objective about your work and face that possibility. It may also mean that you yourself don’t have a complete understanding of how to really market your book to a prospective publisher, and if you don’t know how to do that, how do you expect to market your book to your readers without the help and credibility provided by a publishing house?

But let’s assume that your book is good and let’s assume, also, that you do know how to market your book, but you’ve chosen to go the self publishing route for other reasons. Usually, when a book is accepted for publication by a real press, an editor will then give you feedback so that you can revise and strengthen the manuscript, make it the best it can possibly be before it actually gets printed. While you can pay for editorial services on your own, it seems to me that the feedback coming from someone who you have paid to give you editorial suggestions would be different from the feedback coming from someone who actually has a financial stake in the outcome of the revision. I’m sure there are some professionals out there whom you can pay to give you solid feedback, but I still feel that this is a risk worth considering if you’re thinking about self publishing.

I think a lot of writers these days think that they can kick-start their careers by self publishing a first book. They assume that the public will immediately see what great writers they are and their careers will be set. The danger here is that without good editorial feedback and a definite stamp of approval from a publishing house, you may be attaching your name to something that is actually going to kill your career before it even gets off the ground. You may genuinely have a good book on your hands, but if you send it to press right now without revision it’s going to read like exactly what it is: a draft. Great books are not the product of the writer alone, but are the result of a collaboration between the writer, the editor, and often the agent or other trusted readers.

The reading public, of course, doesn’t really realize that, at least, not consciously. When they read a book that wasn’t ready to go to print, they just assume the writer isn’t a good writer, when in fact, the truth may be that the writer didn’t have the help that he or she needed to turn the book into what it had the potential to become.

This may all sound like I am absolutely against self publishing. I’m actually not. I think it’s a risk, but it has proved to be beneficial for some writers and should not be, I believe, entirely eschewed. I’ll talk next time about some of the pros to the self publishing game.

False Starts

2010-06-27T06:00:00.002-04:00

In his recent Poets and Writers article about his experiences self publishing a couple of books, Steve Almond (who, it should be noted for the sake of credibility, had published several books with actual publishing houses prior to his foray into the self publishing arena) points out that “for most of us mortals, the path to publication is littered with false starts” (68).

Let me just say that Almond is so right.

The climb upward as a writer is slow going and is full of small successes, which don’t end up meaning much in the big picture but which sometimes may feel much more significant than they are. Your first publication, for example. Can you remember the adrenaline rush that one gave you (or will give you, if that milestone is still hovering somewhere in your future)? The first story “acceptance” I received was from an online journal whose editor, I very quickly found out, accepts almost everything that gets submitted to her. I felt, for maybe a day or two, like I could finally say that I was a “real” writer, until I figured out that all getting published by that site proves is that I know how to attach a word document to an email.

But that’s just an extreme example of the very common false starts we all experience. My first real acceptance was equally exciting, although the issue of the journal came and went and for all I know, nobody ever even read the story once it was published. My first acceptance by a paying journal was another of those false starts. It felt huge to me to actually be getting paid for something I had written, although since then I’ve sold a handful of stories for actual money, and I’ve learned that the paying markets aren’t necessarily any more well regarded or widely read than the non-paying ones, and the money never really adds up to much.

First manuscript request from an agent, that one felt huge at the time. Prior to that I firmly believed that if I could just get an agent to read my book, he or she would see how good it was and it wouldn’t be long after that before the book was published. That first post-manuscript request rejection was a reality check, let me tell you. As was the first (and so far only) time I was contacted by a literary agency asking me to query them. The result? The assistant requested a partial and then sent a polite rejection, saying that the novel was very well written but the story didn’t suck her in enough.

Pushcart nomination—yeah, but I didn’t win. Semi-finalist for Leapfrog Press’s fiction contest—again, I didn’t win, and that book is still unpublished and collecting virtual dust on my jump drive.

Don’t get me wrong, these small milestones still get me excited every time. I have this image of a writing career as a nightmarishly long ladder. It takes such effort to get one rung higher that it’s impossible not to be excited when you do, but then you look up and realize that there are still so many rungs to go that you can’t even see the top yet (probably because, in fact, there isn’t one, but don’t let your mind linger too long on that truth). And then you look down and realize that while you have made it a few rungs up, you’re really not that high yet. You could easily jump back down to the ground and not hurt yourself.

False starts? Yes, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing but false starts. But maybe the best thing to do is to focus on the writing itself and not worry about where you’re headed. What’s that old saying? It takes thirty years to make an overnight success? The truth is, individual wins and losses don’t amount to much in the end. In the end all that matters is that you never gave up.

(In case you’re wondering: Almond, Steve. “Self Publishing Steve Part 2: Making the Dream a Reality.” Poets and Writers July/August 2010: 67-70.)

Online Journals

2010-06-20T06:00:00.002-04:00

A lot of writers are dubious of the value of publishing in online journals. Now, before I even go any further, let me just say as an editor of an online journal that online journals do get good submissions. They do. And as a reader I can honestly say that I’ve found just as much great stuff published online as I have in print journals. I don’t really know where that snooty print-only attitude comes from. It seems to me that online publishing is the wave of the future (in fact, one of the top literary journals in America, Tri-Quarterly, switched to an online only format a few years ago).

I realize, though, that since online journals aren’t as well regarded in the literary community as print journals, even writers who don’t frown on online publishing are still often wary about submitting to online publications. Will it even look good on my cover letter, you might ask, and might it actually look bad for me to have been published in these places?

Well in my opinion getting published is primarily about getting your work out there – trying to reach an audience. Of course, the best way to reach the largest possible readership would be to land a piece in one of the select few journals that have a huge circulation and an excellent reputation, but getting published by those places requires a heavy dose of luck. I’ve even heard that many agents don’t pay too much attention to those few major print journals because they assume that most of the writers being published in those venues already have agents.

A good alternative, I feel, is online publication. Think about it – when you’re dealing with the tiny little journals that don’t have a huge readership to begin with, which do you think is more likely to steadily build an audience: the journal that is free and easily accessible from any computer, or the one that you have to pay for and order and then wait four to six weeks for delivery? On top of that, online journals usually keep your work up in their archives forever (or until you ask them to take it down). For print pubs, once the journal moves on to the next issue, your chances of having that particular piece read in that particular outlet reduce dramatically.

The other thing about online journals is that they get your name out on the web – always a good idea for new writers. If I google your name, will it be obvious that you’re a writer? Will I be able to find samples of your work? My understanding is that many agents do look prospective clients up online. One agent interviewed recently in Poets and Writers, in fact, said that one of the main ways she finds prospective clients is by trolling the web.

I think online journals have been unjustly judged. Online journals offer great exposure. They get your work out there, and they help you to build a presence on the web. It probably is true that most online journals receive fewer submissions than print journals, but that doesn’t automatically mean that they aren’t receiving good submissions, and it definitely doesn’t mean that getting published online can’t be a very useful step in your career. It can!

Decoding Rejections

2010-06-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

One thing that you gain from working on literary journals is an inside look at the acceptance/rejection process. This can be extremely useful because I think a lot of new writers – and I can remember a time when I was in this camp – don’t always know what to expect when they send their work out there or what to make of those half slip rejections they receive in return.

Especially when you first start sending work to journals, you might find yourself sort of surprised (and often quite discouraged) by the bulk of form rejections you receive in response to your hard work. You may have slaved over this piece for months and yet the editor couldn’t even be bothered to insert your name into the pre-typed “Thanks, but no thanks” response.

The problem is that form rejections are a necessity. Journals – even small ones, believe me – receive a huge number of submissions per issue, and there is simply too much else to do to spend time giving feedback or personal responses to every writer. But journals also have to reject a lot of work that is good – publishable, even – for a number of reasons (the issue is full, we just published something similar last issue, this doesn’t really fit with the other things we’ve accepted for this issue, and so on). So how do you know what to make of rejections, and does a form rejection always mean your piece isn’t there yet?

Many journals have different tiers of form rejections that they send. The base level rejection goes out to work that they weren’t engaged by at all (and this often means work that they didn’t read all the way through). These rejections are non-committal and offer no real encouragement to the writer: “Thank you for sending your work. Unfortunately . . .” Now, to the work that they did like but still have to reject, these journals will still often send a form rejection, they’ll just send a rejection from a higher tier: “Thank you for sending us your work. Although we enjoyed this piece . . .” or something to that effect.

Now all of these rejections are still form rejections, and yes, you’re right, there’s something inherently discouraging in the idea that the editor didn’t care enough to write you a personal response. Still, you can take it as a good sign if you receive a response that’s clearly a form but does say something positive, nonetheless. There’s a good chance that journal has a tiered rejection process, and you made the cut into the higher tier.

This doesn’t, however, mean that a base level form automatically means you’ve failed with the piece. It could mean the journal doesn’t have a tiered rejection process, or the editors just may not have given your piece a fair read, or there’s always the possibility that your writing style just isn’t the sort of thing the editors of that journal are into. Let’s not forget that writing is subjective. My advice is not to read too much into those basic form rejections, but the ones that seem to come from a higher tier you might as well take as a good sign.

And better still are the personal rejections. Now every journal is different, and there are a few (a very few) editors out there who make an effort to give personal feedback on every submission. However, in most cases, a personal rejection is a very good sign. Even in personal rejections, there is a huge range. Sometimes it’s a simple handwritten note telling you that the editor liked your piece and hopes you’ll submit again. Sometimes you get lucky enough to receive a personal critique of your piece: a concrete explanation of what they liked and why they had to reject it. Sometimes you even get a nice ego massage by having an editor tell you that they essentially loved the piece and are only rejecting it as a result of some variable completely outside of your or their control. But no matter what the personal rejection says (unless it’s coming from one of those places that send personal rejections to everybody) you should feel encouraged when you receive one.

I know, I know. But what we really want are acceptances. Well, of course. Of course it’s disappointing to get the answer when the answer is “no.” But “no” doesn’t always mean something bad about your work or your abilities as a writer, and I think it’s important to keep that in mind. If you educate yourself about those “no”s and understand what they really mean, you’ll hopefully have the strength to plow through them to get to those inevitable “yes”es around the bend.

The Big Picture

2010-06-06T05:00:00.000-04:00

I spent last weekend in a state of delighted excitement. That Friday I had gotten word that a short story collection I had submitted to a book publication contest had been chosen as a semi-finalist. Only the winning book will be published, but it was inexplicably exhilarating to have come so close. This semi-finalist ranking came fairly close on the heels of my finding out that I had been nominated for a Pushcart this year, and I spent the weekend feeling like I had broken through to some new plane as a writer. I still hadn’t published a book, but I felt like it wasn’t unrealistic to think that book publication might not be too far off in my future.

Somehow I managed to pull myself back down from the clouds and get my grading done for the weekend. At the start of the new week, during the drive to work, something very interesting hit me: it didn’t really matter in any significant way. Not the pushcart nomination nor the semi-finalist ranking nor even the feeling that I had moved up a bit in my career as a writer. Even if I had actually won the contest, if I had successfully landed my first book contract, I would still have been in the car at that moment, on my way to teach. The basic facts of my life would have remained the same.

In fact, one of the finalists in the contest is a full time professor at Ohio University, in my husband Damien’s creative writing graduate program. She’s had several books published already and won several awards and contests, but she teaches to make a living. Most writers do, or they do something else to make money. Not many writers can actually live off of writing alone.

It’s not like this was news to me. I’ve long known that writing will never be my full time career. I’ve known I will always have to have a day job. But as I sat in the car on my way to teach that day, it really registered with me how little success as a writer actually means in the big picture.

While some writers might find that idea depressing, I find it oddly reassuring. There’s something both humbling and comforting about the thought that acceptances – and that means rejections, also – aren’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. Writing can add meaning to your life, but I think it’s important to stay grounded, too, in the fact that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get something published, nor is it world changing if and when you do.

What Other Options Are There?

2010-05-30T05:00:00.001-04:00

I want to talk a little about writers’ conferences and non-graduate school writing programs this week. One thing that I kept thinking about as I was at the Writing Works Conference a few weeks ago was how a lot of the ideas that you’re made to explicitly think about at a writing conference are pretty much the same ideas that you study and discuss in formal graduate workshops. Many conferences also offer manuscript critiques with agents, editors, and successful writers.

And if these conference critiques aren’t quite enough for you, there are also a number of intensive workshop programs, which can span anywhere between a single weekend to a couple of months, during which time you participate in workshops and are also given ample time to write. You also are likely to become a part of a community of writers, as enrollment in these programs is usually kept quite small and you have nobody to interact with during the duration of the conference but the other writers.

In other words, these conferences and workshop programs offer many of the same benefits that MFA programs do, but for less of a time commitment (and for some people, less of a financial commitment, although most MFA programs offer teaching assistantships so that students do not have to pay tuition).

There are, however, a few key differences between MFA programs and these other routes. One is that, while an MFA program might be quite a time commitment, spending a lot of time in a program might be precisely what you need to bring you from aspiring to full fledged writer. I know I’m glad for having had three full years to devote to writing, and I don’t think it would be the same to devote a month, say, or a couple of weeks.

On the other hand, while most MFA students do not have to pay tuition, the three (or sometimes two) years that you spend in an MFA program are usually spent well below the poverty line. You get a stipend as a teaching assistant, but it really isn’t much. It’s enough to live by, if you can learn to live frugally, but for many aspiring writers it might be unreasonable to even consider living in poverty for two or three years. What if you have children to take care of, or perhaps massive credit card debt that you will need enough income to pay down, school or no school?

Another consideration is whether the degree itself will open any doors for you, personally. One of the big things you get from an MFA program is experience teaching, and teaching is really the only thing that I can think of that an MFA degree definitively qualifies you to do. If you want to be a college English teacher, then you should go to a formal program. Writers’ conferences and workshops can be useful in a lot of ways, but they will not prepare you for a career in academia. If you’re not interested in teaching, however, then it’s possible that an MFA program isn’t the right path for you. Teaching can be stressful and it can distract you from writing, but if you want to go to school for free, most programs expect you to teach. You may end up finding (as so many creative writing grads do) that your writing ends up taking a backburner to the time and energy you must spend learning to become a decent teacher.

There’s also, of course, the question of life experience. If you devote yourself to writing for three years and are mostly surrounded by other writers, you may not come out of the program with as much interesting stuff to write about as you would have had you been working a regular job and hanging out with regular people during that time.

I guess what it all comes down to is that I think MFA programs can be great, and I also think these intensive workshops seem great, and I also think writers’ conferences are great. Simply put, there are many ways to study and hone your craft. The real question is what will be right for you?

Writer’s Block: Take Two

2010-05-23T06:00:00.002-04:00

Last week I talked about the writer’s block lecture I attended at the Columbus Writing Works conference a few weeks ago. The lecture was extremely interesting and helpful, but I felt that, in general, the entire theme for the conference (or at least, pretty much all of the events that I attended) was how to handle writer’s block and the difficulty of forcing yourself to sit down and write.

Many of the writers talked about how difficult it can be, even for seasoned professionals with book deals and deadlines and no day jobs to distract them, to force the ideas to come. Julie Gregory, the author of the hugely successful memoir Sickened: The Story of a Lost Childhood, talked about going through a period of heightened productivity, during which she would wake up every morning with beautiful sentences in her head. This was the impetus for her writing career, but, she added, it didn’t last. After she actually landed an agent and a book deal for her first memoir, the muse essentially stopped visiting, perhaps having decided that she didn’t need it anymore, and she realized that writing this thing was actually going to be hard work.

This idea kept coming up again and again at the conference (as it often does when a group of established writers pass their wisdom on to newbies): most of the time, writing is not an ethereal experience. You don’t usually feel like there are angels whispering in your ear, and all you have to do is transcribe what they say. That happens sometimes (and when it does make sure you take advantage of the inspiration while you’ve got it!), but most of the time it’s not that easy. Most of the time it really is work.

I want to offer up a few choice quotes from the conference. These quotes say it better than I ever could:

“Writers hate to write, but they love what they’ve written.” (Julie Gregory, who said that most writers have to really force themselves to write, but that it’s worth it for the final product. This is not exactly the same, mind you, as the adage, “Some people want to write and some people want to have written,” which is more, I’ve always felt, about the difference between wanting to be a Writer, capital W, versus actually doing the work to put together a strong piece of writing.)

“Doing it’s hard, but not doing it’s harder.” (Julie Gregory. “It,” of course, being writing.)

“Writing never gets easier.” (David Rakoff, who pointed out that writing is not like some other endeavors, where you eventually reach a point at which it comes easily and you feel that you have mastered it. Writing, he said, continues to be difficult no matter how many books you’ve got under your belt. Your first drafts will, for the most part, never be very good. The quality of a final draft will almost always come down to how much work you were willing to put into it.)

And my personal favorite: “Writing is really, really, really hard.” (David Rakoff)

Writer’s Block

2010-05-16T06:00:00.000-04:00

My favorite of the lectures that I attended at the Columbus Writing Works conference a couple of weeks ago was Ann Palazzo’s discussion on writer’s block. Palazzo started by having us each fill out a questionnaire intended to help us uncover the reasons for our writer’s block in the hopes of then helping us overcome our individual blocks. Just the questionnaire itself seemed to pry my personal block open a bit because it forced me to face my excuses head on and acknowledge that they didn’t really make sense.

The questionnaire also brought up the idea that maybe you shouldn’t force yourself to work on specific scenes/chapters/stories/etc. that you feel like you should be writing, but instead, let yourself write what you happen to feel like writing at the moment that you sit down at the computer. Writing anything is still writing, after all.

From there, Palazzo focused her discussion around six major myths about writing, myths like the idea that when you really get good at writing, you never get writer’s block again, or that writer’s block is inherently bad (she made a very good point that sometimes, writer’s block might just be your brain’s way of letting you know that it’s time to take a break and recuperate. When you’re strengthening your muscles, you have to take breaks between workouts to let your muscles rebuild. Why wouldn’t the same, she asked, be true of writing?).

Palazzo finished her lecture by giving us some concrete strategies to overcome writer’s block. Many of these were things we’ve all heard before, I’m sure (don’t be afraid to write a bad draft, for example, since you can revise it later, or put your story/poem/essay aside when you get stuck so that you can come back to it later with fresh eyes). She made two points, though, that I thought were particularly insightful.

One was that you should analyze your writer’s block and come up with a specific plan to beat it (which is essentially what she had us do at the beginning of the session). This involves, also, analyzing your own history as a writer. What has worked for you in the past? What was your environment like at the times when you felt really inspired and what seems to be the ideal writing context for you? Don’t worry, she said, about what famous writers say they do. You’ve got to figure out what gets your fingers flying across that keyboard.

The other point was to tell yourself that nobody will ever read whatever it is that you are writing. This might sometimes mean lying to yourself, if you’re already at the level of getting things published regularly, but I think it can make a huge difference in unblocking that creative flow of words. At the very end of the session, for example, she had us do a writing prompt (I’m a huge proponent, by the way, of the value of writing prompts, and while we’re on the topic you should check out our MFA/MFYou Facebook page, where we intend to post writing prompts often). Just knowing that it was a prompt, knowing that if it was lousy it didn’t matter because I was only writing it because some lady had told me to write it, opened my writing valve up all the way and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.

The main thing I took away from the lecture was that writer’s block happens. It just does. And you shouldn’t be afraid of it. If you just face it head on and plow through it, you can overcome it. Either way, it’s really not the end of the world (and it doesn’t mean anything about you as a writer) if you lose a little time to writer’s block now and again. The trick is to not allow it to paralyze you with fear. It seems to me that it’s the fear of writer’s block itself that really ends up shutting you down.

Storytelling

2010-05-09T06:00:00.002-04:00

I’m going to get back to the Writing Works Conference next week because there are a few more topics that I would like to talk to you about. This week, though, we’re going to talk about something else. Last night I went to a reading by George Saunders and Robin Hemley at Ohio University’s annual Spring Literary Festival, and something very interesting struck me as I was listening to George Saunders read.

Both writers, first of all, were fabulously entertaining. Hemley’s new memoir, DO-OVER! – in which he relives painful moments from his childhood, only this time he does the things he wishes he had done at the time – is high on my list, now, of books I’d like to read. It’s George Saunders’s story, though, that brought up in my mind what I’d like to talk about this week: the importance of plot.

Now I didn’t have a chance to attend the lecture Saunders gave at the Lit. Fest. this year, but I’m told one of the things he talked about was his days as an MFA student and having decided that he needed to write in a more “literary” manner. He told a story (I hear tell) about writing a novel and trying to make it as literary and serious and MFA as possible. He realized after completing the novel that A) it wasn’t any good, and B) it just wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to write. And that realization, it sounds like, was part of the impetus for his hugely successful career.

The story Saunders read at the reading was brilliant on all three of what I consider the key levels of fiction writing: character, language, and plot. The story was divided into sections that were written in the first person perspective of the three main characters. Saunders captured the voice and personality of each character perfectly through each character’s respective narration, so he absolutely hit the character and language side of fiction right off the bat. Partway through the story, though, it became clear that this story was in fact extremely plot driven – I just hadn’t noticed it at first because I was so drawn in by the voice of these characters.

What I consider to be one of the major problems with the graduate level workshop experience is that there tends to be so much focus put on character and language that many of the stories end up having no plot. I’m not exaggerating. I can remember workshopping a story one time where all of the students in workshop agreed that it was extremely boring, but most everybody except for me decided to see that as a good thing because it was a reflection of how empty this character’s life is. Alright, but boring is boring. If a class full of people who have advanced English level educations – people who tend to read more deeply and stick with things longer than the average reader – thinks your story is boring, that sounds like a problem to me.

So often in the MFA world, any sign of a plot gets written off as being “contrived” – one of those workshop buzzwords, like “cliché,” that pretty much loses all meaning about midway through your first semester in grad school. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t want your plot to be contrived (or cliché, for that matter), but good fiction should have a story arc. Good fiction should be about something.

Good fiction should also have well established characters and beautiful language, yes. All three of these important elements are there, I think you’ll find, in any really good story. But if all you’re doing is writing beautiful language or developing a really well rounded character, well, you don’t really have a story to tell, do you?

Writing Schedules

2010-05-02T06:00:00.002-04:00

I just got back from a conference in Columbus: the Seventh Annual Writing Works Conference, sponsored by Columbus State Community College (which, by the way, has an extremely impressive creative writing program for a community college). The keynote speaker at this truly magnificent conference was David Rakoff (who I was fairly ambivalent to prior to this weekend but who I am definitely a fan of now. He read us some really excellent stuff from his new book forthcoming in a few months). In addition to Rakoff’s keynote address and humor writing workshop, there were a range of extremely interesting lectures and workshops run by a variety of writers. I feel genuinely surprised by how useful this conference was (which is not to say that these sorts of things are rarely useful, but I’ve been to so many panel discussions, lectures, and workshops that I supposed there wasn’t much that I hadn’t heard before), and in the next few weeks I will definitely be addressing a few of the key topics the conference brought up in my mind.

One point in particular that kept coming up in the various lectures and workshops as well as during Rakoff’s Q&A was the idea that many successful writers don’t adhere to any kind of strict writing schedule. Many of the writers at the conference talked about how they don’t worry about scheduling time in their lives to write or habitually writing for X amount of hours at X o’clock every day. Some of them even pointed out that you absolutely cannot expect yourself to write every day; sometimes there are simply other things that you need to do.

One writer said that if she tries to set aside time to write, then she never feels like writing during that time, but she often feels like writing at other times, when she should be doing something else. So she writes at those times. Screw it, right? Another writer said she writes whenever she feels like writing, and she doesn’t when she doesn’t. Sometimes she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and write and then go back to sleep. Rakoff said that he doubts he’s ever spent more than ten straight minutes writing (surely an exaggeration but you get the point).

Almost all the writers who I saw speak seemed to agree that, while the idea of writing at seven o’clock every morning sounds lovely, that just isn’t the way it works for any of them (and they seem to be doing just fine regardless, thank you very much). It was an intriguing variation from the advice successful writers so often give amateurs: you should create a schedule, develop a habit, set aside an hour or two that will be your time to write every day. It seems successful writers often give that advice – perhaps to help the otherwise helpless because perhaps, they figure, if you have to ask you aren’t going to be able to work it out organically – but many of them don’t need to follow it themselves.

Now in fairness, this might partially be due to the fact that most of them make a living off of their writing and so have an unlimited amount of time in which to write every day. If you have no other pressing needs, it might be easier to write when you feel like it and not when you don’t, while it can be a bit more difficult for those of us who have to work full time and must write in the few spare hours that are left.

Even so, it’s useful to keep in mind that many of the writers who do make a living off of writing do not force their brains into submission according to a set writing schedule. Take that for what you will: an interesting tidbit, or perhaps encouragement that it’s okay to keep on doing whatever works for you. Write by a schedule or write when you want. Write every day or in frenzied bursts when you have a few days in a row off. Don’t, though, get down on yourself because you think the “real” writers are clocking in for eight hour shifts, are writing until their fingers bleed. Because they aren’t, and you don’t have to, either.

Divvying up those Character Points

2010-04-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

David Sedaris published an essay in the New Yorker a few months ago that really stuck with me. He talked about the idea that success really comes down to whether you’re willing to shift your priorities in life. You spend more time and effort on whatever it is that you want to be successful at and less on things like hobbies or family and friends. Sedaris, of course, in his lovably self-deprecating way, used this topic as a springboard to talk about his relationship with his family, but this idea of shifting priorities, of allowing yourself to be a failure at parts of your life so that you can be a success at others, really resonated with me.

This is something Malcolm Gladwell talks about, too, something that many people would agree with: success involves sacrifice. This idea has been on my mind a lot recently because I’ve been so busy at work (I have – no joke – seventy five to a hundred papers to grade every week) and have also been working under deadline to address editorial comments on a couple of scholarly essays (essays which, by the way, I spent a lot of time last summer on, too). I also would like to keep my marriage a happy one, and I’ve been trying to be a more social person (which takes a lot of effort for someone with social anxiety, let me tell you).

And, of course, there is my creative writing.

I write, but I don’t write as much as I’d like to. Realistically, I don’t know that it’s possible to write as much as I want. I don’t write genre fiction and so will surely never make a living off of writing, which means I have to devote time to developing myself as a career gal. I also would like to have a baby some day (and yes, my husband and I are both aware that the clock is ticking on that one) and know that being a mother will take a lot of time.

The question I have is am I spreading myself too thin? You have to be a multifaceted person, I believe, to be a good writer, but you also have to be willing to spend a lot of time actually writing. This might mean sacrificing other things that you might also have wanted to spend a lot of time on. We all know that our writing should come before things like video games or TV, but what about things like publishing critical essays or furthering the great academic discussion on X book or Y field? These things would generally be considered a productive use of your time, but if it takes away from your creative writing time, is it really worth it?

I think real life is more similar than you might think to one of those games where you have a certain number of points to divvy up however you see fit. Do you want your character to be stronger or smarter? Do you want him to have better magic or battle skills? You might ask yourself similar questions when it comes to your own priorities. Do I want to be a writer or do I want to be fluent in French? Do I want to publish scholarly essays or short stories and novels? Maybe we all really do have a finite number of effort points, and we have to choose carefully what we want to use them on. We can’t pour them all into writing, but we can decide which parts of our lives we really care enough about to spend the points on. Do you want to be the sort of person who dabbles in a lot of things but isn’t very good at any of them, or the sort of person who can only do a few things but can do those few things very, very well?

Learning from Other People’s Mistakes

2010-04-18T05:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve talked before about how I believe that the competition is fierce and that most of the work getting submitted to journals – even the tiny ones – is fantastically good. Yes, I know you’ve heard otherwise. I know you’ve read interviews with editors or agents who claim that most of the work submitted to them is terrible, but that is such a load. If that were true than every halfway decent, remotely publishable piece would get snatched up immediately because it would stand out so much from all the rest of the crap, and we all know that doesn’t happen.

A piece of writing can get rejected from a hundred places before it finds a home, and once it does find that home it can then go on to win a Pushcart or get reprinted in a Best American Anthology. I once got a really nasty rejection letter, in which the editor essentially told me my story was terrible and poorly written, and then it later got published (the exact same draft that had been rejected) and was read by an assistant at a literary agency who contacted me and asked me to query the agency. The reason why things can get rejected so many times first is because most of the stuff getting submitted is very, very good, and on top of that, there simply are no objective rules for writing that every single editor, agent, writer, and reader can agree on.

Which means if you want to be competitive you really need to find ways to set yourself apart from the competition. Working at a literary journal gives you a chance to see what other writers are doing and can give you a competitive edge with your own work. Once you get over the shock of seeing how much of the slush pile is great and how often pieces that you would have loved to accept still have to get rejected because there just isn’t room, you start to notice small, let’s go ahead and call them mistakes, for lack of a better word, that are causing other writers to get rejected quickly.

These sorts of mistakes can range from not following professional formatting (using a tiny or strange looking font, say, or stapling the pages together), to coming across like an a-hole in your cover letter (I pretty much immediately want to reject people who seem arrogant in their cover letter and act like they already know their work is going to get accepted), to writing a really great story that gets off to a slow start (these stories, sadly, rarely even get read all the way through because you put them down before you get to the good part), to filling up thirty pages when the story easily could have been told in fifteen. And don’t even get me started on typos and grammatical errors. If you don’t care about your work enough to proofread it, what makes you think anybody else is going to care?

These are sometimes things that writers who don’t understand how the selection process really works will assume won’t end up mattering. I think we sometimes look at the work that’s getting published in books and see things that those writers are getting away with, and we assume that we will be allowed to do that, too. But the difference is that a writer with a book published has probably already won the trust of an agent and/or editor. You probably haven’t. The editors reading your submissions probably don’t have a clue who you are, and they aren’t going to have faith that if they just keep reading, your work will end up coming together in a satisfying way. You’ve got to win them over right away and hang on to them until the very end, and you cannot give them any reason to doubt you.

Seeing what good writers who are submitting good work are doing that’s earning them rejections is more useful, I think, than only reading the stuff that’s getting accepted and published. Reading what’s been published might just teach you that you need to write something good. Reading the stuff that’s getting rejected will teach you to write something good, too, but it will also teach you to avoid any number of pitfalls that writers who are just reading the stuff that’s getting published might fall into.

Time Management: What Grad School Won’t Teach You

2010-04-11T06:00:00.000-04:00

When I was an MFA student, I used to complain like a little baby that I didn’t have enough time to write. “I swear I had more time to write when I was just working full time,” I could often be heard saying. “Isn’t the point of grad school to give you time to write?”

The older, ever-so-slightly wiser me now looks back at that whiny me and shakes her head. “Please,” I would tell that younger Ashley if I could. “You have plenty of time to write. You’re just spending it complaining about not having enough time. On top of that, the point of grad school is not to give you time to write. The point of grad school, if we lived in such a simplistic world where there could possibly be one universal point to grad school, is to help you become a better writer. Nobody ever really promised you time.”

In fact, now that I’m teaching what most colleges consider a full-timer’s load of classes (though at my school I’m still technically considered part-time, ah semantics!), I’m realizing that the best way to prepare a budding writer for the harsh realities of the non-grad student writing life is to force you to scrounge writing time whenever you can. When you’re working full time and trying to be a good spouse and raising children and whatever else you do, you’ll be much better off if you’re used to never having time to write. You’ll come at it with the experience and tools necessary to find that time, wherever it might be hiding.

But in spite of my old, young self’s complaints, I do think you have a lot more time to write as a grad student than you do working full time, and so time management is actually something I don’t feel that grad school really teaches you. At least my program didn’t. When I was a grad student the only thing standing between me and my writing was my own invented excuses.

As a grad student I came up with the goal of writing an average of three hours a day for the rest of my life, but once I graduated the plan quickly became to just try to find time to write at all every day. I seem to have found a way to write for an average of about an hour a day, and that’s after something like nine months of shifting things around and experimenting with new ideas, desperately trying to figure out how to make it work.

I don’t mean to suggest that the fact that grad school gives you time to write should count as a strike against MFA programs. Time to write is always a good thing, as far as I’m concerned, and I think we should try harder to recognize it when we have it and value it for what it’s worth. But maybe we should reconsider the way we look at those times in our lives when we have very little time, or those times when we feel like we have very little time. Learning how to manage your time and squeeze those minutes or hours out of each day is just as important as studying your craft and reading until your eyes feel like they’ve been peeled and cooked. Time management is, let’s face it, an essential skill if you really want to make it as a writer.

The Revision Beast

2010-04-04T08:15:00.000-04:00

Here’s a question for you: Is there such a thing as too much revision? I’ve been thinking lately that there is definitely such a thing as too much writing – where you spend so much time in front of the computer that you forget to go out there and have experiences worth writing about, and I’m sure the same can be said of too much reading. What about revision? Is it possible to over-revise?

I’ve seen sometimes in workshops people turn in revised drafts of stories where the earlier draft was, in my opinion, better than the revision, and I’ve had that same criticism given to me about one of my own past workshop revisions. I’ve even seen, sometimes, in journals or collections, stories that feel sort of bland, lifeless, and I’ve wondered if this might be the result of too much revision, where the initial spark for the story, whatever it was that had made the writer want to write it to begin with, has been revised out.

I’m a huge proponent for extensive revision. I tend to believe that many writers, especially those just starting out, don’t revise anywhere near enough. Revision is, in fact, what I consider the biggest difference between writers and would-be-writers: serious writers take revision seriously.

But is there a line that you eventually cross where the piece is as good as it’s going to be and any further revision will damage it, or perhaps just turn it into something completely different? Or maybe what I should be asking is how do you know when a piece has crossed that line? I’ve heard that old rule that if you get to a point where you’re only changing minor things with each revision, you should take it to mean that you’re done. But what if you’re like me: a perpetual reviser, someone who might work on a single story or novel for years and years and years, someone who continues to revise stories long after they’ve been published?

I’ve heard interviews with professional writers – that rare breed that actually makes a living off of writing – who say that part of being a writer is finishing. Yes, you need to revise, but you also need to stop revising. You need to send your work out there. You need to move on to the next project.

I wonder if it’s possible that revision is actually holding me back. I revise so much that sometimes new projects will sit on the backburner for ages because I never have time to work on them, I’m too busy reworking this or that older project. Right now I have several new stories I’d like to write, for example, and a new novel I want to work on, but I keep not doing it because when I sit down to write, I always end up rewriting. And the thing about endless revision is that sometimes a new draft won’t necessarily be any better than an older draft, just different.

I’m not suggesting that anyone should ever stop revising altogether, but maybe it is possible to spend too much time revising. Maybe equally important to taking revision seriously is being able to face the empty page without fear, being able to open a blank document and create something new over and over and over again.

And Don’t Forget to Live Your Life

2010-03-28T14:21:00.001-04:00

I’ve talked a bit before about the importance of writing and writing a lot, and I’ve talked, too, about the importance of not writing sometimes, of actually living your life to make sure you have something worth writing about. I hope you won’t mind if, this week, I touch on the latter idea again.

Something very emotionally painful happened to me a few days ago. I won’t get into it here, but I will say that this occurrence was totally unexpected and knocked me over with the force of a hurricane. I spent the past few days with family, which was a much needed reminder of the good things in life, and I ended up spending the second half of my Spring Break not writing.

But here’s the thing: I think this is exactly as it should be. I think sometimes some of us get so caught up in the writing life – in the importance of setting goals and writing regularly and submitting and on and on and on – that we forget that it’s also important to be a human being: to live and love and feel pain and feel regret, to not just live through our word processing programs but to open ourselves up and taste life, savor the bitter moments along with the sweet.

Writing is an essential part of being a writer, but it is not the only part, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be enough to comprise a full life. In order to be a good writer you have to practice your craft, yes, but you also have to read (a lot!), and you have to be alive. You have to really experience life, to get to know and understand a wide range of people, to appreciate and explore the strangeness of this vast universe we live in. Writers don’t lock themselves in their basements and write all the time. Writers live, and if sometimes that living gets in the way of your computer time, well I say so be it, no excuses required, because this is what it is to be alive.

Some More Benefits of the MFA Life

2010-03-21T11:23:00.000-04:00

I have to be honest, I’ve really been missing the grad student life lately. Part of it, I know, is that I’m surrounded by grad students from my husband’s program, and I get to see – but only from the fringes – these grad students doing the things that grad students do. I only get to take part in the non-school related parts of their lives, which is still enjoyable, of course, but it’s not the same.

One of the things I miss the most is the conversations. Talk about writing. Analyzing craft. Reading the same books and discussing them with each other. These sorts of conversations are the heart of any English graduate program and they tend to take place both in and outside of classroom. The problem – for me – is that they don’t tend to take place with outsiders. This isn’t an intentional slight; it’s not like grad students have a clique sort of mentality. But I’m not taking the same classes; I’m not reading the same books and having one-on-one workshop sessions with the same writers-in-residence.

This sort of unified writing experience is very difficult, I feel, to create outside of an academic setting. While it’s possible to perhaps find a small group of writers willing to read the same books and meet regularly to discuss them from a craft perspective, and it’s certainly possible to create the workshop environment – only far more productive, in my opinion – outside of academia, there are still many other things that don’t seem possible (for example, somehow managing to get a string of established writers to travel to your area, read the work of everybody in your writers’ group, and meet with each of you one-on-one to give feedback, after which the members of the group can discuss the experience and compare what you’ve gained).

And there’s the question of money, too. Grad students not only have ample time to write because they are being paid extremely well, compared to what college adjuncts make, to teach only one or two classes at a time, but they also, as a result, have ample time to exchange work with each other and do extended feedback sessions. (This statement, I can already tell, is going to have some readers shaking their heads in disagreement. I’m not saying you make as much as a TA as you would, say, in a full time office job. But you make way more per credit hour – WAY more – than the average adjunct instructor makes. Trust me. I’m an adjunct. I can barely make ends meet off of my salary.)

Grad students also get funding to travel to conferences. Many of the students here, for example, are taking a trip to Denver next month to go to AWP, on their graduate program’s dime. I desperately wanted to go to AWP this year. I almost had an excuse because I was invited to read with a journal that I was published in, but the reading ended up falling through, and I couldn’t justify the $1000 it would have cost between airfare and hotel stay and food.

Which is all, really, to say that I think there are some things that you can gain from a creative writing graduate program that you simply cannot reproduce in the real world. Of course it’s possible to get on the path to success on your own, but creative writing graduate programs give you a pretty forceful shove in the right direction, and they’re pretty enjoyable, too.

There’s a Time for Us

2010-03-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

Ah, those timeless, fabulous, Stephen Sondheim lyrics. You all know the song, what the Dire Straits referred to as “the Movie Song.” The reason why the West Side Story song “Somewhere” is such a powerful piece of music is because we all know the story of Romeo and Juliet; we all know that Maria and Tony will never find that place, that time. There is no time for “us.”

The same could be said, if you really want to be realistic with yourself, of writing. We all probably have at one point in time entertained fantasies of landing a five book deal that ensures us six figures a year, plus obscene royalties since naturally our books will each land on the bestseller list. Right. But even as we all have allowed, at times, our minds to wander to these totally unrealistic dreams, we all (I hope) are well aware that such dreams will never come true. There will never come a day when we will make a cushy income off of writing and writing alone, when we wake up each morning with nothing else on the schedule but to write. There is not, as it were, a time for us.

What this means is that when we look at our busy lives, when we quantify our busy schedules and try to calculate out how much time we could reasonably spend writing, when we do all this and we see that the answer is very little, the solution to the problem is not to look forward to some indeterminate future in which we will have the time. You’ll write tomorrow, or when things slow down at work, or when your kids start school. You’ll write when you have time.

The truth is that you will never have time. What you’re really doing when you tell yourself you will write “someday” is lulling yourself into a sense of false security. Justifying the fact that you’re not willing to work it out. Denying the fact that you are not a writer, at least, you are not behaving like one right now.

Once you accept that there will never be time, you’re left with only two real options. You can give up and decide that you’re just not going to make it as a writer, or you can realize that most successful writers don’t really have time to write, yet they’ve all found a way to make it work; why can’t you?

I’ve been telling myself for the past few months that one day I’ll land a full time job as a college English instructor – hopefully even as a Creative Writing instructor – and when that day comes I’ll have summers and winters off and plenty of time to write. Oh, it gets me through the bad days, this is true, but there are a couple of problems with this line of thought.

For one thing, in order to really be competitive for such a job I first need to get a book or two published, and in order to do that I need to keep writing as much as I can. I can’t tell myself that it’s okay if I can’t find the time to write right now; if I don’t find the time now then that dream job will always remain out of reach. And then of course there’s the fact that even though I might tell myself now that if/when I get a full time instructor job, time to write will naturally follow, the truth is that I will probably always have other things I could and should be doing with my time. There will always be reasons not to write.

So step one: Accept that there will never be time. Step two: Figure out a way to make the time, already! I’ve been getting up a half hour early every day this month so that I can write a little bit before work. A half hour isn’t enough to get a lot of quality work done, but it’s enough to get me pumped about whatever project I’m working on, and then I’m more likely to figure out a way to squeeze time out later in the day, or to get up even earlier the next day to have more time. (It’s also, by the way, a nice antidepressant. I feel much happier when I’m writing every day, and it really sets the tone for the day if I get some writing done first thing.)

So no, there is no time for us, Tony and Maria, not unless we make the time, but we have to make it right now. Today. This minute. Now.

A Spoonful of Sugar

2010-03-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

There are a few ways I’ve found to take the sting off of rejections that I wanted to share. The thing about rejections (as I know I’ve said before) is that they are an important part of being a writer. If you’re not receiving rejections, then you’re probably not really even in the game. It’s important, then, that we try to look at rejections in a sort of positive light, that we try to be happy about receiving rejections because they’re a good sign, really. They mean you’re sending things out there. They mean you’re doing the things a writer has to do. I’ve talked before about using rejections as a motivational tool, but I think it’s also important that we see the rejections themselves as a positive thing. After all, if you were not receiving rejections that would mean you were not submitting.

Recently, my husband Damien and I started using a rewards system, which we put together from a composite of other writers systems that we had heard about and liked. Our system goes like this: for every one hundred points that you earn, you get a $25 Amazon gift card. Every response you ever receive to your work earns at least one point. A journal acceptance is worth ten points, a manuscript or partial manuscript request is worth five, a personal rejection is worth two points, and a form rejection – those puny little half-slips of paper that so effortlessly make our hearts sink – are worth one point. No matter what response you just received, you’re still that much closer to your reward.

I like this system because it reminds us that even the most basic form rejection is still worth something in the grand scheme of the writing life. Yes, I’d rather get a personal rejection (two points) and of course I’d rather get an acceptance (ten points!), but notice that the divide between points is not that astronomical. An acceptance is worth ten times more than a rejection, but you’d still need to get ten acceptances before you made it to your reward. Really, the way to get to that reward is to have a steady stream of responses coming in– it doesn’t really matter that much what the responses are, as long as you’re sending your work out there and getting something back.

There are two other things that I’ve found make rejections not feel so bad. One is to be perpetually engaged in other writing projects. If you’re anything like me, you tend to feel like whatever current new piece you’re writing is the best thing you’ve ever written. This is a good feeling, and it makes rejections for the older stuff, the stuff you had already finished and started sending around, feel less significant. No big deal, you think. Just wait until I finish this story/poem/book and start sending it out!

The other thing that helps is to send out sim subs to multiple different venues. When I first started submitting, I was kind of nervous about sim subs. More and more places these days accept (even encourage!) simultaneous submissions, but I was worried that if I did get an acceptance, it might be time consuming to track down the contact info for the other journals I had sent that story to. The truth is that yes, it’s kind of time consuming (and sometimes a journal or two will apparently not receive the withdrawal when you send it in), but when you get an acceptance you don’t really care. You’re so excited that X journal will be publishing X piece, you’re more than willing to slog through the withdrawal process.

And the thing is, if you get a rejection for a piece that, let’s say, you’d sent out to twenty different journals, that one rejection doesn’t really bother you because one of those other nineteen might still accept it. In my experience, the same exact piece can receive a “Dear Author” form rejection from one journal and an enthusiastic acceptance from another. If you only send out to one place at a time, if/when that place rejects it, that rejection is going to feel much heavier than if there were several places who were still considering that piece.

So there you have it. Not only are rejections not such a bad thing, really they’re a good thing, in my opinion. Send your work out there, and be happy when you get those little half-slips back. A half-slip, “Dear Author, Thanks but no thanks,” response is still something. Everything you ever do as a writer is always worth something.

The Minors and the Big Leagues

2010-02-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, I’m stealing the baseball analogy from the current issue of Poets and Writers, but I’d like to think that I would have come up with it on my own, what with the start of the baseball season in the near future and my husband, a big-time baseball fanatic, getting increasingly excited as spring training games get closer. I’m talking, of course, about the minor and major leagues in the literary world: small journals with low circulations verses larger, more prestigious journals.

The question I’ve been pondering lately is this: how do you know when you’re ready for the big game?

I’ve heard many different writers offer a range of opinions on the subject of small journals. Some writers argue that an acceptance in a small journal is meaningless and that you shouldn’t even waste your time submitting to these places. This attitude, in my opinion, doesn’t really make sense. Of course getting published in the major journals is a bigger deal than the small ones, but that doesn’t mean that an acceptance from a small journal means nothing. Based on my experiences working on two very small journals, I can tell you that even the small guys get a ton of really great submissions, and most of the submissions have to get rejected. An acceptance still means that your work rose to the top of the slush pile, that someone, or more likely several someones, read and liked and wanted to publish what you wrote.

I’ve also heard the argument that, while of course writers have to begin in the minors, it looks bad for you to linger down there for too long. Once you have a few small scale publications under your belt, you need to move up and start playing for the big leagues. I haven’t quite been able to make up my mind on this one yet. In some ways it does make sense that if you just keep publishing for years and years and years in the small presses, agents and publishing houses might wonder why you’ve been in the game for so long but haven’t made it up to the next level. But then, what about the idea of exposure? I recently had a lit agency contact me about querying them, and the story of mine that they had read was published in an extremely tiny journal. I have a much larger journal in my publication past, but that wasn’t the one the agency noticed.

Part of the reason I’m thinking about this right now is because I’ve noticed lately that the stories that I feel are my better ones have been getting mostly form rejections, but the ones I don’t feel are as strong have been getting extremely enthusiastic personal rejections, and sometimes, acceptances. At first I wondered if this meant that I’m not gauging the quality of my work properly, but then it occurred to me that I’ve been sending my better stories to bigger journals, and I’ve been sending the less strong ones to really small journals.

I’m the sort of person who likes to closely examine and analyze everything that ever happens so that I might take something away from it for next time, but I have to admit that I’m stumped about where to go from here. The fact that the small journals have been extremely encouraging of my work might lead me to believe that I should be starting my submission runs with larger journals (another argument I’ve heard from writers is that you should have a sort of hierarchy worked out for which journals you’d most like to get published in, and you should submit your work first to the top journals and work your way down the list, only submitting to the smaller journals when your work has already been rejected by the bigger ones).

The problem with that, though, is that the stories that I believe are my best have been getting a great big yawn from the larger journals I’ve been submitting them to. I’ve been getting mostly form rejections from those places, sometimes with a handwritten, “Thanks, Ashley. Submit again,” or something to that effect, but rarely real responses: “We really enjoyed X and Y about this story but ultimately had to reject it for Z reason.” I worry that if I take my recent realization to mean that I should aim higher, the result will be that I will stop receiving acceptances altogether, and I will receive far fewer encouraging rejections, too. And let’s face it, encouraging rejections are what the new writer lives off of.

So how do you know when you’re ready for the big game? When is it time to start demanding something more of yourself and when is it smarter to stick with what’s been working? And should you be satisfied with the minor leagues? Should small scale publications continue to mean something or do you reach a point where you have to move up or accept that you never will?

Why We Write

2010-02-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

Think back – far, far back and farther still. Think back to the time before the time you knew you wanted to be a writer. Yes, I realize this may feel like asking you to think back to life inside the womb, but humor me for a second, will you?, and try.

Do you remember where this desire came from? Do you remember where it all began? Do you remember that feeling of excitement, that thrill, that would overcome your senses when you would sit down and scribble your stories or poems or plays? Do you remember, specifically, the difference between that time – the time when you wrote with no expectation for reward, no thought that this thing might some day get published or that you might some day be recognized for the exceptional talent that you are – and this time – a time when everything seems to hinge on acceptances and rejections?

I’ve often said that I believe if you’re writing solely for the purpose of publication or because you hope that one day you might make a living off of this, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. This, of course, is unfair. Everybody has the right to their own secret purposes in life. My point, however, when I make a broad statement like that, is that you’re probably setting yourself up for failure if this is why you write. It seems like a waste, to me, to spend so much time and energy and effort, if you’re only doing it because you think it will bring you things that may never come. Publication, whether small scale or large, seems like an achievable goal for anybody who keeps at it, but the chances that you will one day make a living off of writing are extremely slim, no matter how good you are, and they seem to be getting slimmer with the changing technologies and DIY trends in today’s publication industry.

In addition, I believe that your chances of reaching any measurable level of success as a writer are greatly diminished if success alone is your driving force. Here’s why: rejections will always be more plentiful than acceptances. Period. You may have to live through years of rejections before you even get an acceptance at all, and that first acceptance will probably be for a very small journal that is mostly (or perhaps even only) read by other contributors. (I don’t mean to suggest that such an acceptance should be taken lightly. I’m a firm advocate for small journals, as an editor of an online journal myself, and I believe that getting anything accepted anywhere is a big deal. However, a small journal acceptance certainly is a smaller triumph than, say, if you were to get something published in the Paris Review or Granta.)

If success alone is what’s driving you, it seems unlikely that you will be able to bear through the years and years of scratching your way up to finally reach a level of success that someone other than you might be impressed by. That is to say, I believe that writers who write to get published will, most of them, eventually give up. It just isn’t worth it.

But if you write because you love to write – if you write because it gives you pleasure, because it adds meaning to your life, because it helps you to understand and interpret the world around you – if, in other words, you write now for the same reasons you wrote back then, in that forgotten time so long ago, then none of the rest of it matters at all: not the acceptances or the rejections, not the money or the recognition (neither of which are ever likely to amount to much, anyway). The only thing that matters is the feeling you get when you write. The only thing that matters is the writing, itself.

Just Keep Swimming, Er, I Mean, Writing

2010-02-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

I talked a little bit last time about accepting the likelihood that my graduate thesis, which I’ve been shopping around to agents for the past few months, will probably not get published, or at least, not as my first book. This is something that I think most writers have to accept when they are in the middle of the early stages of their careers.

There’s a common story: the writer who can’t get his or her first novel published, writes a second (or third one, or fourth), finally gets something accepted and then goes back and dusts off that earlier manuscript, now that he or she’s broken into the publishing world. We’ve also all heard the stories of people who write a first book, a second, a third, and finally on their fourth or fifth they get a book published, but they don’t try to publish those earlier manuscripts because they know now that those early ones weren’t good enough.

Whatever the case, it’s important to remember that real writers – the ones who actually write and publish and slowly but surely make progress in their writing careers – just keep writing, no matter what. What distinguishes the ones who make it from the ones who don’t, as far as I can tell, is the ability to accept the inevitable rejections and the fact that you’re not perfect (and neither is your work), without getting discouraged and without ever, ever, EVER giving up.

Yes, this seems to involve a certain contradiction at the very core of your being. You’re willing to take criticism and you haven’t deluded yourself into thinking that you’re a genius (maybe once upon a time you had those delusions, but you’ve grown out of them by now, I hope, and now you know that you weren’t born to become the next Hemingway, that, in fact, Hemingway wasn’t, either; he just worked hard and got lucky, both). And yet at the same time, you believe in yourself, in your skills as a writer and your ability to keep getting better, and perhaps most incongruous of all, you truly believe that other people will want to read these things that you write.

It’s that balance you always hear about: hubris checked by modesty. Believing in yourself and your work just far enough, but not too far. Not so far that you become one of those a-holes who argue with anyone willing to give them feedback and who believe that every editor and agent who has ever rejected their work is an idiot.

But I believe that anybody can reach that balance. It just takes emotional maturity and perhaps being around other writers long enough that you realize that you’re not special but that doesn’t mean that you don’t still have something worthwhile to say. So the real deciding factor, then, is whether you’re willing to keep at it indefinitely. To receive rejection after rejection but still continue sending stuff out. To write every day, even when you’re positive that nobody will ever publish what you’re working on, even when you’re afraid that nobody will ever publish anything that you write, ever. To write a second novel, even if your first one never got published. And to revel in the small triumphs: journal acceptances, encouraging rejections, and those flashes of inspiration that send you breathlessly rushing to your computer, carried away by your own excitement to get this written down.

Rejections: The Greatest All Time Motivational Tool?

2010-02-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

I asked a couple of people recently what I should write my next blog about and they said rejections as a motivational tool. OK, and in what way are rejections motivating? They make you want to get out there and try again. They make you feel like a real writer because a “No” response is still better than no response. Yeah, these things are true . . . but rejections are still kind of discouraging, aren’t they?

The topic has been stewing in my mind since then, and I’ve been trying to decide what rejections are better at: encouraging you to try, try again, or making you feel like you’ve been fooling yourself all along. All writers, if they’re going to stick with it long enough to actually reach any kind of steady stream of acceptances, have to develop a thick skin about rejections. We all get rejected. All of us. A lot. Your favorite writer has been rejected. Your favorite writer, come to think of it, probably still has people who don’t like his or her work. This is a subjective business.

My current agent search has shed a bit of light on the topic of rejections for me. So far I’ve sent out about twenty five queries. I’ve gotten a few form rejections, about an equal number of personal rejections, about an equal number of no response (yet?)s, and two requests for partials, which eventually ended in rejections. Of the personal rejections and the rejections from the agents who requested partials, the response has remained pretty similar across the board: This is interesting. This is well written. This sort of book is very hard to sell (or sometimes, “But I’m just not the right agent for this book”).

While I would be lying if I said these rejections haven’t been discouraging, there has been a very motivating element to them. For one thing, I’ve been encouraged by the fact that I’ve gotten a fair amount of personal responses, and those responses have been very positive about my writing. The writing itself.

The topic of this particular novel, on the other hand . . . well I knew this book might be hard to market. It’s literary fiction, which is difficult to sell to begin with, and it’s about a somewhat controversial issue. It’s frustrating to have worked on a book for three years and finally realize that it might be inherently unmarketable, but these responses really have pushed me to get back to work, serious work, on my next novel.

I wrote the first draft of my next novel in a feverish writing spree when I was inbetween drafts of my thesis (the novel I’m currently shopping around). I got back to work on it after I decided that my thesis was ready to start sending to agents, but I wasn’t able to quite get back into the groove of it. I rewrote the first twenty five pages or so, then spent a bunch of time mapping out the events that would follow them, then decided that this first twenty five pages that I had just rewritten wouldn’t work and so went back to page one and started over . . .

But these recent agent rejections have made me realize two linked things. One is that my first novel (this was actually not the first novel I ever wrote, by the way, but it’s the first one I actually thought might be publishable) will probably not get published, at least, not as my first novel. That is to say that I think it’s a good book and I still believe that it’s publishable, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to take a chance on it when I don’t have any other book credits to my name. This sort of book, as some of these agents have told me, is, by its very nature, simply hard to sell. If I had a stronger track record I think I’d stand a better chance, but as of right now, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

The other realization that came quickly on that one’s heels was that I needed to get back to work on that next novel. I needed to take it seriously and actually get that next draft written. My thesis probably won’t be “the one,” which means if I want to make it, I need to get another one finished, and perhaps another after that. I need to keep trudging onward and writing new and better books if I ever expect one of them to make it past the slushpile, past the partial request, past the full manuscript request, and finally – finally! – sold to a publishing house.

The Business Side of Writing

2010-01-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

Many of us tend to think of writing as this purely creative field, this artsy endeavor that we’re drawn to, at least in part, because we’re not drawn to the things you have to do in an office job. But the truth is that a big part of being a writer involves a lot of the same stuff that you do at a desk job.

Consider submissions. You have to keep track of what pieces you’ve submitted to which journals, and preferably on which dates. I keep a spreadsheet where I log all this information (in addition to what particular projects I have going, what my goals are, and whether or not I’ve met my goals). In what sometimes feels like a past life, I used to work in the billing department of a healthcare clinic. This job epitomized the classic image of a desk job, in my opinion. I spent most of my day moving paper from one stack on my desk to the other, and a large part of my job was logging information into spreadsheets, not unlike what I have to do now as a writer.

But the submissions process is like an office job in more ways than that. Correspondence was another big part of my job: sending out correspondence to various labs, hospitals, and neighboring clinics, not to mention patients and insurance companies. I remember thinking how tedious it was when we would have to send out a run of patient bills, for example. Printing all the invoices, stuffing the envelopes, and then mailing them. Preparing a batch of submissions is sometimes even more tedious. It involves all those same components but you also have to research each journal to find out what, exactly, they are looking for. Then you have to find out how they accept submissions; do they want you to format it in standard manuscript format or following their own quirky specific rules? Do they want you to mail it to them, or e-mail it, or use their online submission form? The whole process is so dull that many starting out writers can’t even seem to bring themselves to do it.

And other parts of writing feel like work sometimes, too. What about when you’ve reached a point as a writer where you’ve made a commitment to it – you’ve decided that you’re going to write every day, or X number of hours every week, or X number of words every month – but you’re just not feeling it that day? You still sit yourself down in front of that computer and do the best you can to be engaged. On good days you’re able to trick yourself into getting sucked into the work, on bad days you force it until your time or word limit is reached and then feel relieved when quitting time rolls around.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that being a creative writer isn’t the romantic, artistic dream we may have once assumed it to be. It isn’t a pure escape from the office/desk job/business world. Not if you actually want to get published, anyway. The truth is there’s the artistic side of writing and the business side of it, and you have to be willing to do both if you want to really make it. But the truth is, also, that this is part of what separates the ones who will make it from the ones who won’t. Those people who don’t submit, the people who don’t buckle down and write even when they’re not “feeling it,” those people are not going to be much competition for those of us who do. And for those of us who really, really love writing, the way we all say that we do, we don’t really mind the business side of it so much. It’s worth it to us. Somewhere along the line we realize that it’s worth it.

The Up-Side of Teaching

2010-01-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

To be fair (and to make myself feel better about my current situation in life) I want to talk a little bit about some of the reasons why teaching could be considered the perfect career for creative writers. Last week I went over some of the reasons why this might not be true after all, so let me give the other side of the issue a chance to defend itself.

First of all, and as I mentioned last week, once you work your way up into a full time position as a creative writing professor, you generally have a month or so off in the winter and about three months off in the summer. You still get paid a decent annual salary, but you have around four months completely off every year. You can (and should) spend that time writing. As was brought up by Justus in the comments from last week, you also get a sabbatical every seven years, during which time it’s just assumed that you will be writing. Keeping up with your creative writing is, actually, one of your job requirements as a creative writing professor.

In addition to that, as Justus pointed out last week, teaching is good practice as a writer. You are forced to look at writing problems; you are forced to think about what makes good writing and what makes bad writing; you are forced to think about how to improve. All of the things that you teach to your students, you think about again and again for yourself, and every semester you become a slightly better writer than you were the semester before.

But perhaps most appealing of all (to me) is the thought of being part of a literary/creative writing community. Forever. This is one of the main benefits, I think, of going to grad school: to immerse yourself in a community of writers. If you become a creative writing professor, you will always be part of such a community. While there are no guarantees that you’re going to get along with everybody in the department, I feel that there’s a much better chance of developing strong and productive relationships with your coworkers if you work in an English department versus, say, if you work at an office. This is important both for writing purposes, because you gain a lot from interacting with and sharing your work with other writers and literary types, and for general peace of mind, because, after all, you have to spend a lot of time around your coworkers, and how much you like them has a huge effect on how much you like your job. Sometimes, I believe, getting along with your coworkers is even more important than whether or not you enjoy the work itself.

There are other benefits, too, such as having access to a university library and being affiliated with a university who will promote your work, because it benefits them, too, if your books sell well. And perhaps I shouldn’t forget the importance of things like job security and benefits (the employment benefits of being a professor are pretty awesome, often including things like your children getting to go to that college for free).

The trouble, of course, is that most of us have to put up with teaching adjunct – year round and for a weak salary – before we can even hope to land a full time teaching position. And teaching adjunct is a bitch. You’re considered part time, even though you sometimes teach as many or more classes than the full timers, you get paid hardly anything compared to the full timers, and you have to teach the worst classes, the classes that the full timers don’t want. But as my husband Damien keeps reminding me, no matter what job you want and no matter what field, you have to start at the bottom and work your way to the top. Teaching is no different, and if we can put up with the bottom for a few years, and keep our writing wits about us so we actually have a good chance of competing for a full time position, then someday, in the not-too-distant future, it might all feel very, very worth it.

A Time to Write and a Time to Teach

2010-01-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

With school back in full swing out here, I’ve been getting to that stage of hectic busyness that always leads me to wonder whether or not teaching is really the best job for creative writers. We often talk about teaching like it is, and I think there are a lot of pretty great benefits to being a teacher that work well with writing, not the least of which is that you usually get winters and summers off. If you really focus, you can get a lot done in that time. Summer break, for example, is sufficiently long for a person to buckle down and write a first draft of a complete book-length work. Then that person could spend the more limited time during the school year revising.

But setting that oh-so-appealing three to four months off aside: is teaching really conducive to a successful writing career? Well, I think there are a lot of strikes against it, and I can never quite seem to make up my mind on the issue. Let’s look at it a bit more closely, shall we?

I feel that there are really two main components to a job as a teacher: planning lessons and grading papers. Both involve a fair amount of mental focus, and both are comparable to the mental powers you use as a writer. Planning lessons uses the same brain functions that you use when you’re drafting, and grading papers uses the same mental muscles you exercise when you’re revising and editing. So if you spend all day doing the things you have to do to teach, you don’t always have the energy to keep using your brain in that same way for another hour or two to write.

In addition to that, I find that teaching takes up way more time than a regular nine to five job. Sure, a good deal of those extra hours can be spent at home in your jammies, or at the coffee shop or wherever you like to hang out, but regardless, you spend well over forty hours a week if you carry a typical full time college teaching load – at least I do, and I’m not even technically full time, although I do teach the same number of classes as the full timers at my school. See, besides planning lessons, grading papers, and the actual contact hours of regular class time, I spend a fair amount of time each week responding to student emails and reading and giving feedback on the additional drafts my students pass my way (because I figure if they’re willing to put the work in to revising more thoroughly, I better be willing to put the work into giving them feedback).

So once classes really get going, I inevitably start to wonder if this is really the right career. I like teaching, don’t get me wrong. It’s fun (most of the time, anyway) and rewarding. But it’s extremely difficult for me to spend fifty or sixty hours a week using these exact brain functions and then try to write as much as I want to at the end of each day. And if I don’t get to write as much as I want, I start to feel like I’ve lost my way because writing has always been the thing that keeps me going, it has always been the force that pushes me through life. If I don’t have the energy to write anymore, well, pushing ahead in a career, even a great career like teaching, doesn’t really feel worth the price.

This is not to say that I absolutely believe that teaching isn’t a good job for writers. It’s just something I’m thinking about, something I think about often. During the winter and summer you can write your ever-loving brains out, and maybe that really is enough to keep it in balance. Eight months out of the year you work work work, four months out of the year you get to be a full time writer. Those eight months, though. Those eight months can be pretty hard, let me tell you.

The Spice of the Writing Life

2010-01-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping up with my writing goals for the past several months. I still write, and I think I write a fair amount when I compare it to how much time many other starting-out writers spend writing, but I still can’t seem to meet my measly little one hour a day goal. Oh I come close, but I haven’t quite hit the mark in some time, and it’s frustrating because an average of one hour day doesn’t seem like much to ask of myself.

This has been throwing my whole world off balance, if you want to know the truth. My entire sense of identity, and my sense of what makes life worth living, they’re both entangled with my image of myself as somebody who writes often. Somebody who writes not just because she thinks she’s going to hit it big one day, or because she has this pretentious image of herself as “artiste,” but because she really genuinely loves to write. But if I haven’t been writing much, if I haven’t even been hitting an average of an hour a day, it makes me stop and wonder: is that really who I am? Have I been fooling myself this whole time?

To try to get to the bottom of this problem, I sat down and analyzed my life as a writer for the past few years. Before going to grad school, I wrote often – probably not every single day but on the days I did write, it would usually be for at least a couple of hours, and some days I would spend the better part of a full day writing. My guess is that I was clocking not much less than an hour a day if averaged over the course of each full year.

My first semester in grad school I pretty much stopped writing altogether. I wrote a few new stories . . . for workshop . . . because I had to, and that was it. That winter I got extremely depressed, asked myself what I was doing in grad school if I wasn’t even going to write, and made some hardcore resolutions that ended up sticking. From that point forward I wrote . . . a lot. When I actually did start logging my time spent writing, I found that I was spending a little less than an average of two hours a day writing.

Now, after grad school, I seem to be back where I started before I went to grad school. So what gives? Well, beside the fact that I certainly had more time to spend on writing when I was a student (the real world’s a bitch, you guys, I’m telling you!), there is one key factor that I think might be at the core of the problem. Variety.

I’m going to extend a metaphor to the breaking point here, so bear with me for a minute. When you’re trying to lose weight, you might go out and find a new diet plan that seems interesting and appealing and will give you the results you want. You start the diet plan and usually stick with it pretty well for the first little while. Encouraged by your results, you plow through for a few weeks, maybe even a few months. Somewhere along the line, though, you start slipping. You splurge. You tell yourself you’ve had a bad day and deserve this donut or that cookie. Eventually you realize you’re basically not on the diet at all anymore. Then what happens, at least to the true weight loss fanatic, is that you find another diet plan and start all over again.

Yo-yo dieting is a common and oft-made fun of phenomenon, but the thing is, what I believe is at the heart of this jumping from fad diet to fad diet is our need for variety in life. We get excited by new things. We feel encouraged when we’re starting some new program, embarking on a new resolution. But after we’ve been doing something for a while, even if we’re seeing positive results, it just starts to feel stale. We start to feel less motivated. I think that when I made up my mind to overhaul my writing life, it had much the same effect as being an overweight person who hits rock bottom with that one last piece of cake and makes the decision to start a new diet program.

That is to say, it worked. It worked wonders, at least for a little while. Then somewhere along the line, I added logging hours into the mix: a new addition to my “diet” program that kept it fresh for a while longer. But I think what’s happening now is that the freshness has gone out of it a bit. It isn’t that I don’t love writing – I do! – and it isn’t that I can’t somehow steal an hour to write each day - I can, I know I can – but I think what’s happening is that I need something new – a new sort of goal, a new type of resolution – to keep me motivated and keep me feeling like I’m working towards something, like I’m moving forward and not just spinning endlessly in a circle.

Keeping Track

2010-01-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

As I was planning out my writing goals for this year, I looked through my process blog entries for last year to see what I’ve been doing and which goals I have and haven’t met. It really hit me how helpful it is to keep these kinds of records of what I’ve been working on. It’s helpful at the time, because just by the simple act of writing it down I’m holding myself accountable for what I do and do not get done, and keeping a record like this helps later on, too, so that I can have accurate documentation to review and analyze.

When I write my monthly posts for my process blog, I include not only whether or not I met my goals for that month, but also what the circumstances were that may have prevented me from meeting them. On the conscious level I’ve been including this information to explain what happened, you could say as an excuse, but looking at those explanations now, and likewise, looking at my entries for the times when I met or exceeded my goals, has helped me to evaluate myself as a writer. It’s helped me to understand how I work, what works for me and what doesn’t, what occurrences or situations in life seem to slow me down, and what settings seem to be ideal for my writing output.

It’s also been really useful for me to keep track of what projects I’ve been working on, as well as how much I got done and on which days. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done a lot more than I actually have, and sometimes I feel like I’ve done nothing when in fact I spent hours upon hours working on a close revision of one particular project. But being honest with myself, knowing on a conscious level what I have and have not been doing, is, for me, one of the best forms of motivation. Once I realize that I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like, I definitely push myself to work harder, and if I have been performing at the level I want myself to perform, I feel encouraged to keep the streak going.

I think it’s a good idea for writers to keep track of their work. It’s a given that you should log your submissions, but I believe that writers should also log what they’ve been working on. This may mean different things for different people. You may be the sort of writer who counts words, you may quantify your work in terms of time, or you may think about what you’ve been doing in terms of specific projects. It doesn’t matter. Whatever works. I think it’s well worth the time it takes to do it, and you’ll probably find that you start pushing yourself just that much harder just by knowing that you’re going to write these things down and look back on them later.

Issue Three

2010-01-01T14:37:00.000-05:00

Start the year 2010 off right by reading Issue Three of MFA/MFYou, which is waiting for you on the main website even as you read this. You will not be disappointed, I assure you!

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-27T09:44:00.001-05:00

I'm taking a few days off from MFA/MFYou. Happy holidays, everyone, and don't forget to check the website on January 1st, when our very fabulous Issue 3 should be up. I'll be back on the newsletter next week.

Life After Workshop

2009-12-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

I want to talk today about writer’s groups. No, not writer’s workshops. I’m talking about non-academic, not-for-university-credit, voluntary writer’s groups. I’ve recently gotten involved with one of these writer’s groups. Being a recent MFA graduate, it’s hard for me not to compare this other sort of writer’s group to the traditional grad school workshop, and I have to say, I find this sort of group immensely more useful.

Here’s the thing: the group of writers that I’m involved with is a group of people whose opinions and work I respect in a different way than the general respect I would give to everybody in a workshop setting. Sure, you should value any feedback that anybody gives you – feedback is precious and no matter who offers it, and no matter why, you should listen to it with an open mind – but feedback coming from people who write and read in similar styles to your own is, let’s face it, much more useful than feedback from people who would never read the sort of thing that you write unless they had to . . . for workshop.

Also important is how much you personally like the sort of writing that the other writers in your group do. If you’re not a particular writer’s audience, if he or she is doing things in his or her own work that would never interest you as a reader, that person’s feedback might not be as useful to you as another writer who is actually writing the sort of thing you would read in the real world.

There’s a lot to be said for starting your own group peopled with writers whose work and tastes match your own, and there are other advantages besides the audience issue, too. My writer’s group spent our first meeting discussing how we want to run each session. Rather than having a professor decide for the entire group how each session will be run, how much work each person can submit, and what sort of feedback the writers can give each other, we worked these things our for ourselves. The result is that our discussions are much more efficient because they are tailored to our own specific needs.

We are also able to guide the feedback, if we need to. If I know that you’ve already revised this piece twelve thousand times, I might offer you different feedback than if I know it’s a first draft and hasn’t yet found its footing. Likewise, if I know that you’re planning to submit this piece to, say, The Paris Review, I might give you different feedback than if I know that you’re not planning on submitting it at all, that you’re just writing it for therapeutic reasons or for an experiment.

In addition, writing group discussions are much more organic outside of an academic setting. The same is true, I’ve found, when you compare a conversation between a group of friends who all happened to read the same book to a formal classroom discussion, guided by a teacher or a fellow student who is leading the discussion, and always with the intention of making the discussion last for a specific amount of time. Those time constraints are the biggest issue for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt frustrated with a workshop discussion that degenerates to nitpicky sentence level complaints because there are still fifteen more minutes allotted to that piece, or on the other side a really useful discussion gets cut short because class is over.

I did, I should say, have one workshop in grad school that pretty much felt like the writer’s group I’m part of now, but for the most part, academic workshops are useful, but the boundaries of the classroom setting prevent them from being as useful as a home grown sort of writer’s group would be.

The Reading Muse

2009-12-13T17:43:00.000-05:00

I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting my writing momentum back up after moving over the summer. For the first couple of months here, I was preoccupied with finding a job, getting unpacked, and learning my way around a new town. Then I was preoccupied (and stressed) with getting adjusted to a new job. Then with adjusting to another new job. Then with quitting the second job. Then figuring out how we were going to scrape by on my income from only the one job. . . .

So for the past few months I’ve been trying different things to get myself engaged with writing. Some of them have worked – well, sort of – like jogging my brain with a writing prompt to get those creative juices flowing and then immediately shifting my attention to another, more important (to me) project. Some of them have failed miserably, like trying to draft in my head while I’m making the hour and a half commute to work, and then expecting that once I get to a computer I will be bursting with ideas that I just can’t wait to write down.

What I didn’t try, and I now realize may have been the most successful of all, was picking out a book that would match the sort of writing project I felt like working on, and then simply reading that book and letting it be my muse.

I’ve been struggling my way through reading a collection of short stories for something like a month and a half – has it really been that long? A month and a half spent reading one single book! It isn’t that the short stories in the collection are bad. In fact, I like the stories quite a lot; I like the writing style; I like this writer’s dry sense of humor, her poetic voice. But I haven’t been in a short story kind of mood. Well, it turns out that my reading mood matches my writing mood. I haven’t felt like writing short stories, and I haven’t felt like reading them, either. That’s why I spent so much time just trying to force myself through one book.

I’ve been trying to decide between working on the, oh I don’t know, let’s say one millionth draft of a children’s book of mine and a second draft of a novel. I’ll settle on one, open up the file and try to immerse myself in the story, and very quickly my mind will start to wander to one of the many other things I probably should be doing – I just don’t feel inspired. But any seasoned writer will tell you that it’s not a question of waiting for inspiration. If you wait for inspiration you might never write a thing, or you might write so sporadically that you’ll never really improve.

At any rate, I finished the story collection the other day and decided that I felt like reading a children’s book next. I picked up a book I’ve been dying to read for some time now and was almost instantly sucked into a whimsical adventure story. And you know what else? I started getting excited about my children’s book all over again. Delving, as a reader, into the sort of book that I want to write inspired me to get back to work on my own book.

It makes sense. I mean, isn’t that why we become writers to begin with? Because we are avid readers, and because the things we read inspire us? We don’t create in a sort of vacuum; everything that we read and have read informs each new piece that we write. And the things that we read that really engage us send our minds reeling with limitless possibilities, limitless new ideas just waiting to be written.

The Short Stuff, Revisited

2009-12-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

For a long time now I’ve found myself torn between my belief that it’s important that writers who are just starting out in their careers be working on book length projects, and my absolute certainty that you have to start at the bottom and work your way up (the bottom in this case being getting short pieces published in small literary journals).

It’s kind of a contradictory idea, or at least it may seem that way at first. Which is it? What should we be spending our time on: the short stuff that we can submit to journals or the long stuff that we can use to query agents and book publishers? Well I still firmly say both, and something happened to me this past week that might help illustrate why.

As you may or may not be aware, I divided my time fairly evenly in grad school between working on multiple drafts of a full length novel and writing and revising numerous short stories. Most of my peers spent their time on one or the other (and the scale, at UAF anyway, was tipped dramatically on the side of short stories alone). I started grad school as an unpublished and largely undisciplined writer, and left with a handful of small publication credits on my CV and a full length novel that I was ready to send out.

A couple of days ago I received an email from the editor of 34th Parallel, a small journal that published a flash fiction piece of mine about a year ago. The editor forwarded to me an email he had received from an assistant at a New York literary agency. She had read the issue of the journal with my story and wanted to know if I had a novel in the works that I could query the agency with. An important side note here is that she specifically stated that the agency is not interested in short story collections.

Before I go on I have to pause and remind you that this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, or at least, it means nothing more than that she liked my story. I sent my query in immediately, but I may never hear back, or I may receive a form rejection, who knows? Boiled down to its most basic parts, this is still nothing more than a query.

But the point is that there are two important components that made this rather exciting opportunity possible (after all, whether they ultimately reject my novel or not, I was lucky enough to rise to the top of the slush pile with this agency: they actually requested that I query them!): I had to have a story published in a journal, so that the agency assistant could even find me in the first place, and I had to have a novel already ready to go, so that I could answer the agency’s request that I query them with a novel with anything other than: Thanks but . . . I don’t have anything to send to you . . .

The moral of the story? It is important to be working on both. Besides the fact that queries that have no publication history to speak of in the author’s bio paragraph probably don’t look very impressive, getting shorter pieces out there in literary journals can get you noticed by literary agents. They do read lit journals, keeping their eyes out for new talent, and I’m sure that they pay closer attention to the queries from those writers whose work they already know they like than that mass of random strangers who send hundreds and hundreds of unsolicited queries to them every week. Yes, the short stuff is important, and so is the long stuff. If you want to make it out there, your best bet is to try to master both.

Another Post about Time

2009-11-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

As the month of November rapidly approaches its end, bringing the year 2009 close on its heels, and as I accept the truth that I will not meet my writing goal for the month yet again, I’m finding myself wondering how people in the real world – ordinary, working class people, people without rich spouses or independent wealth – ever reach any level of success in the arts. I was so sheltered in my MFA program for the past three years that I honestly forgot how hard it really is to find time to write, when so much of your time is taken up with the drudgery of survival. The have to’s of life.

This is something I’ve been talking about a lot lately, I know, and the reason I’ve been talking about it so much is because I’m realizing more and more that it really is a ceaseless struggle for most of us. Most of us will never get a million dollar book deal. Many of us will never even get an agent. Some of us may never even get a book published at all. In other words, most of us will always have to find the time. Make the time. Carve it from stone, as seems to be most writers’ metaphor of choice.

I haven’t met a single writing goal (I’ve met submissions goals, but those are different) since I graduated with my MFA. In fact, for this entire year I’ve only completely met my writing goal once: for the month of January. My last few months as a student were spent busily filling out graduation paperwork and preparing for an epic move. A majority of my summer was spent in the midst of said move, as well as working on a couple of critical articles that are being published in literary magazines and finding a job – and otherwise getting my bearings – in a new state. Okay, but what about after that?

Maybe it’s partly that I lost my momentum. Maybe it’s partly that I still haven’t quite gotten used to this new life. But I think a lot of it really, truly is that I just don’t have the time anymore. I don’t. When I was a student I had heard stories about past graduates who absolutely stopped writing after they got their degrees. One guy told me, a year after he finished, that he had decided to take a month off from writing after he graduated and had just never gotten around to starting back up again. Another graduate – a friend of a friend – had graduated three years before me, and she hadn’t written a thing since she finished. I could go on. There are many more.

I am not exactly like those people. I haven’t stopped writing. No, I haven’t been meeting my goals, but I do still write. But I don’t write as much as I’d like to and I don’t write as much as I believe is necessary to really get to where I want to be. I’m beginning to realize that I will probably never be able to consistently meet my golden three hour a day goal (a goal that was difficult, only sometimes manageable, even when I was an MFA student). Lately, I haven’t even been able to meet a one hour a day goal. So what’s to be done?

Well, one interesting point that one of my husband Damien’s professors made recently is that maybe we’re wrong to think we should always be writing. Maybe we should completely reevaluate the way we look at how we spend our time. Of course you can’t never write and reasonably call yourself a writer. But what about the time you spend doing other things that then gives you inspiration in your work? What about the time you spend thinking about the world around you, an absolutely indispensable part of being a good writer? Or engaging in stimulating conversations with other people? Observing humanity in all of its brutal beauty?

While I think it’s important to keep carving away at that fabled time stone – we should still write and write often, if we can – maybe we shouldn’t get so down on ourselves when we don’t write as often as we feel we should. Maybe that just makes it worse. Maybe that just misses the point altogether. Because the point – isn’t it? – is that we do this because we have to. We do it because it’s how we make sense of this mysterious world around us. We don’t do it for the quantifiable final products. We do it for the experience. We do it because it makes all that time spent doing other things feel like it all means something, feel like it matters.

A Larger Horizon

2009-11-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

One topic that tends to come up in cover letters for submissions to MFA/MFYou is the idea that there is a lot to be gained as a writer from having real life experiences, completely unrelated to literature and creative writing. Many non-MFA writers suggest that the time they didn’t spend studying writing in an academic setting they instead spent having real experiences that they can now translate into their work. Having jobs that non-writers will be able to relate to. Visiting interesting places. Getting to know all kinds of interesting people (and not having a majority of their friends and colleagues be writers and literature scholars).

Lately I’ve been revising a novel. I wrote the first draft while I was a grad student, during a break between drafts of my graduate thesis. I had came up with what I still think is a great premise and a really fun character, and then I sat down and banged together a rough draft, just trying to feel the plot out as I went. But something was off. It was bad even for a first draft. The plot was dull and contrived and all the characters except for the main character seemed like caricatures of particular types f people

I still felt like the core idea had potential, but I had no idea how to tap that potential. I looked at the draft from every angle. I picked it apart for elements of craft and looked closely at how each component of the story functioned, ultimately trying to determine why the novel wasn’t working as well as how I could make it work. I realized that the problem was as fundamental as the plot. The problem wasn’t the perspective, or the structure, or the metaphors and analogies and symbols I used throughout. The problem was that the plot was completely boring and uninspired.

I decided that I wasn’t mature enough, as a writer and a human being, to write this novel. I needed to live several more years of life first and have varied experiences, meet strange and interesting people, and gain a broader perspective on the world around me, all of which I could then weave into the story to make it come to life. And so I set the novel aside and began work on another project in the meantime.

But I’ve recently gotten back to work on this novel. I had one of those flashes of inspiration that pointed me in the direction of where this novel needs to go, and it came from taking one foot out of the world of literature and creative writing. I’m still part of that world, certainly, but I took a couple of steps away after I graduated. I began teaching at what is primarily a technical college, took a second job in retail, and even more valuable, began spending more time exploring a totally unrelated-to-literature interest of mine. And suddenly, a few days ago, it hit me what I should do with the novel. I’ve been enthusiastically working on the next draft ever since.

I’m a huge proponent of the value of creative writing programs, but I do think it’s true, too, that an English education alone will not give you the tools to write interesting, engaging, worthwhile literature. Studying craft is important, but so is knowing about interesting things and having experiences that are completely separate from the world of books and artistry. It’s not enough to know how to write. You also need something to write about.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

2009-11-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

When I started going to school for my MFA, one of the major things I expected that people got from these programs was important contacts that might lead to agents and publishers in the future. I had heard countless stories – all about the most prestigious programs in the country, I’m sure – where at the end of a young writer’s MFA studies, a faculty writer refers the young writer to his or her agent and just like that, the writer is set.

I quickly found out that this is not as common as we might have been led to believe by the success stories we’ve all heard. Yes, the chances are good that many of the faculty writers in an MFA program have agents. But the chances are not good at all that they will refer you to their agents. My guess is that even at those top tier programs, it’s not a common practice.

But in my experience most agents will tell you that the number one way to get them interested in you is to be referred by one of their current clients. So what’s a young writer just starting out in the publication world to do? The answer, I think, is keep honing your craft, keep writing, and keep submitting to journals, and be patient. It may not be likely that you’ll be referred to an agent while you’re in an MFA program, but that doesn’t mean that the contacts you make there won’t help you down the road.

Part of what I sometimes forget is that if you’re at the MFA level, you’re probably not at the professional level, not yet. That’s not to say that most people don’t start getting published in journals while they’re in an MFA program, or at least shortly thereafter, but I bet if you asked most seasoned writers, editors, and agents how many MFA students and recent MFA graduates are actually ready for agents, book deals, deadlines, and everything else that goes along with being a professional writer, the answer would be not many.

The two people that make up the fiction faculty at UAF are both successful writers: one has won some prestigious awards for his short story collections, and the other had her most recent novel accepted by an imprint of a major publishing house. Both graduated with their MFAs from UAF, and both had to wait several years after earning their MFAs before they got their first books published. I think it’s fairly common for ten, even fifteen years to pass between graduating from an MFA program and getting that first book deal.

But you do meet a lot of other writers in a program, and while none of you probably have agents or useful contacts yet, many of you will eventually. Maybe ten years after graduating, your good friend Joe Writer lands an agent and is more than willing to refer you, his old grad school pal, his writer friend who he’s kept in touch with and shared work with these past ten years. Or maybe you’ll be the lucky one who gets to refer your grad school friends. Who knows?

I think the main contacts you make in grad school are not actually the faculty or visiting writers, although you do gain a lot by learning from these successful writers. But really, you and all your fellow MFAers are networking with each other. It might not seem like your workshop buddy is a useful contact yet – after all, he’s at the same stage as you in his career – but as you move forward, so will he, and so will most of the other people in your program. Together, you will all be part of the next generation of writers, and you’ll all be able to say you knew each other back when. You’ll all be able to help each other out.

More on the Slush Pile

2009-11-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

I want to talk about something that’s kind of a sensitive subject, a subject I’ve been avoiding talking about for some time because, while I think it’s extremely illuminating when it comes to the inner workings of literary journals, it may make a particular literary journal that I used to read for look bad.

So I’m going to start by pointing out that I don’t think that this practice is uncommon at all, particularly not amongst the journals that are run by MFA programs, which many literary journals are. And I would also add that even those literary journals that don’t technically do these sort of slush pile parties are still probably making decisions based on the same kinds of variables and gut reactions (that’s right, I said “gut” and not “visceral.” You know why? Because I’m not a pretentious a-hole). And finally, I would remind you that though this certainly doesn’t seem an effective way to wade through the slush pile, I don’t know that there is an effective way. The slush pile is massive and is ever growing; the people who have to read submissions simply do not have the time to give every single submission a fair chance. It’s a sad truth about the publication world.

The way the slush pile party works is this: all the editors and readers for a journal get together and the stacks and stacks of unread submissions are placed in front of them on a table. They have got to get that slush pile knocked out because more submissions are arriving every day and the older submissions simply have to be decided on before the pile gets any larger. So they dive in. They work through submission after submission as quickly as possible, trying to move on to the next and the next in the hopes of finishing and being able to leave at some reasonable hour. Which means, as you can imagine, not actually reading most of the submissions all the way through (not the prose ones, at least). It means reading every submission looking for a reason, any reason at all, to stop reading and reject. And many submissions, believe me, don’t get more than their first page read. Many submissions don’t get read beyond their first few sentences.

But this is a social event as well as a job. That’s why they call it a “party.” Sure, the term is sarcastic, but even as it is it’s also kind of serious. This is a chance for a bunch of friends to get together and share with each other what is normally very solitary work. There is a loud din of chatter going on during the entire event, and it’s very difficult to actually focus on reading through all that noise.

But what really depressed me the first time I went to one of these events wasn’t just the fact that submissions were not getting read carefully, that there was so much noise it would have been difficult to read something all the way through even if you had the time to. What made me almost want to give up was the fact that one of the major ways that the readers socialized with each other was by making fun of the submissions. (Again, I remind you: this, I am absolutely certain, is common practice. I can’t even count the times I’ve read about an editor who claims that almost everything in the slush pile is terrible. This is a sort of making fun, as is that fabled “wall of shame” we’ve all heard about, where editors will pin up on the wall, as a joke, some really terrible submission or cover letter.)

Now sometimes there really are truly terrible submissions. Some submissions are just asking to be made fun of. But some of them aren’t. Most of them aren’t. Most of them are well written, interesting stories or poems that are getting made fun of because the reader isn’t reading carefully. The other people in the room laugh along with the initial reader, who perhaps stops to read a sentence aloud, and they’re laughing not because it’s a terrible sentence but because the sentence is being offered to them as a joke. Because they understand that they’re supposed to think it’s terrible, and so they do.

I don’t know that there’s any absolutely foolproof way to guarantee that your work makes it through the slush pile alive. I suggested last week that one trick is to make sure you’re doing something new, but even then I think whether your submission gets read fairly probably has more to do with luck than anything else. But here’s the bright side: when you do get rejected, you shouldn’t take it personally. I know I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again but seriously, rejections don’t mean much in the big picture. Acceptances are all that really matter, and maybe rejections that actually give you personal feedback or encouragement. Form rejections, though? Just brush them off. Throw them out or file them away or nail them to your wall or burn them in a primal ritual, whatever your method is, but whatever you do, don’t let them get you down.

That Great Big Pile of Slush

2009-11-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

This past week I volunteered with a group of my colleagues at Zane State College to judge a fifth grade essay contest put on by the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. It was an interesting and fun experience and it reminded me a lot of the slushpile parties that Permafrost, UAF’s graduate student run literary journal, used to have. If you had walked in on us judging the essay contest, you would have found a group of exhausted looking English faculty sitting around a table with stacks and stacks of contest entrants in the center, and at our feet you would have seen stacks of essays that had already been judged. As the day wore on we got more and more draggled looking, I’m sure, and by the end of the day we were admittedly somewhat rushing through the essays, trying to just finish up already so we could get out of there. It was fun . . . but it was an all day thing and by the end of “all day” pretty much any activity begins to wear on you.

Even though we spent the first hour or so of the day norming our standards, we disagreed on a lot of things. While any essay that scored under a certain point got tossed to the side immediately, many of the essays had to be read by at least two readers. If the disagreement by those two readers was large enough, the essay would go to a third reader. It was fascinating to see how all these English instructors that all teach at the same institution could have such different reactions to the very same essays. Ultimately the winners were essays that we were able to come to some sort of a consensus on, though often the winner in one category would be the one that three or four people thought was the best, and the rest of the people just sort of agreed to accept the decision since the one that they would have chosen wasn’t going to get a majority vote.

This experience very much mirrored reading for a literary journal. You start with stacks of submissions and the feeling that you’re in over your head. Some of the submissions are going to be at a low enough level – however you even gauge that! – that you don’t have to spend much time with them. Others will have different readers in total disagreement. One reader might think it’s good but it should be rejected for X reason. Another might argue that X reason is nowhere near important enough to reject such a good piece. Yet another might think the whole thing is crap and it should be rejected now before anybody wastes any more time arguing about it.

Some editors and agents say that there are good submissions and there are bad submissions. The good ones will get published and the bad ones won’t. Period. This is absurd! It completely ignores how subjective literature is, for one thing, and it also relies on the fallacy that there are no other variables going into the reading process. If I grab a submission off the slushpile after I’ve been at it for four hours, I might, through no fault of my own, be less inclined to give it a fair read as I would have been if I had grabbed it at the beginning of my reading session. If the particular submission in question happens to be 25 pages long – forget about it! I don’t want to read another 25 pages right now. I’m probably going to be looking for any excuse I can find to stop reading and reject it. This is all completely subconscious. You don’t pick up a submission and consciously think, “I don’t think I’m going to give this a fair chance.” But the variables, the variables!

With the essay contest, what it really came down to, I feel, is that the essays that were saying something different from the other essays were the ones that rose to the top. Most of the essays were extremely similar. This did not make them inherently bad. It did, however, make them boring, at least after you had already read several others about the exact same topic. The same is true with submissions. You might get a really well crafted story that just happens to remind you of any number of other stories you’ve read or that have been submitted to your journal, and you’re going to reject it because even though it’s good, it bores you. I’ve received rejections like this, rejections telling me that the writing is excellent but the topic is nothing new. I’ve written rejections like this, too.

The fact is it’s the ones that are doing something we’ve never seen before that seem to be the ones we all agree that we like.

Get Some Rest!

2009-10-25T12:51:00.001-04:00

The MFA/MFYou newsletter is going to take a week off . . . because I am extremely sick. I'll be back next week, I promise, all rested up and ready to write your ears off. Or should I say eyes?

Sacrifices

2009-10-18T11:57:00.000-04:00

As the first full week of my new part time retail position draws to a close and the two stacks of papers that I have to grade for my classes remind me that they won’t grade themselves, I’m beginning to rethink my old idea that there is no such thing as no time to write. I haven’t been able to find a single second to write in the past week until right now, and even now I’m sort of choosing not to do what I should be doing so that I can spend a few minutes writing this. I’m already so drastically behind in my writing goal for the month that I don’t believe it’s possible to catch up, even if I quit the retail job right now . . . but I’ll come back to that later.

There’s this image that we have of the starving writer. The person so dedicated to writing that he or she behaves totally irresponsibly in all other aspects of life. Makes no real effort to hold down a job. Ignores family and friends in favor of writing. Ignores his or her own physical health, even, and hygiene, all in the name of art. We’ve all heard the stories. People who went on to great success and who will tell you that part of the reason they made it is because they made the conscious decision that writing was more important than, say, earning a steady income.

I always used to think that sort of behavior was utterly unacceptable. Artist or not, there are certain things we all have to do to survive. I thought that these success stories stand out only because these people got lucky. That for every one such success story there were probably hundreds of stories with similar beginnings but that ended with the person starving to death on the streets or at least eventually giving up the dream.

Well I’ve been realizing lately that what those stories are really about, I think, is sacrifice. That sometimes we have to make sacrifices so that we have time to write. It could be sleeping for an hour less, or not going out drinking with your friends on Saturday nights, or not watching TV, or, in my case, not working that extra job to bring in extra money.

This past week and a half, since I started the new job, I haven’t felt like a writer at all. I haven’t really been a writer, to tell you the truth. A writer is a person who writes, and I haven’t been meeting that one simple requirement. And the thing is there’s nothing that I could really sacrifice besides the job. I don’t watch TV. I haven’t been playing video games. I haven’t even been reading. I’ve been working the two jobs, and that’s it. I even had to schedule time to go on a date with my husband, Damien, the other day (and I fell behind on my grading as a result).

I see two possible choices that I can make here. I can choose to be a writer and quit this retail job so that I can have time to write, or I can choose not to be and keep the job so that we’ll have a more comfortable amount of money coming in. Between my meager income as a teacher and Damien’s as a TA, we make enough to scrape by. It’s a tight scrape and it will involve a lot of other sorts of sacrifices, but we’d have enough for all the basic stuff you have to pay for to get by.

And I’d rather be a poor writer than a financially comfortable nothing.

Being and Writingness

2009-10-11T12:46:00.000-04:00

I heard somewhere recently that when we visualize ourselves reaching whatever ultimate goal we have – whatever sort of success we are looking for in life – we are setting ourselves up for failure. This, of course, is an overstatement, and it’s also not really that innovative of an idea, either. But we do hear motivational speakers and self help books rely on this somewhat wrongheaded approach: if you keep your mind in this fantasy world of where you want to go, it will motivate you to take the proper steps to get there.

What I heard recently is that, in fact, we should be visualizing ourselves taking the small steps that will lead the way to whatever that larger goal is. That we shouldn’t distract ourselves from the practical, concrete things we need to do by fantasizing about ourselves in some dream version of the future, which may or may not come to pass. This, of course, is just another self help nugget – and self help nuggets, as a rule, are not very helpful – but I think there is more truth to this idea than this visualizing yourself having reached the ultimate goal hooey.

This idea is essentially the same method as making small, attainable goals that will lead you in the direction of where you want to go – and feeling good about yourself when you reach each of those small goals. The big problem with the other method is that you can reach small goal after small goal and actually be doing quite well, but still be years away from reaching that ultimate goal that you’ve been dreaming about. The result is that you might feel discouraged, might feel like these small steps aren’t getting you anywhere, might just give up altogether.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had these elaborate fantasies of myself becoming rich and famous off of my writing. I would think about how great life would be one day, when I wouldn’t have to have another job outside of writing (and filmmaking, which was my other big dream at the time), and when I would have regular meetings with an agent and with editors. When I would have plenty of money to live comfortably and live well and, more importantly, make my living off of an activity that I enjoyed doing, anyway.

Here’s how it would go: I would sit down to write, be at it for maybe half an hour, give or take, and then I would start thinking about how good I believed this thing that I was writing was. How this was definitely going to get accepted somewhere. How this was going to set me on that path I had been desperately trying to find the entrance to: that fabled path to success. And then I would start thinking about what would happen next, and what would happen after that, and where it would all lead – that final image of myself as a successful professional writer.

I was one of the biggest writing clichés: the person who wants to have written rather than to write. I wanted to skip all those steps inbetween and just get to the point where I would wake up in the morning with nothing that I had to do but write. But of course, I had time to write; I was wasting it fantasizing about success. Those steps that I wanted to skip? Those were the steps where you actually, you know, write things.

I have this theory that most of us – maybe all of us – enter into that stage somewhere early on in our development as writers. We begin writing, of course, because we enjoy it, but once we start to realize that we’re kind of good at it, and that there are people out there who make a living off of being good at it, well that’s when the trouble begins. The important thing is that we move past that stage.

I’ve reached a point now where I pretty much just assume that I won’t ever get a book published by a major publisher, that I won’t ever make enough money to live off of writing. And the surprising thing is that this is actually a very freeing realization, because now my focus is on meeting these small goals I set for myself. Writing for X amount of time every day. Submitting to X number of journals each month. Getting the kinks worked out of Y story and better developing Z character. Now I actually feel like I’m sort of living the life I want to . . . right now. I don’t have to fantasize about a future that will probably never happen because the point is that I want to write, and as long as I squeeze time out of my days to do this, I would say I’m living the dream. I am a writer.

The Real World and Other Nightmares

2009-10-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it’s because I had a nightmare last night about work – one of those dreams where everything goes wrong and you lack the wisdom to deal with it the way you would in real life – but I’m feeling sort of cynical about life in the real world today.

This past week has been sort of a downer for me as a writer. I’ve had a phenomenally busy week – planning lessons, grading papers, getting things squared away with a new part time retail job I’ve taken to supplement my teaching income, and as always: errands, errands, errands. I haven’t written much this week, and what frustrates me is that it’s not because I’ve been sitting around watching TV or playing DS (my video game drug of choice). I haven’t written much this week because every second that I’m awake I have something else, something more pressing that I have to do.

I’ve talked before about how saying you don’t have time to write is something of a cop out. I do think this is true – after all, you could sleep for an hour less each night and spend that hour writing, if nothing else – but I also think there is something to be said for the lifestyle of a graduate creative writing student.

When I first started grad school I felt that my life suddenly revolved around teaching – and I wasn’t even sure at the time whether I wanted to be a teacher. I hated my new life, and I spent a lot of time ranting about how I had had a lot more time to write when I was working in an office than I did now that I was a creative writing MFA student. (This time I spent ranting, of course, could have been more wisely spent writing.)

After I got used to it, though, and especially after I got the hang of teaching, I found that I had waaaaaaaaay more time to write than I ever did out in the work world. When you work eight hours a day, yes, it’s possible to come home and write for an hour or two, but don’t forget you also have to make dinner, spend time with your spouse, run errands, and sleep. If you get home from work at five, and you should really try to be in bed by, say, ten so you can get a good eight hours before having to get up at six and get ready for work, you really don’t have a lot of time in which to carve an hour or two to write. And you can absolutely forget about the possibility of writing for three hours a day – which is always my ultimate goal.

As a graduate creative writing student your schedule is much more open. It’s stress, more than any real barriers, that keep you from writing. You teach one class (in most cases) and take two or three. Most of your homework is enjoyable – it is, after all, your field of interest – and even after doing all your homework and all the stuff you have to do to teach, after running all your errands and doing everything else you have to do to survive, you still have plenty of time leftover to write and write and write and write.

Not so, I’m learning, as a part time adjunct instructor and a part time retail sales girl. I haven’t even gotten into the thick of the retail job and I already can tell that finding an hour or two to write everyday is going to be a constant battle. Every single day I will have to search for time, figure out how I’ll do it this time, figure out what I need to sacrifice to squeeze it in.

But I know even as I write this that I will work it out. I’ll find some routine that works and I’ll get my writing time in. Maybe not as much as I would like – that three hour a day goal feels more unattainable than ever right now – but I’ll find some time. I’ll find enough to keep myself sane. And in the meantime, I’m thinking again about PhD programs. I’m scheming how I can get myself back into that cushy life where even though you don’t make a living off of writing, it’s just assumed that writing is important and that you simply must have time to do it. That writing is as essential as breathing, that it’s one of those basic functions that keeps us going, keeps us alive.

Editorial Feedback

2009-09-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

So one of the non-MFA writers that MFA/MFYou has published mentioned that he doesn’t feel he’s missed out on anything by not getting a formal creative writing education – he gets essentially the same (or one could argue more valuable) feedback that you get in workshop from editors when he submits his work. This is very true. Although not all editors give feedback on rejected submissions, it’s not uncommon for editors to give personal feedback on the submissions that came really close to getting accepted or even that they liked enough to bother spending the extra few minutes writing a real rejection and not just sending out the form response.

This past week I got a rejection that caused me to go back and revise a story – and the story, I feel, has greatly improved as a result. What happened was that the editor gave me a reason for the rejection that happened to be the exact same reason that another editor had given me a few months ago. The problem that these editors pointed to had to do with the amount of exposition that fell at the beginning of the story. The first time an editor told me this, I recognized that this was true of the story but I felt that it was alright – that it was still well written and engaging and I shouldn’t feel the need to change it just because the current standard is that we don’t like it when stories have a lot of exposition.

But when the second editor cited the exposition as the reason for rejection, I decided I would be wise to go back and revisit the story with that concern in mind. I opened up a new document and wrote a new beginning, working to address the problem these editors had with the story, but I kept the thought in the back of my mind that if I didn’t like the end result, I would chuck the revision and keep the story as it was. But I did like the end result and I think that the story is immensely stronger now.

This is similar to the experience MFAers sometimes have in workshop. You might cringe at some of the workshop feedback, but when several people agree that something is a problem you’ve got to be kind of arrogant to not seriously consider their concerns. The difference here is that I think in some ways the feedback you receive from editors should carry more weight. If more than one editor – having no knowledge of what other editors have said – agree that something isn’t working in your piece, you’d be wise to really think hard about whether they might be right.

I had another editorial feedback episode yesterday, this time for a story that has been accepted for publication (from a market that is both paying and international – woo-hoo!). The editor sent me some feedback and would like me to revise the story and get it back to her in a week. Much of her feedback was similar to the margin notes you receive in workshop. Not the major stuff that gets discussed out loud in class – no, if there had been major problems I doubt that the story would have been accepted at all. This is the sentence level stuff that gets marked on the individual copies of a piece: this sentence is a bit awkward, this bit of dialogue seems out of character, this is perhaps a bit of a cliché. That sort of thing. And it’s all (with the exception of one sentence that I plan to talk to the editor about – see if I can convince her why this is okay) stuff that I agree wholeheartedly about.

I feel like my workshop experiences were at least partially preparing me for the feedback I would later receive from editors, but I also think that you could skip the workshop environment altogether and, as long as you’re a mature enough writer (and human being) to be able to listen open-mindedly to criticism, you’ll be able to improve using the editorial feedback that will inevitably come your way. You may not always like it, and you certainly won’t always agree with it, but you should be happy to get it whenever you can. None of us can do this entirely on our own.

Average Reading Levels and Other Forgotten Things

2009-09-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

I’m teaching Technical Writing this fall and I came across an interesting bit of information that I can’t help but apply to creative writing. The textbook I’m teaching out of says that it is common for businesses to put out writing at a sixth to eighth grade reading level. The book cites a study that says that while 28% of Americans graduate from college (a very low number to begin with), only about 31% of college graduates can actually read at what we would consider a college graduate level. Simply put, if you’re writing very complex, highly intellectual prose, you’re writing for a very small audience.

While this is more important from a technical writing perspective than from an artistic perspective – you may decide that you don’t want to dumb your art down just so that you can reach more people with it – it still, I think, is worth thinking about. Consider what a higher reading ability your average master’s or doctorate level creative writer has compared with the average, everyday American reading public. Small presses are sometimes willing to put out the highly artistic, intellectual stuff even though it has a low chance of making them any real money, but most of the bigger publishers aren’t even going to consider your work if it can only be marketed to people with English graduate level educations.

And this in my opinion is one of the most legitimate arguments against getting an MFA. The feedback you receive at a graduate level workshop comes from graduate level writers and readers, people with advanced educations, reading abilities, and a stronger than average willingness to work hard to figure out what a text is getting at. They applaud the innovative and unique, the experimental and peculiar, and they deplore things that are easy to follow, straightforward and traditional, plot driven or with a deeper meaning that most readers in the class are able to figure out. In essence, they don’t like the stuff that is actually going to be accessible to a wider audience.

That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with writing for a small audience of like minded individuals. But I would argue that there’s nothing wrong, either, with taking audience into consideration and actually writing at a level that non-writers and non-scholars will appreciate, too. I’m not saying you should write at a sixth to eighth grade reading level – unless, of course, you’re writing books for sixth to eighth graders. The average American who actually reads for pleasure, I’m guessing, has a higher reading ability than the average American period. But I don’t think the average reading American is at a graduate reading level, either. In my writing, I’m interested in writing stories that are well crafted and complex enough that those scholars will consider it passable – though maybe not exceptional, not perfect by any means – and I don’t want to alienate the larger reading public in the process. I think there can be a middle ground.

I believe that a lot of graduate students aim for that higher ground and end up limiting their audience. Yeah, the few people who read their stuff might consider them brilliant. But they will never have more than a few people willing to read their stuff. This, I suspect, is where a lot of the negative MFA sentiment comes from. I don’t even know how many submission guidelines I’ve read that specify that they are not interested in the writing getting pumped out of MFA programs. I think it’s true that MFA writing sometimes seems pretentious and it’s true that a lot of it is not actually enjoyable – you read it because it’s doing interesting things, not because it’s actually entertaining.

I also don’t think that getting that MFA automatically means you will become one of those writers. You can – and should! – pick and choose which of the feedback is actually going to bring your writing to the point you would like it to be, and this is true whether you’re in a graduate workshop or a writer’s group out in the real world. But there’s a lot to be said for studying the books that actually sell instead of only the books that are considered artistically interesting, and of getting feedback from other writers who are trying to write for a wider audience than from writers who value the strange and the difficult above all else.

The Network

2009-09-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

Some funny little coincidences have happened lately that remind me how small a world we writers live in. At a get-together for the new graduate students in Damien’s program a few days ago I chatted with a girl who told me about a poet friend of hers. She mentioned a few specific details that I very quickly connected with a poet we had published here at MFA/MFYou. I asked her what the name of this poet friend of hers is and sure enough, it’s one of our fabulous MFA/MFYou contributors.

But wait, there’s more:

Last night Damien was chatting on Facebook with a PhD fiction writer in his program. She told him that his profile picture is in an online photo album that a cousin of hers is in. That’s odd, Damien thought, because the only photo album she could possibly be talking about is one created by one of my old professors from my MFA program. Damien prodded her for more details and sure enough, her cousin studied creative writing at a college that my old professor used to teach at before he came to UAF.

Small world.

I noticed recently that a poetry professor at my old MFA program is Facebook friends with a nonfiction professor at Damien’s current program. A while ago I had a friend recommend a book to me and then another writer friend mentioned casually that he knows the guy that wrote it – they were on a panel discussion together at a conference some time ago. I was looking up agents the other day to find possible people to query about my novel and I stumbled across an agent page flashing an image of my UAF mentor’s most recent book

The thing is, the world of writing really is that small. When I was younger I used to fantasize about being part of an entourage of writers. You always hear about this big writer who is friends with that big writer; you always notice writers thanking each other in their acknowledgement pages.

Through my MFA program, and through Damien’s MA program, we’ve met numerous successful writers, some reasonably famous writers even, and many more that are on their way up. We’ve begun to become part of that very small world where you know people that could possibly introduce you to someone who could possibly publish your next book, or help you promote your current one, or even just give you invaluable feedback on your work. This networking idea seems overwhelming at times but it really is important. And it’s really not as difficult as you might think to break into that great big little network of writers.

Momentum Revisited

2009-09-06T10:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve talked about momentum before and I’ll probably talk about it again but I’m going to talk about it today, too, because it is, in my opinion, the most important ingredient for success in writing – and most anything else you could ever do. After having spent the past couple of months focusing mostly on scholarly writing, moving, and finding a new job, this month I’ve been focusing on trying to get my momentum back up as a creative writer.

I liken my experience this week to the episode of The Simpsons when Homer decides he wants to be an inventor like Thomas Edison. Homer quits his job and clears his schedule and sets up an office for himself in the basement. He writes “Inventions” at the top of a notepad and then sits there tapping his pencil against the pad, waiting for the brilliant ideas to come flooding in. And of course, they don’t.

You can set aside a block of time, you can arrange an office for yourself or set up your computer just so, you can put your cat outside and send your husband or wife to the store, you can tell yourself “today I am going to write that story/poem/essay I’ve been wanting to write about bla bla bla,” and still, still, you find yourself sitting there in front of a blank computer screen, feeling despondent.

I know this seems in contradiction to what I always say about how it isn’t an acceptable excuse to say you don’t have time to write – the time is there you just have to decide to spend it writing. It’s true that I’m a big proponent for knocking out the excuses and just writing; I don’t believe you should call yourself a writer if you don’t write and write often. But I do admit that there’s more to it than just deciding that you’re going to spend the next hour writing. And that more, I believe, comes down to momentum.

I used to spend an average of about two hours a day writing, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, and it never felt the way it feels right now when I sit down to log in my time – like I’m forcing it. But the thing is, I’ve lost my momentum and until I get that momentum back up I’m probably going to feel like Homer tapping his “Inventions” notepad and waiting for the ideas to come. But if I don’t stick with it, if I don’t keep sitting down to write everyday for at least an hour, I’ll never get the momentum back.

Already I can feel it getting easier. Two mornings ago I woke up with a break through about a story I was working on – third person! I need to change the perspective from first to third! – and I rushed downstairs to get cracking on it. Yesterday I suddenly had a flash about something I should add to my novel and even though my husband was home, The Simpsons was blasting from our living room TV, and it wasn’t time I had specifically set aside to write, I turned on my computer and excitedly worked the new idea into the novel.

I’ll be teaching this fall and the quarter begins in two weeks. I fully expect that as long as I keep sitting down to write everyday by the time school begins and my schedule gets busy again, my momentum will be going strong as a creative writer and I will be able to comfortably juggle both teaching and writing. It would be easy to give up, to tell myself “well, you just can’t force it” or “I’m just not inspired right now” and do something else instead, but I think it’s important to stick to it until you’ve trained your mind into lingering in that writer mode. Then, and only then, will I feel like a real “writer” again.

Group Motivation

2009-08-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

My first semester as an MFA student was extremely difficult. I’ve touched on this before, I know, but I’m thinking about it more and more lately with my husband and some of his colleagues getting ready to begin their first quarter in their creative writing program. Around here anxiety is high, as you can imagine, and so is hope.

There were a number of reasons why that first semester was so hard for me, and a lot of it had to with that obnoxious artist’s ego that had to be completely broken down and smashed into as many tiny pieces as possible to be sure it couldn’t put itself back together. But one of the problems with going through that very necessary ego check is that you don’t feel very motivated to keep at it when you feel like a lousy writer, or when you realize that there are too many writers out there to count just as good as – or better than – you.

I hardly wrote at all my first semester in grad school, and the few things that I did write I wrote because I had a workshop deadline. I think this is actually quite common at the beginning of a program – and many creative writing students never break out of this funk. They spend their entire three (or two, if you’re an MA student) years only writing when they have to, only when it’s homework, and then they stop writing altogether after they graduate.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I think the key would have been to use that automatic community of writers that I got to be a part of to my (and their) advantage. This past week Damien and I had a little writing party at our house. We invited some people we’ve met so far from Damien’s program and then we did two half our writing sessions, each starting with a separate prompt. In between sessions we ate, drank, and were merry, as they say. It was very successful – a lot of fun and it got us all writing. At the end of the party everybody agreed that we should make a regular thing of it, that even when school is in session something like this would be a great way to keep everybody motivated and generating new ideas.

And all it took was for someone to organize it. Why not you? I have a theory that most people in creative writing programs desperately want to do things like this, but they often feel overwhelmed by school and teaching and everything and so don’t think to start a group themselves. That or they feel like it should be a given in a creative writing program that everybody is motivated to write just by workshop alone, or by knowledge that their thesis will eventually be due, and so they don’t think they need a writing group outside of school. But I think the professors in these programs are just assuming that students are meeting outside of school to write and workshop each others stuff. That the people in charge take it as a given that the program, alone, is not enough.

This sort of group can operate outside of a creative writing program, too. All you need is to find some fellow writers willing to do what they claim they enjoy doing – to write. While this is of course easier in a creative writing program because pretty much everybody that you know is a writer, it’s certainly not impossible in the “real world.” There are writing groups on the internet if you don’t know any other writers personally and you could easily set up a community writing group – just ask your local library and bookstores if you can put flyers up on their bulletin boards and windows. But I think the important thing is that if there isn’t something in place for you to join, you should take the initiative to start it yourself.

Writing is not an automatic function, like breathing, as much as we sometimes pretend that it is. Most serious writers engage themselves in writing communities to keep in practice and keep motivated. Maybe once you’ve got a publishing house that provides you with an editor you’ll be okay on your own, but until then you’re responsible for building or joining your own community. And trust me, it will be worth it.

To MA or to MFA, That Is the Question

2009-08-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

Something I’m sure we’ll be talking a lot about for the next while is the difference between an MA program in creative writing and an MFA program. What’s the difference between these degrees? Why is one a terminal degree and the other more of a gateway to a PhD? And how does a person choose between the two?

Let’s compare the requirements of Damien’s MA program to my MFA program. They’re pretty similar. While my program lasted three years, all the course requirements could be filled in less than that. Really, the extra year is to give you time to work on your thesis. Both programs require lit courses, workshops, and theory, and both require a creative thesis. And it’s the thesis, I think, that’s the key.

In my MFA program the thesis had to be a book length, publishable work. In Damien’s program, the thesis is much shorter – it does not have to be long enough to be a real book – but it must include a critical introduction. So maybe that pinpoints the difference between the two programs. The MFA is more of an artistic degree – the thesis is an actual book that you can then polish up and try to get published. It’s preparing you first and foremost for a career as a writer. The MA is more of an academic degree with a bit more of a focus on criticism, and it prepares you primarily for a career as a professor.

But the interesting thing is that both degrees prepare you for both fields. They would have to, wouldn’t they? Because you can’t really make a living off of writing, but at the same time if you’re getting a degree in creative writing it’s because you want to write. In my MFA program I always felt like they didn’t prepare us enough for careers in the academic field – giving information about conferences, for example, and how to get scholarly essays published, what a career as a teacher entails (besides teaching) and how to get your foot in the door, all of which it looks like will be covered in Damien’s MA program.

But I suspect if I had gone through an MA program I would have felt there wasn’t enough preparation for a career as a writer (having to write a book length work for your thesis seems to me a huge difference from being allowed to turn in a few short stories, essays, or poems. If you’re doing a complete book the process in many ways mirrors the process of working with an editor to get a book published. The MA thesis to me is more reminiscent of a portfolio you might hand in at the end of a single creative writing class).

So I suppose there is a difference, but it’s slight enough that maybe the real question shouldn’t be do you want an MA or an MFA but which individual programs are going to be the best fit for you? Which programs have the instructors whose work you respect and who you would like to work under? Which programs allow you to teach creative writing and which only allow you to teach composition? Which programs have the better track records of people finishing and getting good jobs, and finishing and getting books published? Which programs have you heard good things about? Which programs did your favorite writers graduate from?

The Value of the Degree

2009-08-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

After a month and a half long break, MFA/MFYou has set up shop in beautiful Athens, Ohio. For those of you who have been waiting for what may feel like centuries for a response on a submission, we have every intention of getting through the backlog and sending out some responses soon. In the meantime, our newsletter is back on schedule.

I wanted to talk this week about the value of the MFA degree itself. It’s something I’ve often derided, feeling that the experience is valuable in that it helps you become a better creative writer, but the degree itself is essentially worthless in any real world applications because the only thing it qualifies you to do is teach, which not all creative writers are interested in doing. And even if you do want to teach, like I do, you may need to publish at least one book before you’re a real contender for a tenure-track full time position.

But all of that was speculation based on my understanding of the degree’s value and the experiences of other people that I know who graduated and then had a difficult time finding any kind of full time employment. Now that I’m no longer an MFA candidate but actually a holder of an MFA degree, and I am, for the first time, looking for a job as an MFA, I’m revising my opinion regarding the worth of this degree.

Before I moved to Ohio I sent out my CV and cover letter to four different community colleges in the area. I had low hopes for finding anything because I didn’t know whether they would consider my experience as a TA sufficient, but I figured it was worth a shot. I requested to be considered for adjunct work, if any was available at any of these schools. Three of the four schools responded to me while I was on the road. Two of those schools offered me two courses each as adjunct, and one of the schools is actually considering me for a full time position. Before I got into town, I already had a job interview scheduled for the full time position and was in touch with the department chairs from two other schools about possibly teaching adjunct if I don’t get the full time position.

I’m comparing this with other people’s experiences right now, trying to find work in these hard times. Even though I read on the MLA website that the average adjunct English instructor salary comes to about $11/hour (shamefully low!), it’s actually not a bad position to be in – being qualified for a specific career. One of the department chairs I was speaking with told me that it’s very difficult to find qualified English instructors and I’ve heard that with the economy in the slumps more and more colleges are turning to adjunct faculty to level out their budgets. Not a very well paying job, no, but a job that’s in high demand.

In addition to that, my fear that finding full time work would be impossible at this stage is proving unfounded. I made it all the way to the final interview stage for this full time position, and while I may not get the job (I probably won’t know for another week), it’s important to remember that I wouldn’t have even been considered for it without my master’s degree.

I think part of the MFA-is-worthless attitude comes from wrong expectations that graduate students sometimes have regarding their career path. I think a lot of people in grad school want to move directly into cushy, full time positions as creative writing faculty after they earn their degree but, like in any field, you have to start at entry level and work your way up.

I enjoy teaching composition and I enjoy teaching early level lit courses. Creative writing is fun to teach, too, but in my experience, composition is the most rewarding because of its more diverse range of students and the more vital nature of the material being taught. An MFA degree does qualify you to teach comp at a community college – it qualifies you to teach full time if you can find an open position. It’s true that if you want to teach in a graduate program or if you want to teach in a creative writing program specifically, you’ll probably have to get a book published first, but if you really like teaching there are plenty of other options out there that an MFA will open the doors to.

The Question of the PhD

2009-06-28T16:46:00.000-04:00

This will be the last entry of the MFA/MFYou Newletter until August. We’re making the quite epic move from Fairbanks, Alaska to Athens, Ohio, with a lot of extended pit stops along the way, and surely won’t have the time (or the desire) to keep up with weekly entries during the month of July.

This week I want to talk about something that for some reason has been coming up a lot in conversations I’ve had with various professors in the program lately: the creative writing PhD. I haven’t completely decided how I feel about this at the moment so I’m going to give a bit of what I’ve heard other people say to start us off.

I heard a literature professor recently talking about her frustration that the creative writing PhD undermines the value of a literature PhD. She feels that since a literature PhD is a highly advanced degree involving extensive amounts of research and effort, a creative dissertation doesn’t come close to comparing with the work you do for a lit PhD and so the two degrees are uneven, though they have the same title. As a result, the mere existence of the creative writing PhD devalues the lit PhD, which so many people spend years and years slaving to earn.

The topic came up again at dinner last night when a creative writing professor mentioned that she feels the creative writing PhD devalues the MFA. An MFA in creative writing is a terminal degree; it’s meant to be as high as you need to go to be able to enter the field. If it’s possible to go “further,” that is, if you can also get a PhD, it would seem that an MFA may get to a point where it’s no longer terminal. She said that some MFA programs will not hire faculty members with PhDs in creative writing to avoid undermining the degree that they confer in their program.

Having just earned an MFA I can say that, after studying for and taking an extensive comprehensive exam, after taking three years of coursework, and after writing and defending a complete novel for my thesis, I do feel that a PhD in creative writing would be redundant. Especially now that I’m aware there’s such a controversy over it, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to pursue a further creative writing degree. It would especially be frustrating to get a PhD in creative writing and, as a result, find yourself barred from teaching at a number of MFA programs and holding a degree that offends people.

But what if you want to become a better literary scholar and researcher, and are interested in expanding your credentials as a teacher? And if a PhD in creative writing is slowly devaluing the MFA, what will you do if, in ten years, say, the MFA is no longer considered a terminal degree? Will explaining that you chose not to get a PhD in creative writing for ideological reasons help you get a job? And while there may be MFA programs who don’t want to hire people with PhDs, isn’t it possible that some PhD programs feel that hiring a professor with an MFA would be like hiring someone with a BA to teach in a Masters program?

It’s a complicated issue and right now I just don’t know where to stand on it. For me, I think I might try to get a PhD in literature down the road so that I have the more advanced degree, but not the one that can be seen as devaluing my MFA. I’m also curious to talk to the faculty at Ohio University, where my husband Damien will be starting as a creative writing MA student in the fall, because OU confers PhDs in creative writing and so they likely come at the issue from another perspective. It will also be interesting to compare Damien’s experiences as an MA student – an MA being a non-terminal degree – with mine earning a terminal MFA degree. We will definitely be revisiting this issue in the future.

Inspiration

2009-06-21T20:52:00.000-04:00

I’ve heard a lot of talk about how there is perhaps more inspiration for writing material outside of an MFA program, in that fabled “real world” everyone talks about. I imagine this is probably true, and in fact as I’m preparing to move to Ohio in a few weeks I’m going back and forth with what would be better for me: finding a good teaching job at one of the many community colleges in the area, or getting a regular job and stepping away from the very different world of academia for a while.

But I do think there is a lot of inspiration to be had in an MFA program, and for me a lot of that inspiration came from reading the work of my peers and instructors. All the other students in my program at UAF were absolutely amazing writers and most of them had very distinct styles from each other and from me. I think one of the most useful things you can do as a writer is expose yourself to a wide range of writing and experiment around with some of the things you see other people doing. This is different from just reading a lot, since in an MFA program you can then actually talk to and get feedback from the very people that inspired you.

In my program there were two people in particular whose work I was just blown away by and who as a result really inspired me to push myself to step out of my comfort zone and see what would happen if I tried this or that. (That’s not to say that I was only blown away by the work of two people; there were many people in the program whose writing really impressed me. But there are two in particular who really inspired me to experiment around with some of the things they were doing).

One was a fellow student, who is in my opinion the best writer in the program (or at least whose writing is my personal favorite) and who has this incredible ability to meld fantasy-type genre stories with absolutely amazingly well crafted, literary writing. The first workshop I had with her she submitted a story that everybody just fell in love with, myself included. It had a touch of magic and fairy tale-like fantasy but also very strong character and voice, and I was super inspired to try to experiment around with magic realism in my own writing – which has been very fun and I think has helped me move to the next level as a writer.

The other is an instructor in the program, award winning writer David Crouse, who in the very last workshop I took at UAF actually submitted his own work to be workshopped alongside the students. Not only was it super cool to get to workshop such a successful writer’s work at the same time as our own work, but I felt really inspired to push myself to be less, well, obvious in my writing. I’m well aware that my number one problem as a writer is that I’m often heavy handed and come right out and say things that it would be better to let the reader put together for him or herself, and when I saw how much it can work to, as he says, “withhold” more, I made an effort to try to work more on that in my work.

This is a different sort of inspiration, yes, than what people talk about when they say there is more inspiration in the real world than in an academic program. But it’s inspiration nonetheless and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The Many Ways to Learn

2009-06-14T16:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday my husband Damien and I went to a panel discussion at the Alaska Book Festival. This Festival is still very new (this was the third annual) and it’s still finding its feet, so the variety of events is disappointing. Even so, every year since the first I’ve gone to at least one event and found it interesting and useful.

Yesterday’s panel discussion was perhaps the most intriguing yet. They had a nice range of panelists: a published writer, a self-published writer, an editor for a small publishing house, and a book reviewer for the local newspaper. The topic was publishing and marketing and with such a range of perspectives we learned about really the whole process, from how to make yourself stand out to get that book deal to begin with to how to market your book once it’s out there.

This is the sort of practical information that we all need to know if we want to move beyond writing stuff that we deem brilliant and then stow away in our desk drawer forever and actually writing stuff that is actually going to be read. I left the panel discussion with a page and a half of notes that I will probably revisit over and over again from now on.

Another quick anecdote and then you’ll see (I hope) where this is going: when I was an undergrad, I took a class on Latin American Women’s Lit (we read some really cool stuff in that class, by the way). One day during class the teacher stopped in the middle of a lecture and frowned at us. She wanted to know why none of us were taking notes on what she was talking about. Somebody pointed out that there are no tests in the class, just essays, so why would we need to take notes? The teacher was enraged. She said that when she graduated from college she had boxes and boxes of notes, which she’d hung on to ever since and had gone back and reviewed numerous times. Were we really just concerned with whether or not we would be tested over the information? Didn’t we want to actually learn this stuff?

As you can imagine, all of the students in the class (my young bratty self included) thought she was being absurd. You actually think we’re going to keep our college notes forever? We burn them in a primal celebration at the end of each semester. We do what it takes to get whatever grade we want and once we get that grade we move on.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through my many years of student and then teacherhood, it’s that most people aren’t really interested in learning the things that you’re forcing them to learn (or that they feel they’re being forced to learn). But let someone go out and pursue knowledge on their own and they’ll take notes, they’ll listen closely and they’ll even look up the information later.

When I was a grad student, I was appalled by how many of the students would not do the assigned reading, and hardly anyone ever took notes during class. I’m serious! These are people who were working themselves as English teachers, who had Bachelor’s Degrees in English, and who theoretically had made a decision to really commit their lives to Literature, either as writers or scholars, and yet many of them still totally slacked off at school (and I have to admit, I slacked off sometimes too). But I’ve noticed that at Book Festival events or that sort of thing, most of the people take notes, many of them ask questions during the Q and A after, and pretty much all of them seem excited to learn what the people on stage have to teach.

The variables are so different when you’re seeking out knowledge on your own versus learning it in a formal academic program. Still, I think either way it comes down to whether or not you're willing to put the effort in. One thing that I think it’s always useful to remember, though, is that the knowledge is out there. There are writer’s groups. There are conferences. There are Book Festivals and readings and all manner of other literary and writer’s events (many of which are free!). It seems that ultimately whether you grow to the point of being able to reach success has much more to do with your own will to actually do it than whether you were accepted into or joined an MFA program.

On Shyness and Being Socially Awkward

2009-06-07T14:59:00.000-04:00

You always hear about MFA programs as first and probably foremost providing you with a community of writers. It’s the promise of that community, of at last finding ourselves part of a group of people that we actually have things in common with and can talk to about literature and about writing (and about music and comic books and independent films and . . .) that lures so many of us to these programs to begin with.

As for me, I’m extremely reserved, socially awkward, and I just don’t feel comfortable at parties or in large groups of people. I’m fine one-on-one, or in very small gatherings, but put me in a situation where there’s a ton of people there and I can’t help but fade into the background and stop talking altogether. Well it turns out that the way people get to know each other in this sort of community environment is by having large parties. Of course. How else can an incoming group of new students and a massive group of current and past students get to know each other but to just mingle together and, well, talk.

This was very difficult for me, and when I first got here and started hearing about a party at this stranger’s house and a party at that stranger’s cabin, I opted out. I knew, even at the time, that I should go to these parties to get to know the other people in the program, but knowing that you should do something and actually doing it are two very different things. Plus I had the comfort of having family in town so I didn’t feel this pressing urgency to make friends.

So as you can imagine, I didn’t get to know the other students the way they got to know each other, and once everybody developed relationships with each other they stopped having large parties that everyone was invited to and started hanging out in smaller – or sometimes still large – gatherings, to which they only invited the people with whom they had become friends. Obviously. And I wasn’t one of those people.

It wasn’t until my very last year in the program that I started forcing myself to come out of my shell and get to know people in the program, and once I did I was horrified that I had waited so long. I have met some of the coolest, funniest, most intelligent, most any-other-positive-word-you-can-think-of people in the program here and it makes me sad to think I could have been hanging out and developing close friendships with them from the start.

But something that I’ve come to realize in this past year as I have gotten to know people is that most of the people in the program see themselves as socially awkward and most everybody in the program is at least a little bit shy. I think the stereotype is true: writer’s are generally of an introverted nature. If I had realized that from the start . . .

It’s way less scary, I think, to push yourself to get to know people if you know that it’s scary for them, too. But making the effort is well worth the reward, because while yes there will be people in an MFA program, just like everywhere else in the world, that you just don’t click with, there’s a good chance that there will be more people that you really will. If you’re shy and afraid to say the wrong thing (or not sure if anybody will be interested in anything you have to say, which is how I usually feel) just remind yourself that most of them probably feel the exact same way. Just like everything else in life, you get out what you put in. That community doesn’t build itself.

MFA/MFYou Issue Two

2009-06-02T15:05:00.000-04:00

Hot off the presses . . . or, freshly uploaded from my computer to yours anyway: Issue Two of MFA/MFYou. I'm excited about the excellent fiction and poetry we were able to put out in this issue, thanks to the hard work and good writing sense of our fabulous MFA/MFYou contributors. Check it out, you won't be disappointed. And if you still haven't had a chance to read Issue One, don't worry. You can find it in our brand new MFA/MFYou Archives.

Talking

2009-05-31T14:06:00.000-04:00

I love to talk to other people about literature and about writing. The only thing I love more than talking about it is actually doing it: reading and writing. But the truth is, talking about it is a close second. One of the things I was really looking forward to in joining an MFA program was that I would become part of a community of readers and writers who, I assumed, would all be way into to talking about it, too.

But this is one of my MFA expectations that didn’t quite get fulfilled, at least, not as completely as I would have wanted. What I found when I got into the program was that a lot of people, when I would ask them questions about the books we were reading for classes or the comps exam, or what they were working on as writers, were so burnt out on the subject from school that they didn’t want to talk about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making broad generalizations and this was not true of every single person in the program. Most of the people who I ended up liking the most were the ones who were as interested and excited about talking about literature and writing as I was, so maybe what it really comes down to is that some people just like talking about it and others don’t.

But I have another theory that might also be a little bit (or a lot?) true. I think when something that you love makes that shift (you know, the one that so many of us dream about?) from being your hobby to your occupation – either because it’s your job now or because it’s the focus of your academic studies – sometimes you start looking at it the way you look at, well, work.

Suddenly getting into elaborate discussions about a book you’ve read might not be that fun, since you were forced to spend three hours engaging in such a conversation in class and you associate the idea with school, which you do not want to think about right now. And the same with writing. A fellow student asks you what you’ve been working on lately and you feel like you’re being interrogated. “I don’t know. Just a story.” And that’s all you feel like saying because last night in workshop the other students spent an hour ripping your story apart and you’re sort of embarrassed and dejected and you just want to talk about anything but writing. Add to that the fact that if you become a career academic you’ll probably be writing intricate papers – or books – that go into a lot of detail as you argue your reading of a particular text or texts. Your way of having a discussion about literature becomes reading other people’s arguments about the text and then writing your own. A fun and valid way of doing it, sure, but can it really replace having an actual back and forth conversation about a book?

I don’t know why this didn’t happen to me. I always left class wishing it wasn’t over yet because there was more, still, to say about this or that book. And I wanted to know what other books my peers were reading, and what they thought of those books, and how much time they wrote every week, and whether or not they were submitting, and . . . and . . . and . . . Like I said, I eventually found some really awesome people who will sit and gab for hours about this stuff, but I can’t help but wonder if a better place to find people to talk to about these things might not actually be out in the real world.

I’ve been thinking about all the famous writers throughout history who were members of groups of people with whom they shared work, as well as talked about reading and writing. I could give some specific examples but I won’t bother – we’ve all read about writers who developed tightly knit and close friendships with other readers and writers, or who were part of literary or writers groups. It seems to me like one of the things that many – dare I say most? – successful writers have in common is that they had other people in their lives who not only gave feedback on their work but who connected with them in lengthy conversations about literature, philosophy, art, and the craft and business of writing.

Some of these groups, I’m sure, were formed with fellow academics, people the writers met as students or teachers, but many of them weren’t. If that’s the only reason you’re interested in grad school, consider that it’s quite possible that you’ll be able to form that sort of group on your own – and you may be better off doing so, since those people won’t have made the sometimes fatal mistake of turning reading and writing from their passion into their work. But however you do it, I hope that you do it. Maybe I’m biased because I enjoy it so much, but I feel that talking about reading and writing with others is an essential part of being a writer. It motivates you; it helps you look at things from other perspectives; it gets you thinking about new things that you hadn’t thought of on your own. We are each just one person, and we need other people to broaden our views. It’s as simple as that.

Oh that’s SO Cliché!

2009-05-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

One thing I noticed a fair amount of when I was teaching Creative Writing last semester was the tendency students had to refer to each others work as “cliché” or “stereotypical” or “unoriginal.” It’s something I remember experiencing for the first time when I took my first graduate level workshop – being cliché wasn’t something I had ever been accused of as an undergrad, for some reason, but my first semester in grad school I grew to loath the word cliché. Oh they tried to say it nicely, mind you. Things like, “This is funny in a totally clichéd way – I assume that’s what you’re going for, right?” or, “Your narrator seems like sort of an idiot because he speaks and behaves in a totally clichéd manner – is that intentional?”

I’m not going to bitch and moan about how much it hurts to be told that your writing is clichéd (a lot) or how it hurts even more to realize that (GASP!) the things your peers are telling you are true. I look back on my first graduate level workshop as one of the most painful but also most useful experiences I have ever had in my life, and while some of those comments still sting a little bit (they remind me, you know, how little actual talent I have because any ability that I do have has come from a whole lot of hard work) I feel I have improved drastically because of them.

But what I want to talk about here is my experience looking at it from the other side this past semester, as a teacher. I did have one incident during the semester where one student’s feedback was so over-the-top cruel (saying that the entire story was just one giant cliché and that it could not possibly be revised and should be thrown away altogether) but overall most of the students were trying to be constructive when they repeatedly accused each other of being cliché, and in fact, most of them were essentially right (of course, I still encouraged students to come up with more constructive feedback than “this is so cliché”).

Though a majority of the writing coming from that class showed promise (and some of it I believe will be publishable if the student keeps working on it), I would also say, if looking at it from an objective manner, most of the stories that were written for that class contained elements that were not particularly original. While some of the stories were certainly less original than others, it did seem to be true that most of the students were inadvertently falling back on ideas that most of us (who are perhaps more well read than a class full of undergraduate Intro to Creative Writing students) would say we’ve seen a thousand times before.

But here’s the trick. In general, the reason why things become cliché is because they’re effective. This is true on the sentence level (how many cliché metaphors and similes can you think of that would just shock you with their beauty and truth if it wasn’t for the fact that it was a cliché?) and it’s true on the larger scale, too. Characters often have this or that personality trait because it successfully tells you something important about them. We’ve seen this or that plot twist so many times because it works. See? Most clichés becomes cliché because, in truth, they’re excellent examples of writing.

What’s that you say? But a good writer comes up with his or her own good writing? Here’s the thing: I’ve come to realize that, at the early stage of writing, many excellent writers use clichés not because they’re not good enough to come up with something for themselves, but because they haven’t read widely enough yet to know that this is a cliché. It may well be (and I think often is) an idea that the writer came up with on his or her own, it just happens to also be an idea that tons of other people came up with too.

This is part of the reason why I think reading A LOT is essential to success as a writer. You have got to develop a broad knowledge base of what’s been done already and what hasn’t. Of course, there are a number of other good reasons why you should read a lot, but this is one that I think gets forgotten sometimes. And the other important thing I’ve taken away from this is the belief that writing really clichéd stuff early on – when you’re still learning how to write – does not necessarily preclude you from developing into a very good writer. It may well even be a sign of developing ability – you’ve figured out this thing that works, you just don’t have enough knowledge in your field yet to know that somebody else figured it out before you.

So write your clichés if you must. Eventually you’ll have to move past them if you want to be considered good by anyone but your mom, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that all writers who write in clichés are inherently bad. Maybe all it really means is that they still have a lot left to learn, and really, don’t we all?

Overwhelmed by Workshop Suggestions

2009-05-17T19:07:00.000-04:00

I got an interesting rejection this week. It was for a story I had submitted to workshop a few semesters ago. This story had been a totally different sort of writing from what I usually do and so, when I had it workshopped, I was really sort of insecure about what to do with it, not even sure what I wanted it to be. The truth is, I was probably a little overzealous in my revision to accept every bit of advice that was given to me whether it was really the right choice or not. But at any rate, I revised the story taking WAY more of the class’s suggestions than I normally would and started sending it out when I felt like it was ready.

The editor who rejected the story gave me some extremely useful specifics on why he was rejecting it. He said he thought it was a great idea, but X, Y, and Z were holding it back. Every single thing he pointed out were things I had changed about the story to follow workshop feedback. The interesting thing about it is that I realized, as I thought about his suggestions and compared them with the original workshop suggestions, that in many ways I feel that both sets of feedback were right. But how can that be?

I read somewhere recently that suggestions that are given in a workshop should rarely be taken – they should only be used as a sign for something that might be wrong with the piece at the moment. Once you figure out what’s fueling the suggestion, you should, most of the time, ignore the suggestion itself and come up with something on your own to fix whatever problem lies at the heart of the suggestion.

My problem was that, not feeling very confident about the story to begin with, and especially since it was a totally different sort of writing from what I normally do, most of the suggestions that were given to me during workshop sounded like great ideas. So I decided to take many of them. But once they had actually become part of the piece, they created a whole new set of problems that I hadn’t noticed until this editor pointed them out to me.

This is one of the dangers of workshop. I can’t even remember all the times I’ve been given feedback that sounded great while I sat in the classroom feverishly taking notes, and then when I went to actually make the changes I realized that they would never work – they didn’t fit with what I was trying to do or they created new, much larger problems or . . .

My problem this time was really a complete lack of self confidence in my own abilities to, well, write the story for myself. Workshop is great, don’t get me wrong, but getting feedback can become almost like a crutch sometimes and if you’re not feeling very sure of a particular piece it can do more harm than good to have a large group of people, many of whom are probably not picking up on your intentions as the writer, give you suggestions on how to make it more like something they would have written.

So it’s important to remember that your workshop did not write the piece, you did, and only you can make the final decisions of what to do next. It’s difficult, I think, but extremely important to find the right balance between having the confidence to veto suggestions that are wrong for this particular piece and yet the wisdom to recognize when there are problems with the piece and when feedback should be taken.

The Finish Line

2009-05-10T15:40:00.000-04:00

Well I’ve officially finished my MFA program. This past week was finals week and I turned my stuff in for the workshop I was taking and posted my grades for the class I was teaching and now I’m left with the peculiar feeling of having done everything I was supposed to do and yet knowing, still, that there’s so much more left to do.

I’ve heard people speak of the anticlimactic feeling of finishing but I would say that, although it doesn’t feel as monumental as I might have imagined three years ago, finishing does feel climactic to me. I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about how sheltered I’ve been in the program and how nice it is to be part of such a sheltered community of writers. Finishing, then, really does feel like the end of an era, the final chapter of a book.

It’s scary to think about going out into “the real world,” scary to think about (probably) getting a regular job, outside of academia, where my life will no longer revolve around sharing work and talking about writing with fellow writers. I’ve made some writer friends here, and hopefully I’ll make writer friends where we’re headed, too, so that I’ll always have people with whom to share work and talk about craft. But that stuff will be pushed off into the background, now, just like writing itself will have to be. Because first you have to worry about survival – feeding your family and paying your bills.

It sort of feels like moving out of your parents house that first time. All your life they’ve clothed you, fed you, put a roof over your head, fostered your development, (hopefully) encouraged you to become what you want to become, and now they’re stepping out of the picture. For better or worse, you’re on your own. And now you have to take over the responsibilities of taking care of yourself, something you didn’t realize was such a task when somebody else was doing it for you.

But even though it’s scary, even though it feels like I’ve reached the end of a book I very much enjoyed, the light shimmering around the clouds is that I get to pick right up with a new book, and who’s to say it won’t be just as good? Who’s to say it won’t be better? Just like moving out on your own the first time, leaving an MFA program is also exciting – it feels like the start of a new adventure. Now I can put all that stuff I learned and practiced in the program to use. Now I can put myself to the test, see if I really have what it takes.

And as scared as I am right now, I still say: BRING IT!

Reading by Choice

2009-05-03T14:37:00.000-04:00

Last week I had a sort of exciting revelation: not being in school is going to mean that I have time to read things that I choose to read! I know, I know – that’s obvious. But I hadn’t really thought about how much that really means until I got totally involved in – and inspired by – Stephen King’s newest short story collection.

That’s right. Stephen King. Can you think of a less MFA approved writer?

My required reading for workshop – the only class I’m taking this semester – was finished and with my thesis done, my comps exam behind me, and all of my lit credits already in the bag, I didn’t have any papers to write or any books that I needed to read. So I had time during a semester to read a book that I didn’t have to read for school – a very rare occasion indeed.

No, it’s not the best book in the world – it’s not even Stephen King’s best book – and if you’re looking at craft issues it’s nowhere near as well written as the stuff we’re required to read for school. But it was a freaking enjoyable book even so. I got totally sucked in, to use that old reading cliché, and one of the stories in particular (a story called “The Gingerbread Girl,” one which I highly recommend and which I would argue is well crafted and worthy of being studied in an MFA program) really inspired me as a writer.

I won’t say too much in the hopes that you might actually read the story yourself, but there’s a very high tension point where, based on the way a certain thing is described, an image flashed into my mind – a very disturbed image of something that one of the characters could have done to the other. But it didn’t happen; something else happened instead, which made perfect sense for the story, of course, but I couldn’t get my idea of what she might have done in that situation out of my head.

I was so engaged with the story that I wanted to remain in that world even after I finished it. I wanted to see what would happen if the character had done what I had, for that one brief moment, expected her to do. So I started writing my own story. No, it isn’t like fan fiction. It’s not the same world, not the same characters, not the same story in any way. Just a new story about a woman who finds herself in a similar situation and she does what I wanted her to do.

I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And I felt more inspired and more into what I was writing than I’ve felt in a long time. My story is so different from Stephen King’s that I can’t imagine anybody would even see what the two have in common, but the important thing is that I picked a book off my shelf, one which I felt in the mood to read (a luxury we absolutely do not have when we’re required to read X book on X week in school), and I ended up totally inspired to write something new.

It made me really excited about the fact that I won’t be a student next year. As much as I love school, and I love discussing the required reading with others, there’s a lot to be said for choosing what to read for yourself. Of course personal taste comes into play, and your receptiveness to a particular book at a particular time can be greatly altered by whether you happened to be in the mood for that sort of book, and ultimately I feel that reading something by choice can be a much more fruitful experience than reading something because you have to. And so I’m actually starting to feel that (as much as I praise and praise and praise some more the value of MFA programs) I’m likely to grow a lot as a writer in the near future by not being in school anymore. Hurray for the silver lining!

In Defense of the Thesis Defense

2009-04-26T13:45:00.000-04:00

I should talk a little bit about what exactly went on at my thesis defense and what I gained from the experience. Before I went to my thesis defense I took the opportunity to go to other people’s defenses – whether they were defending fiction, poetry, or nonfiction – and in preparation for my own defense I took notes on what questions were being asked and then tried to answer the questions myself later for practice.

This, as I have said before, was one of the most useful things about the entire thesis process, because in my preparing for the variety of questions I might have to answer I actually was forced to think about all kinds of things that I hadn’t really thought about before. (That’s not to say that I hadn’t thought about craft related issues as I was writing my novel, but there were still other ways of looking at it that I hadn’t had time to consider.)

But my defense itself was extremely interesting (and fun, once I got over the very bad case of jitters I came down with that morning). They asked me some questions that I had definitely anticipated – questions about the difficulties I had as a female writing from a male perspective, for example, and questions about the difficulty of rounding out your “bad guy” characters so that they are real, believable human beings and not just evil demons. But there were also a number of questions I hadn’t planned on – questions about my decision process for events that would occur in the novel that might be predictable versus events that would be totally unexpected, questions about passive versus active characters, and questions about the thematic symbolism I tried to weave throughout the novel, hell, even questions about the ratio of dialogue and interior monologue to plain narration of action.

In many ways, it felt like what I imagine an author’s interview would feel like, where somebody who has read your work closely is asking you questions about how you wrote it. But many of the questions brought up new ideas for revision – I hadn’t really thought, for example, that some of the events in the novel were predictable or that one of my characters might come across, at times, as too passive. And many of the other questions made me feel pretty damn good knowing that thematic details and that sort of thing, which I had tried to weave in subtly, were being picked up on by close readers.

After my defense my committee and I had some time alone where they told me how much they really did enjoy the novel and then gave me some concrete suggestions on how I might revise it further. I left feeling, well first of all relieved that the whole thesis process was pretty much over (I just had to fix a few typos and then turn it in to the graduate school), but more than that both encouraged (they liked it! They really liked it!) and excited about future revisions.

One of my committee members suggested – and it was something I had already been thinking about – that I should set the whole thing aside for a few months so that, when I come back to do the next draft, I can reread it with fresh eyes. This is definitely the way it has to be because, after working on it for two years straight, I most certainly have lost any perspective on the work I might have once had. As I’m letting the sediment of the novel settle in my mind, I’m having a few writer friends whose opinions I really trust read it. I feel very confident that when I come back to do the next draft (which will probably be sometime this summer – I’m too excited about it to let it sit for too long), I’ll be able to do a very thorough, very good revision of it. But more than anything I feel confident that the things I learned from the thesis experience will stay with me as I write my next book, and the next one. As stressful as the whole process was (and it was very stressful for me – I have issues with anxiety, man) it was worth it a thousand times over.

The Thesis Is Not the Book

2009-04-19T18:33:00.000-04:00

Having recently defended my thesis, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between your thesis, which you must successfully defend to earn your degree, and the publishable book it will hopefully one day become. As I was getting ready for my defense I started freaking out about my chances of passing – suddenly this thing I had been working on for so long and had been feeling like was almost ready seemed very very very far from where I wanted it to be.

But then some people reminded me that you have to look at the thesis process as there being two separate sides to it: there is your thesis and there is your novel (or book of poetry or collection of short stories). Your thesis will probably not be ready yet when you defend it. That is, it will not be ready to publish. But that’s okay. Part of the point of the thesis process is to prepare you for the work ahead of you in putting together a publishable book – you’re not expected to actually finish the program with one ready to go, rather, you should finish the program with the skills to get a book ready to publish.

After I turned my defense copy in to my committee members, I started to notice all kinds of things about the book that I wanted to change. As I prepared myself for the sorts of questions I would be asked at my defense things just started to click into place in my mind. Suddenly I could see problems with the structure, with certain characters, with some of the underdeveloped aspects of it like the setting, that I had never quite been able to see before.

It made the few days leading up to my defense uncomfortably stressful, because suddenly I saw all these flaws with my novel that I was worried my committee members would make a big deal out of during my defense, but on the positive side, once I passed my defense (and it was actually a wonderful experience but I’ll talk about it some other time), I left feeling very excited about all the new ideas for revision I had – and a renewed feeling that I would be able to turn this into something publishable if I just made the decision to keep at it until it’s there.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a writer getting their graduate thesis accepted for publication without having done at least one more revision – if not multiple revisions – after defending it and before sending it out. That said I have heard of many writers who did eventually get their graduate thesis published (and many of them are just wonderful wonderful books). I learned too much to even describe from the process of writing my thesis but perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the process was that two week period after I turned in my defense copy but before I defended. The questions that I ended up getting asked at my defense were extremely useful – but as I was waiting for my defense I prepared myself for a range of questions (many of which didn’t get asked) that really forced me to look at my thesis in a whole new way.

Right now I’m going to set it aside for a month or two so I can gain a little perspective on it and make the most out of my next revision, but I feel really excited about where to go with it from here. I’m super grateful to the entire thesis writing process for giving me the skills necessary to be able to trudge ahead and one day turn this book into what I want it to be.

Making Use of the Faculty

2009-04-12T22:45:00.000-04:00

This past Friday a couple of UAF professors put on a CV and Cover Letter Workshop for interested graduate students. The timing for this workshop couldn’t have been better for me, since I’m currently trying to put together a CV and cover letter to apply for adjunct jobs in Ohio. I have to admit, I felt like a fool because the CV I had previously put together (with which, by the way, I applied to graduate programs this past time around) was not at all what a CV should be. It didn’t even look like a proper CV – too fancy. To put together that CV I had looked up information on the internet, looked at some samples, and downloaded a template. Boy did these things lead me wrong!

At the workshop the faculty members answered questions, and one of them passed around copies of his current CV (with which he recently applied for and received tenure). These professors also recently went through a hiring process at our university, sifting through the applicant pool to try to find the best applicants for a few open positions. They gave us concrete, specific, and immensely useful information about what they were looking for on the hiring committee, what they do as applicants, and how we could put our experience in graduate school to the best possible use on our CVs and cover letters.

In addition to the fact that this was extremely helpful for me as I get ready to apply for my first non-TA teaching positions, this workshop really got me thinking about how much you can gain from just tapping into the professors’ wealth of knowledge about both writing and academia. This is one HUGE plus about MFA programs; you can learn all kinds of things about how to become a professor and you also get some good references to use when applying for future jobs.

I’ve said before that one of the major things you get from MFA programs is preparation and experience for a career in academia, and while this might not seem directly relevant to creative writing, consider how good a job teaching is for writers. How many writers work as teachers to support their writing addiction? Quite a lot, actually. Teaching is a great job for writers because it encourages you to keep working on your writing and affords you ample time to do it (can you say summers and winters off?) – in fact, if you don’t keep getting quality publications you won’t even stand a chance at ever getting tenure. Learning how to get your foot in the academic door is important, then, and I don’t know that there is any better way of preparing yourself for this sort of career than asking people questions who have been through it themselves. People like the professors in an MFA program.

Another Entry about Rejections

2009-04-05T14:27:00.000-04:00

Okay, down the rejection road one more time. Here’s the thing: rejections are an inevitable part of being a writer. I think because of my recent graduate school rejections I’ve been extra sensitive to rejections in general recently and I began to really question the worth of my writing. It couldn’t have come at a worse time because it was right before I had to turn in my thesis and prepare for my defense. I started to think, wait a minute, this book isn’t even any good, how the hell am I going to defend it?

Well I got a rejection a couple of days ago that made me feel a lot better, helped me put it all back in perspective. It was from a paying journal with a higher circulation than I’ve yet to be published in and the editor told me that my story was very good, that this was excellent writing, and that I should know that it made it very far along in the editorial process. She said that “as always, with such “rejections,” it’s important to remember that this is not a judgment about your writing.” This was a really similar response to what I got last summer from that agent who requested to read the manuscript of my children’s book and then ended up deciding not to represent me. A clear statement that they liked my writing, and that I shouldn’t consider the rejection as any kind of statement whatsoever about the work itself or my skills as a writer – it has to do, instead, with a number of variables that I have no control over. It as, after all, a business, and market trends, current supply/demand situations, etc. all play a role in what gets published and what doesn’t.

I can look at my stuff and say that I like my writing much better now than a year ago, or a year before that, or a year before that, and that should really be what I’m focused on. No, I’m not “there” yet, wherever “there” is. But I’m changing in a way that I consider improvement and as long as I keep at it, I’m sure this will continue to be true. And that matters much more than whether any individual story gets published by any individual journal.

There Is No Good and There Is No Bad

2009-03-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

Recently in workshop a student asked the professor: as a teacher how does he deal with stories and writers that simply aren’t any good? The professor responded that as a teacher he sets aside notions of good and bad completely and just looks at stories based on how they can be revised. This is something I’ve been doing as a teacher this past semester in my Creative Writing class. One of the professors at UAF always says that the purpose of workshop is to tease out the possibilities of the work submitted and now that I’m teaching Creative Writing I really agree that this is the best way of looking at it.

I find that every single story that gets submitted has the potential to become better and without even realizing it, I’ve been checking my personal tastes at the door. I don’t read my students’ stories with any thought of whether or not this would ever become a story that I, personally, would consider good. I don’t even think about whether this would be publishable – there is a wide range of publishable fiction and a lot of it is well outside of what I would consider worth reading (one of my students recently did a presentation on a mystery genre literary journal and pointed out that almost all of these stories were terrible if you look at them from a craft perspective, a useful thing to have brought up in class since it spotlights that very question of whether or not there is such a thing as “good”).

So instead of assessing the stories based on whether or not they are “good,” which would be impossible in my opinion, they need to be looked at with the assumption that any of them can become better than what they are now – and we’re going to try to help the writer get them there. An idea that goes hand in hand with this assumption is that any writer has the ability to make their stories good – the purpose of the creative writing class is to help writers learn the elements and technique of craft so they can make their stories become whatever they want them to be.

Possibilities, as that UAF professor puts it. It all comes down to possibilities. Where could this story go from here? What could be changed to bring out this idea more, or to get rid of that one? What about this story is creating this effect? What might be added to create that effect? Good or bad doesn’t even enter in to the equation.

It’s true that some drafts may seem further along the scale than others – one student may turn in a draft that already has all kinds of tantalizing things going on and it has less far to go to reach some of its potential than, say, another student’s story that reads, in that early draft, bland and clichéd. But that doesn’t mean that Student A is a “good” writer and Student B isn’t. Student A may spend very little or no time on revision and Student B may work exhaustively improving that story, working toward a final product that is much better than Student A’s. Does that mean that Student B is indeed a “good” writer and Student A isn’t? No. It means that Student B is doing what a real writer does and Student A isn’t. It means, in my opinion, that there is no “good” – there is only hard work.

Pushing Yourself

2009-03-22T17:41:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it’s the fact that I won’t be going to school next semester (yes, that’s right, it’s been officially decided that I’ll be moving to Ohio so my husband can begin study at a masters program there. I’ll try to find the least undesirable job that I can and focus my attention on getting my novel ready to send out) but this past week I’ve suddenly had a heightened sense of the value of the feedback that you get and the things that you learn in an MFA program.

Feedback is something I’ve struggled with I would say my entire time in the program. Sometimes I want to ignore some points of feedback altogether – write it off as that person simply not being in my audience – and I know that other people are prone to this as well, often directing their peers with what sort of feedback they’re looking for when they turn something in to workshop (and I’ve been guilty of this, too). But I’ve been thinking more and more lately that that sort of attitude will hold you back from getting to be the writer that you have the potential to become.

I don’t mean that I’ve decided that from now on every single suggestion that anybody gives me I’ll just mindlessly take. But ignoring bits of feedback altogether isn’t useful either. Ultimately, whether somebody would be in your audience or not has very little to do with whether or not you should consider their points. They are readers and writers and how they react to your piece is worth knowing – even if you won’t change the piece accordingly.

What I mean is that, you learn, as a writer, every time somebody misreads something that you wrote. And no matter what, people will always misread things. Even if it’s ready, even if you get it published to great success, there will always still be people who read it differently than you intended, get hung up on certain parts that you put in as mere background, or just plain dislike it for whatever reason they may have. And it teaches you a lot about writing to know these things.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that, with my time in the program very near to its end, I’m finding myself more and more interested and willing to try to crawl outside of my comfort zone as a writer, to stop saying, “Well, I’m just not interested in writing like that” and begin to experiment around with some of the techniques that I used to consider pretentious and now realize can be really effective, if done well.

I still believe that experimental writing is overused and that most readers aren’t interested in it, but I do think that, if something nontraditional can be done in such a way that it doesn’t seem experimental – that is, it’s so flawlessly integrated into the text that the reader doesn’t even notice the experimental quality of it unless they stop and think about it – it can be effective. It’s true that most of the experiments that we see in workshops aren’t being done well yet, but if you think about it, of course they’re not – they’re drafts! And I think you learn a lot from trying these things, even when they don’t work out.

But experimental isn’t really the right word. I guess what I really mean is not being afraid to move beyond what sort of writer you’ve always been and instead opening up to the possibilities of what sort of writer you have it in you to become. There are certain things that I feel afraid of trying because I think, “I’m just not a good enough writer to pull that off,” but really, the only way I can get to be a good enough writer is to push myself and try those things and learn from my mistakes until I get to a point where I can pull them off.

Writing without Workshop

2009-03-15T19:38:00.000-04:00

As March charges steadily toward its end I’m beginning to face the likelihood that I’ll be joining the real world next semester instead of continuing on as a grad student in a new program somewhere. So far I’ve gotten lukewarm responses at best – ranging from getting in to a program without being offered a TA to making it onto the wait list to getting flat out rejected. There are still two schools I haven’t heard back from but one of them I feel 99% certain I would have heard by now if I had gotten in and the other it’s likely will be a rejection, too, judging from the responses I’ve received from the other programs.

What does this have to do with workshop, you ask? That’s a very good question. I’ll tell you. Even though my preference would have been to get into a literature program, I had been planning on trying to take workshops as electives so I could continue getting feedback and being forced to grow as a writer. With the realization that I won’t be in school comes the realization that neither will I be taking workshops. And I’m starting to recognize this as a positive opportunity instead of something scary – something ominous – in my future.

I’m sure whether I’m taking workshops or not, I’ll share my work and get feedback from other writers (I’ll have to force myself to be brave about asking them is all). But instead of the broad range of readers in a workshop setting, it’ll just be the people I choose to share my work with and feel confident will give me the sort of feedback that will be helpful for me, personally, as a writer. I’m starting to see that this may actually be better, since I tend to take feedback very seriously – possibly too seriously – and it may be in my best interest to limit the feedback a little bit.

And aside from the obvious fact that it will be liberating to write whatever I want, revise it as I see fit, and not think about what a huge group of people with varied tastes would say, I think it’s also going to push me a little bit harder as a writer, too. I’ve spent the past three years taking into serious consideration the openly voiced opinions of my fellows workshoppers. I’ve learned a lot from it both as a reader and a writer and I’m able, now, to look at my own writing much more objectively and anticipate what major concerns a reader might have.

I think not taking part in the workshop environment will force me to put this skill to better use and force me to practice it, hone it. Instead of having the comfort of letting somebody tell me whether my suspicions about this or that aspect of the story not working are founded, I’ll have to work it out for myself – pinpoint the problems and figure out how to fix them. And I think it’ll help me take that next, necessary step forward as a writer.

Spring Break

2009-03-08T16:58:00.000-04:00

My mom's in town and I'm spring breakin' it old school. So I'm going to take a break from my blog, too.

Back to the Basics

2009-03-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

This semester, I’ve been given the honor of teaching Introduction to Creative Writing – Fiction, a class that grad students in my program aren’t usually allowed to teach. I should add that my being offered to teach this class was largely based on luck, a right time right place sort of thing.

Already in the first half of the semester I’ve gained so much from teaching this class that I now firmly believe that teaching creative writing should be a requirement of all MFA programs. Not only is it much easier to teach than academic writing (and I actually believe that the regulations on who is allowed to teach academic writing should be much tighter, at least at my university – come on, these classes are essential for these students’ future success in college and a lot of TAs don’t take it seriously at all, but I digress) but you also learn A LOT as a writer from being on the other side of the desk. After all, the best way to learn is to teach.

I’m sure my teaching experiences will be a frequent subject in my blogs for the next few months because there are numerous interesting and useful things that I have learned (and probably will continue to learn) by teaching creative writing. Perhaps the best place to start – and probably the most useful thing I’ve gained so far – is how useful it’s been to go back and revisit the basics.

That’s right. The basics. Working from an introductory level textbook that focuses on the fundamentals – plot and conflict, tension and resolution, revising and re-imagining – I’ve been reading about things that I haven’t thought about in years – since I was an introductory student, myself, and it’s funny how much some of this stuff has sort of slipped into the back of my mind as I’ve been taking more advanced workshops and forms classes.

I had an epiphanic moment (that’s right, epiphanies do happen in real life) when I was doing the reading and planning my lesson a few classes ago. There’s a story that I’ve been working on recently where I was focusing all my attention on exploring certain themes and working out the main character’s voice. Since all my attention was going into some more advanced techniques I was working with, I inadvertently allowed a sort of basic, beginner level mistake to seep into the writing. The reading that I had assigned for my class addressed the very same mistake, laid out in concrete terms why this doesn’t work, and talked about some alternative techniques that can be used instead to greater effect.

At first I felt like an idiot. Here I was teaching creative writing and here was this stupid mistake that I myself made in a recent story. I finished planning my lesson and then went back and revised my story. Even though when I wove the problematic technique into the story I had very specific reasons for doing it, the story is better off without it. As with most experimental writing (in my opinion), it was a cheap and easy way to try to get at the character’s voice when it’s actually much better – much more difficult to write and therefore more rewarding to read – if I get at the character’s voice through more traditional methods.

Going back to the basics is something that I think many MFA writers could benefit from. The textbook includes what has probably become my new favorite writer-on-writing quote. Flannery O’Connor said that as a writer, “you can do anything that you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” While many of us like to believe that it’s only by breaking the rules that you can achieve genius, I think the rules are there for a reason and while now and then breaking or bending one or two of them doesn’t hurt, totally abandoning the basics by the wayside is really just sort of arrogant and pretentious, and it isn’t likely to impress more than a handful of arrogant and pretentious readers.

So I’m excited to be taking a refresher course at the introductory level – by teaching it. Already my writing has dramatically improved by going back and restudying some of these things that I learned so long ago.

You’re Fabulous Kid but Seriously . . . Don’t Quit Your Day Job

2009-02-22T16:09:00.000-05:00

One of the most interesting misconceptions that I think people have about creative writing is that it’s a career. Certainly, it can be. There are a few (very few!) lucky creative writers who have either kept their expenses minimal enough or really hit the jackpot on the New York Times Bestseller List so that they are able to make a living off of writing. But most writers have a separate source of income to keep them going and creative writing is the thing they do to add meaning to their life – not to add money to it.

This is really visible in an MFA program, where you are surrounded by successful writers in the faculty - writers with several books published, writers who have won prestigious awards, writers who really know the business. And yet they all have day jobs as teachers.

In my own progress as a writer, I feel the point where I officially stepped over the line separating the wanna-be writers from the actual writers was the moment I realized that writing isn’t a career, that I absolutely was not going to make a living off of it, and at the same time I realized that I didn’t care and that I wanted to really commit myself to it anyway.

One thing that I often feel (wrongfully!) frustrated about in my MFA program is that there is no time spent on the business. We don’t get instruction or advice on finding an agent, on crafting a good cover or query letter, on how to tell whether your project is in line with current market trends. But the truth is this is just as it should be – because creative writing is an art, not a career. I call it a hobby and some people that I know sort of cringe when I say it, like it belittles what we’ve all devoted our lives to. But really, studying in an MFA program doesn’t prepare you for a career as a writer – at best, it prepares you for a career as a teacher, if that’s the route you choose to go. And it helps you hone your craft, your art.

If you’re not writing because you love to write - if you’re doing it because you believe it’s going to make you rich and famous or because you think it would be more fun than getting a “real” job – you’ve probably got some disappointment on the road ahead.

Letting It Be Real

2009-02-15T20:54:00.000-05:00

With my thesis defense rapidly approaching, I’m hurriedly trying to make my novel as good as possible by the deadline (which is about a month away). I recently received some really useful feedback from a couple of people who read my novel over the break and then I met with the head of my committee this past Thursday to work out some more ideas for revision. The good news? She doesn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t pass my defense. The bad news? I still have A LOT of revising to do to make it the publishable novel I want it to be.

I’ve had to face something these past few days as I mentally combined all the various feedback I’ve been given and tried to figure out how to address some of the major issues that exist with the ending of the novel. The ending is simply not going to work. It must change. Big deal, right? Well, it was difficult for me to accept this truth because when I set about to write the novel basically all that existed in my mind was the ending: I wanted to figure out how a character could get to the point of making a specific decision, a decision that is very wrong in my eyes. The entire novel blossomed from me trying to work out, in my own head, how somebody would make this decision.

But in the process of writing the novel, the story and the characters within it took on lives of their own. They became more than just an idea and they began to do things that were absolutely right for them to do . . . but made the ending make no sense. My brute refusal to accept that, to try and force the story to end this way simply because that was the original premise for the story, was essentially ruining the entire thing. I think Damien put it best when he told me that he had liked the book the entire way through until the ending, which ultimately made him angry and made him hate every single character completely. A pretty disappointing way to leave a story. This was not at all the reaction I was going for - obviously.

I realized, after really struggling with it, that the ending had to change. My thesis advisor made a wonderful suggestion for a good medium between the ending I had originally wanted to have and the ending that I absolutely did not want because I thought it would be too happy of an ending. Ultimately I realized that this new ending was more heartbreaking (the reaction I was going for all along) but even more important, it was way more complicated and real. This is the way this character would deal with the events that unfold throughout the course of the novel.

I feel like this was an important lesson about writing that I was going to have to learn sooner or later: that you can’t stay married to a premise. Or specific scenes, for that matter, or bits of dialogue or narration. Really, part of revising well is being able to cut and change the things that you love because they just don’t fit with this world and the characters within it.

For me writing is a very organic experience, I just sit down in front of the computer and type whatever pops into my head. As a result, the characters become organic, too. They live and breathe and do whatever the hell they want to do, regardless of what I wanted this story to be. In a lot of ways that means I have to give up my right to be the world creator – I’m more of an observer. The recorder of what happens. But if I impose my own vision of what this story should be or who these characters are it’s more likely to just destroy the whole thing, make it feel forced, scripted, created and, as a result, unbelievable. And not at all worth reading.

Comps

2009-02-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

All the second years and even some of the thirds out here are scurrying to get ready for the Comps Exam. Many and maybe even most MFA programs require students to pass an exam over a lengthy reading list – ours is forty books long, although I’ve heard of programs that have as many as two-hundred and some that have as few as twenty.

I took my Comps last year and I can remember the anxiety of the days leading up to the exam and I can certainly relate to how many of my fellow MFAers are feeling right now. I started reading from my list the summer before I started in the program. Forty books isn’t really that many, if you think about it, and I was actually originally planning on just trying to get it out of the way my first year. I read about a quarter of the list before I started the program and then during my first semester here, between teaching for the first time, getting used to how different grad school was than what I had expected it to be, not to mention adjusting to life in Alaska, which is pretty much just as strange as you might imagine, I sort of let the reading slide and decided I would take the exam my second year, like you’re supposed to.

Another full year to finish the list? That seemed like no problem! But my first summer out here I began excitedly working on the first draft of my thesis and once I had that together I started revising and revising and revising it . . . By the winter before my Comps date, I still had close to half the list left to read and the overwhelming feeling that I was not going to pass this test.

I figure out what I had left to do and planned out which books I needed to read by which dates. I knocked out three to four books a week during the winter break, but once the semester got back in (and I was teaching a sophomore level class that I had never taught before), my more immediate requirements got in the way and I found myself, a couple weeks before the exam, having to accept that I couldn’t possibly finish all of the books and instead I needed to figure out how best to familiarize myself with the few that I would not have time to actually read.

Sound familiar? If you’ve ever taken a Comps Exam it probably does. I’ve come to find out that most people don’t actually read every book on the list. They try their best, but you have a lot on your plate as a grad student and if you’re actually making sure to write a fair amount on the side, you may find yourself having to pick and choose which things you simply do not have time for.

But it turns out that Comps is all about doing the reading. Acquainting yourself with a wide range of texts in your genre. Once I took the test I was surprised at how easy it was. It was clear that the test itself was just a means to expose us to the books themselves. And I felt relieved, because it meant that I would pass even though I hadn’t read every single book, but I also felt sort of guilty, because the point of the whole thing was to read every book and I hadn’t done that.

The other day I was talking to a friend who is about to take comps next weekend and he mentioned that while he doesn’t think he’ll be completely done with the list in time for the test, he plans on finishing the few that he only read partway through as soon as he has time after the exam. I think that’s a smart move. After all, the Comps Exam is no different from anything else in a school environment. You get what you give. Passing the test doesn’t mean you gained what you were supposed to have from the experience.

I never did get back to my Comps list but I plan to, even the one that I didn’t finish reading because I hated it (sorry William Faulkner . . .) There are certain books it’s just good to have read, partly so you know what other people are talking about and partly because, as a writer, it’s good to step outside of your normal range of reading. Even the ones you don’t enjoy can teach you something (even if it’s simply techniques you’d like to avoid at all costs in your own writing). And in my experience, a large majority of the books are extremely enjoyable, anyway. So get reading! If you want to improve as a writer you’ve got to be willing to put all the necessary work in.

On Submissions

2009-02-01T10:00:00.001-05:00

Reflecting on a recent story acceptance I got from The Ampersand Review, I realized two very interesting things.

First, I realized something about rejections. This story is one that I just finished revising at the end of December and had only just started submitting it around when I already got the acceptance. I submitted it to seven places and got it accepted by one of them within a few weeks. It made me go back and reflect on the other acceptances I’ve gotten, and they’ve all been similar situations. Every story I’ve ever gotten accepted has been accepted quickly, after receiving no more than a few rejections before somebody accepts it. It occurs to me that, while I still firmly believe that rejections can be a result of many more factors than simply that the story isn’t publishable, it may be safe to say that if a story gets rejected by ten journals, it probably needs more revision.

I’ve heard of writers who use this as a rule. They submit a piece ten times, and if it gets rejected all ten, they stop submitting it and go back to work on it. But I was never too sure about that idea, since I know full well that a rejection might mean nothing more than that the editor didn’t even read more than the first sentence or two and was reading even that much just looking for a reason to reject. But since my record seems to suggest that maybe if a piece is actually ready, it will find a home fairly quickly, I’m re-evaluating my thoughts on this general rule.

I think I’m going to adopt this rule myself. If a story gets rejected in the first round of sim-subs, and I usually send out to around 10 places in one batch, I’ll go back and read through it again. Really closely look for what might be causing these editors to say no. It could be that the first sentence isn’t engaging enough, or something as simple as a missed typo early on which may be causing the editors to quickly lose faith in my professionalism. Or there may be more serious craft or plot problems that, for whatever reason, I didn’t notice the first time I decided it was ready.

The second thing I realized was that a lot of my fellow MFA students are simply not submitting. I had some conversations with a few different people about submissions recently, and it seems to be the case that many, maybe even most, of my peers in the program here at UAF rarely submit at all. This is so sad to me because you obviously can’t get accepted if you don’t submit and acceptances are an important part of encouraging you to keep at it. Over and over again I’m simply blown away by the excellent writing that my peers here are doing, and yet many of them have never even been published at all . . . because they don’t submit!

I really wish that MFA programs helped train people for the business side of writing. How to craft cover and query letters. How to approach agents. How to revise your stories not just to make them as good as possible for somebody who has already committed to reading them all the way through, but also to make your stories engage a reader (like an editor or agent!) early on who may not actually have the time to read every story they come across all the way through. And just as important as all those things is the simple act of submitting. Regularly.

But MFA programs don’t usually focus on these things and so it’s important for each writer, as an individual, to do it for him or herself. I think it’s a good idea to set goals for everything in writing, but even more so for submissions. Force yourself to submit to a certain number of places each month. Keep track of your rejections and don’t be ashamed of them, they’re an important part of being a writer. A fellow MFAer at UAF is collecting her submissions and counting toward the magic number 100, at which point she’s going to go out and treat herself for all the hard work she’s put in. I think that’s an awesome idea because after all rejections are just as much a part of being a writer as acceptances are. I say if you’re not getting rejected regularly that means you’re not submitting enough!

Yeah, It’s a Good Idea, but Can You Write It Well?

2009-01-25T19:25:00.000-05:00

So I read a book last week that, in spite of how much I want to leave it behind and get the bad taste out of my mouth, is worth talking about because it sheds some light on the great MFA/MFYou debate. This book, whose title and author I will politely leave undisclosed, was absolutely terrible.

This was the first novel by a science fiction writer, an MFYou. She’s very public about her writing process and as someone who is fascinated by learning about other writers and how they do what they do, I was interested in reading a first novel by someone who’s writing process I already knew a lot about. It was published by a small press, who apparently didn’t edit it very well because the book is full of typos and grammatical errors, but that aside, the book was very poorly crafted.

This is clearly not a writer who pays much attention to craft. Her focus, I can tell, is on plot. And the plot alone was quite engaging. A fun and funny approach to a classic genre of stories. While there were a few inconsistencies, which she tried to smooth over as best she could without actually going back and rewriting the offending details, the plot was pretty well done.

The craft side of the book, though, was horrible. There didn’t seem to be any thought put into how to tell the story, what perspective to be in, which details to include and which ones to leave out (I’m not all that interested, for example, in the elaborate section where the main character tries to remember whether or not she can go home because she may have locked her front door, only to remember at last that she has a key to her own apartment - it is, after all, her own apartment! And does any of this end up having to do with anything? NO!).

It reads like a first draft, one that has promise, one that you can imagine will be good, one day, but has a long road of revision ahead of it (like any first draft). The problem is, and I should have known this going into it because I did already suspect that she doesn’t understand the difference between revising and editing, that it seems she wrote a first draft, did some “edits,” as she calls it, which seem to be just surface level proofreading, and then considered it done.

But there was a lot more that needed to be revised. She needed to consider the voice of the narrator; she needed to think about perspective; she needed to think about what details we need and what details we don’t; she needed to think about how to describe things (outside of her rampant use of adverbs, we get hardly any description at all); she needed to think about how to tell us the important bits of exposition that we need to know; she needed to think about how to fully develop the characters. . . Essentially, she needed to learn to step beyond what happens in the story and to ask herself how to best express these things that happen and these people that they happen to.

It’s an interesting change from having just read Yesterday’s Weather by Anne Enright the week before. That book was still good; I enjoyed many of the stories and would have considered it worth reading even if I wasn’t picking it apart to find the difference between her older stories and her newer ones. But Enright’s trouble, in my eyes, was too much playing around with craft, not enough attention paid to plot.

This other writer has the opposite problem, but it seems this problem is more inexcusable. This book, even though I liked the plot, was not worth reading. And even though she was able to get it published, I can’t help but wonder about this small press, who put out a book so full of typos many of the lines don’t even make sense (and I haven’t even mentioned that some of the pages are printed crooked and the picture on the cover is fuzzy at the edges, like it was taken with a really crappy digital camera).

But again, it all comes down to that the best sort of writing pays attention to both craft (which I consider the MFA side of writing) and plot (which I think of as the MFYou side that MFAs often forget entirely about).

The Balance Between Story and Craft

2009-01-18T18:15:00.000-05:00

Last week I talked about Anne Enright’s short story collection, Yesterday’s Weather, and how it shows the importance of personal experience in writing. This is a difference between her earlier stories and her later ones that Enright herself noticed and referred to in her introduction. The stylistic shift that I noticed is more subjective and it may not be one that other people would agree with me about.

Enright has a very unique style: her stories are heavy on exposition and the narration tends to shift back and forth quite frequently from the “now” moment of the story itself and the characters’ pasts. There is also a certain vagueness to the storytelling, which is, I think, an attempt at subtlety that in my opinion often goes too far. I would almost call her writing experimental.

I noticed that, while there are certainly exceptions, I generally liked the more recent stories better. When I tried to put my finger on what it was about the more recent stories that I liked, I realized that many of them used this expositional shifting and vagueness far less than the older stories. A lot of them even had a normal amount of exposition, though some of them still had more than most stories would. And the vagueness, while it was still often present in these stories, was much more in line with what I would consider skillfully placed subtle hints about what it all means and what’s going on. The more recent stories seemed less like experiments and more like stories by a writer who has found her voice and has found the right balance for her voice.

It’s interesting, though, that many of the older stories reminded me of the sort of thing you see a lot of in MFA workshops. Writing that seems to focus more on doing something different than on telling a good story. I often think that one of the main differences you see from MFA writers and non-MFA writers is the attention paid to craft. I think a lot of non-MFA writers think more about the story, the plot and what events will take place. Whereas many MFA writers focus more on how to tell the story, what techniques should they employ and how should they structure this piece.

Ultimately, I think you have to focus on both for a story to be very good. More and more literary journals these days include in their submission guidelines that they aren’t interested in the sort of writing that gets manufactured in the MFA machine. Writing that pays little or no attention to plot, the story part of the story, and instead focuses entirely on employing artistic techniques that often leave the story completely incomprehensible unless you read it several times, extremely closely. Something that few readers and no editors will be willing to do. Really, only other writers have any interest in reading this sort of writing.

While Enright’s early stuff still managed to get published, I would argue that she has improved immensely over the years in large part because she has found a good balance between craft and story. I wonder if this is in part because she went and wrote several novels inbetween and you have to learn to pay attention to plot if you want to write a novel. Even writers looking for artistic inspiration are unlikely to bear with you for 300 pages of no plot.

In contrast to Enright’s collection from last week, this week I read a downright terrible book that has the opposite problem from Enright’s earlier work. I’ll talk about that next time.

A Question of Experience

2009-01-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

Anne Enright’s short story collection, Yesterday’s Weather, compiles stories from her 2008 book, Taking Pictures, her 1991 book, The Portable Virgin, and two stories that appeared in 1989 in Faber’s First Fictions: Introductions 10, a British anthology of new writers. A friend of mine did a presentation on Yesterday’s Weather in workshop last semester and I borrowed it from her to read over the break, thinking it would provide some interesting insight into how we progress as writers.

Anne Enright earned her MA from the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing program (incidentally the same place my thesis advisor Gerri Brightwell, author of The Dark Lantern, earned her MA before coming to UAF to earn her MFA, and for that matter, the University of East Anglia is the place many acclaimed British writers earned their MAs). In her introduction to Yesterday’s Weather, Enright says that she chose to organize this collection in reverse chronological order, where the more recent stories appear first, followed by the 1991 stories, and those early First Fictions stories finish the collection.

Enright says she organized the collection in this way in part because it is funny for her to see how much her view of the world has changed over time. Many of Enright’s stories are about being a mother and being a wife – two topics Enright openly admits she knew nothing about when she started as a writer.

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this shift can be seen when you compare two of Enright’s stories on the same topic: a story about a woman who realizes that her husband has had an affair. Actually, this theme recurs quite frequently in Enright’s stories, but for the sake of comparison we’ll look at one that was from the 1991 set and one that was from the 2008 collection. In the story originally published in 1991, the woman reacts by dying her thinning hair blond and stealing another woman’s purse at the salon only to drown it in the river. So. She goes a bit nutty, in other words. In the story published in 2008, the woman’s struggle is not so simple and the woman herself seems far more bothered by her husband’s infidelities . . . and yet, she is somehow also more accepting of them.

The more recent story feels realer to me. It deals with the issue in a more complex way and even though the feminist side of me (though I would never identify myself as a feminist!) is frustrated with both characters for not simply leaving their husbands, I believe the newer story (it’s actually more believable than my fantasy that the wife would just leave) and the story is laid out so that I feel I understand the character’s reaction. The character's reaction in the 1991 story is a little too dramatic in my eyes. In Enright’s defense (or at least, in defense of the writer she was 17 years ago), I’m simplifying the 1991 story dramatically; it is certainly still a complex story, but compare it with the 2008 story and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Looking at these stories in this way is intriguing since many of us get really serious about writing before we get really serious about life. That is, we lock ourselves in our rooms and write, write, write, the only problem is we’re spending all of our time at the computer and, consequently, have very little to actually write about. And some common life experiences (you know, those seemingly insignificant little ones that the ordinary reader will have experienced for him or herself and will, then, be able to tell if you’re speaking about something you don’t understand) just don’t really happen until you get a little older, have a little more perspective.

There is also an interesting stylistic shift that I noticed in Enright’s stories but I’ll talk about that next time.

On the Importance of Momentum

2009-01-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

It’s easy sometimes to forget the role momentum plays in our everyday lives. We talk about addictive behavior, or habits, or even decisions based on a sense of identity, but often what we’re really talking about is just continuing to head in the same direction we’re already headed, for better or worse, because we’ve built up a certain momentum.

I’ve really noticed the value of momentum as a writer lately. The past several months, close to the past year, really, I’ve had a really good momentum going as a writer. First I was working on my thesis, then I set that aside to work on revisions of a children’s book I had written previously, then I went back and forth between my thesis and several short stories, then short stories and the first draft of a new novel . . .

I’ve kept myself busy with a lot of different projects and never went more than a day or two without writing, and if I did for some reason miss a full day or two, I’d make up that lost time as soon as possible. Writing gets to be so automatic, when you’ve got that momentum going, that you no longer feel like you have to find time to write, it gets to a point where you have to find time for your real life. Writing is always the first thing on your mind, everything else feels secondary.

So secondary, in fact, that this past semester I spent so much time writing and daydreaming about my stories and novel that when crunch time hit I was wholly unprepared. I realized that writing had become almost like a bad habit, an addiction that was getting in the way of the things that were actually mandatory in my life (grading papers, writing papers, oh, I don’t know, feeding myself and my husband???) I figured that I had to stop writing for that last couple of weeks so I could finish up my school stuff --- but of course, that wasn’t possible. I was too addicted.

I managed to get everything done, and keep writing on the side, but once the semester officially ended, I turned in all my final stuff, posted my students’ final grades, and completely shut down. I had to do my Christmas shopping (after all, Christmas was only two days away by that point), and I needed to put together the first issue of MFA/MFYou. So I decided that just for, say, a week, I would stop writing and instead I would sleep in during the mornings, play video games, read comic books (and regular books, too). Just relax.

Now that I feel rested up, though, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting back into my groove. It’s funny how quickly that momentum can dissipate. I didn’t end up taking the whole week off, instead I took two days off, wrote one day, then took two days off again. But the trouble is, I went from writing almost every day for close to two hours (and never, as a result, having my stories very far from my mind), to writing in one small two hour block in the middle of a five day stretch. And now all the stories that used to bounce around in my head all day every day are much vaguer to me; they’re more like distant memories than the crisp, vivid, detailed things they once were.

I’m already starting to get that momentum back up, but I can’t help but take it as a lesson on how much we rely on momentum to get things done. Maybe the truth is what makes us writers is that we’ve allowed ourselves to become addicted to writing, the same way some people are addicted to chocolate or to TV. And while some addictions may be “healthier” than others, we have to find the right balance in life, and, once we find that balance, we’ve got to keep that momentum going.

Reckonings and Resolutions

2008-12-28T10:00:00.000-05:00

As 2008 draws to a close and winter break gets into full swing, I’m weighing up where I’m at right now, what I’ve done this past semester and year, and where I’d like to go from here. This is one of the things that I like the most about being involved in an MFA program: every semester there is an end, the perfect opportunity to really look at yourself as a writer, figure out where you are, where you’d like to be, and set goals to get yourself from here to there.

This past semester was an off and on productive one for me. I got a new draft done of my thesis, and one that I think is finally fairly close to where I want this novel to end up. I got some new stories written, some old ones revised, and I spent some serious time on improving myself as an academic writer, something that may not be important to all writers out there but if you want to be a teacher it’s not a bad idea to work towards getting papers published as well as whatever sort of creative writing you do.

But there are a lot of things that I’m looking back and shaking my head at, too. Recently, I started tracking how many hours a day I write with the hopes that I would discover that I write two to three hours a day on average. It turns out that, on average, I write a little less than two hours a day. Which is okay, I guess, surely a lot more than a lot of would-be-writers write, but it’s not as much as I thought I was writing. It’s useful for me to be aware of this, I realize, even though it’s a little disappointing.

I don’t know that this is a number I can reasonably change too dramatically, between being a wife and a cat-mom and a student and a teacher and let’s be honest, it’s important, as a writer, to read a lot, too . . . But I think it’s useful to be aware of how much time you actually do spend writing, and if the number is surprisingly low, it’s something worth working on. I’m going to set a sort of resolution for myself that for the year 2009 I’ll spend an average of at least two hours a day writing. I may or may not be able to do it, but I think that just by having that as a goal and by keeping track of it, I’ll be more likely to push myself that extra little bit.

The other thing I’ve realized I need to push myself more on is seeking out feedback from fellow writers. This semester with workshop and as I worked with the head of my thesis committee on my novel, I really realized the value of having people outside of yourself look at your work and give you honest feedback. This has been on my mind a lot lately because I’ll be graduating next semester and, if all goes as planned, I’ll probably be moving on to a graduate program in literature instead of creative writing and, who knows, I may never take another workshop class again.

I think it’s really important to be involved, one way or another, in a community of writers who you can learn from and grow with and who, if nothing else, can look at your work from unbiased eyes. I notice a lot of my fellow MFAs exchange work and give each other feedback outside of workshop, and it’s something I need to be more brave about taking part in, myself. I tend to be shy about it. I feel like I’m burdening other people if I ask them to read something and give me feedback, but I think it’s important and, especially once I graduate next semester, it’ll be something I’ll simply have to force myself to do since I’ll no longer have a workshop and thesis committee to share my work with.

And with that, I’ll sign off for the year 2008. Check mfamfyou.com on January first, when the first issue of MFA/MFYou will be up.

Prioritize!

2008-12-21T20:43:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about priorities, since with the end of the semester I had to meet those final deadlines as both a student and a teacher, and I had to set my writing aside to make sure I was spending time on the appropriate things (this is very much on my mind right now because I had hoped to get some work done on a specific story this weekend but I ended up having to A, do laundry, B, grade papers and submit my final grades, and then C, spend time with my husband). The end of the semester always makes me think about how we set priorities and how we squeeze writing into our otherwise busy schedules.

Of course, one of the major draws to an MFA program is that it forces you to set your creative writing as a top priority. If you work full time as a – whatever – and your writing is a sort of a hobby on the side (by hobby I don’t mean to belittle creative writing, but instead classify it based on how it fits in to our lives…) you have to take the initiative to decide to write instead of doing whatever else you could be doing. As an MFA student, of course, there’s also some choice in it (you can choose not to do your homework, as many of us know full well) but it IS expected of you that you will be writing regularly.

But whether you’re an MFA student or not, where we go as writers all comes down to how we set our priorities, and what we set as our priorities. Sometimes I’m not very good with prioritizing, as my not-so-clean-right-now cabin can prove. But whether you’re good with prioritizing or not, if you want to make it as a writer, you have to learn to set writing as a top priority, and an MFA program can be used as a kind of fool-proof way of doing that. Sure, you can slack off as a student, you can procrastinate and not take it very seriously, but either you spend at least some time on writing, or you won’t make it through the program. Period.

And the higher you can set writing on your priority list, the better writer you’ll be.

Workshop Reflections

2008-12-14T17:13:00.000-05:00

Because I am extremely sick today and because I think it might be interesting, I’ve decided to post as my blog for this week a portion of the assigned final commentary for my workshop class this semester. We each had to write a 5-8 page self commentary on the pieces we turned in this semester, our process of writing them, what we struggled with, our revision tactics, etc. One piece that I turned in to workshop this semester in particular I think of as a telling sign of how much I’ve gained through the program:

The second story I submitted for workshop this semester was one I had written a few years ago, and submitted to workshop during my first semester at UAF . . . to disastrous results. In response to this story people actually hinted in their feedback that nobody who would write something like this could possibly be a good writer – and I thought about giving up as a writer altogether.

Needless to say, I set this story aside after that workshop and I didn’t decide to come back to it until just this summer. I’ve always really liked the idea behind this story, and I thought that, since through my experiences in the program here at UAF I’ve grown a lot as a writer, perhaps I could rewrite the story entirely from page one and make it workable. I did just that over the summer, and felt like it came together much more smoothly than the earlier draft that had gotten ripped to shreds during my first UAF workshop class. I changed just about everything about the story (the narration, the characters, the tone . . .) except the core idea of the story.

The workshop feedback on this story this time around was much more encouraging while at the same time being very useful. I had the impression that people generally thought the story had potential (which is certainly a shift from that earlier workshop experience) and I got a lot of extremely useful suggestions on points to expand, points that need to be clarified or maybe left out, and ways that I can increase the tension and stakes for the main character. I’ve been working on revising this piece further for the past few weeks now and I plan to continue revising it over the break. It’s coming together well and my hopes are that by the end of the break I’ll be able to start submitting it to journals.

I learned a lot through the revision process of this story in particular because I was forced to really look at it not just from the perspective of “what happens in this story?” but from an angle of closely analyzing craft: how does the narration function; how can sympathy be created for a genuinely despicable main character; how can I include exposition that’s necessary without letting it take over the present scene? And because early drafts of the story were problematic because of an unintended metafictional element; I was forced to be more aware of craft from a perspective of things I did not want this piece to be.

I feel that this piece is a good gauge for how much I’ve improved as a writer during my experience at UAF. The first draft of it I actually wrote for an undergraduate workshop; then I revised that and took in a new version to my first graduate level workshop. Before I came to the program, as this piece can verify, I didn't think about craft on a conscious level; I just wrote what sounded good to me. But now, two years into the program, I was able to completely rewrite the entire story with more of an awareness of craft and technique and I think, even though I’m still revising it, it’s a much better piece now.

Commitment

2008-12-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

Probably the most useful thing you get out of an MFA program (in my opinion, at least) is that you are forced to set aside any illusions you had about writers being born with the skill, or that some people are just literary geniuses (and what goes along with that, unless you’re REALLY self deluded, is that you have to accept that this means you are not a genius, either).

This can be very difficult at first. I know it was for me. It wasn’t that I came into the program thinking of myself as a literary genius, not in those terms, certainly. But I did believe that some people were just naturally gifted, that writing was something you were either good at or you weren’t, and I, I believed, was one of the good ones.

But I almost immediately learned that the reason I had gotten to the level I was at was because I had spent my entire life, since I was old enough to spell, practicing; I just didn’t think of it as practice. And on top of that, the level I was at wasn’t good enough. I still had a long way to go.

These lessons sort of bombarded me, what with all of my peers in the program who were all just as good as me (and many of them were better), the quite large number of high quality submissions that got rejected from our literary journal, the amount of work I expected my students to put into their academic writing, watching how much those students would improve when they did put in the work (and how the ones who believed they were already perfect and refused to put the work in didn’t improve at all and often ended up behind the other students by the end of the semester) . . .

By the end of my first semester I knew two things for absolutely sure: that nobody was just born with the gift of writing, and that to become a good writer you have to work, work, work!

It’s hard work; it means spending a lot of time and effort on your writing and it means making sacrifices. Whether or not you are willing to put in that work (and especially after you realize that any ideas you may have had of one day making a living off of writing were also illusions, too, but I’ll talk about that some other time) is entirely up to you.

But the beauty of the MFA program is that, at least in my experience, you realize pretty quickly that making it as a writer is going to take work and that you have to commit to it or else you’re just wasting your time. And once you make that commitment, your life will never be the same.

Lit Seminars, a Necessary Evil

2008-11-30T20:26:00.000-05:00

I’m bogged down these last few weeks of the semester with what feels like an uncomfortable load of reading to do (of course, a fair amount of my stress comes from the fact that I’ve been spending too much time on my thesis and workshop stories and so, now that the semester is almost over, I’m realizing how much I have ahead of me to get my final paper ready for the lit seminar I’m taking --- poor time management is what I call that). It brings up an interesting issue related to MFA studies – literature coursework.

When I started my MFA program, I was actually a little surprised to see how much of the program was involved with not only studying and practicing the craft of creative writing, but studying and analyzing literature. That’s not to say that studying writing isn’t also part of it, of course there are workshop credits, thesis credits, forms credits. . . . And I suppose I expected, in a back of the mind sort of way, that getting a master’s degree in English would involve advanced levels of literary analysis, but I think I thought that it would be a minimal part of the program, that most of my time would be spent on creative writing.

What I’ve realized is that you gain an awful lot, as a writer, from analyzing and reading literature, too. While a lot of the ability to write well boils down to how much practice you put into it, I think a fair amount of improving as a writer comes from just reading as much as you can and analyzing it not only for craft, but in the same way that non-writers are going to analyze your work – as a work of literature.

So, while on some level it’s frustrating to look at my next few weeks and have to tell myself I probably shouldn’t be spending time on my fiction right now (and I know full well, even as I write this, that I’m going to spend time creative writing anyway and kick myself later when my final paper isn’t as good as it could have been…) at the same time, I know that I get something out of this other coursework – the non-creative writing part of a creative writing program – as a writer.

Those End of the Semester Blues

2008-11-23T20:15:00.000-05:00

One thing you can expect from an MFA program is that it will keep you very very busy. If you take it seriously, anyway. For the next few days I’ve got a stack of papers to grade, what feels like an awful lot of reading to somehow squeeze in between having one on one conferences with my students, and I’ve got to get work done on my last workshop submission of the semester, my thesis, and my final paper for one of my classes, all of which have deadlines looming in the future. Thank God we get a couple of days off for Thanksgiving, huh? Anyway, this’ll be it for my blog this week. Message: MFA programs keep you busy and sometimes you have to sacrifice doing other things you’d like to do.

Planning Ahead

2008-11-16T19:16:00.000-05:00

With my time in my MFA program quickly running out, I’ve been thinking more and more lately about what, exactly, you do with an MFA degree. It seems to me there are two major things you learn in an MFA program: how to be a better writer and how to be a good teacher.

The first is probably the reason why most of us join an MFA program to begin with and while I believe you do gain a lot as a writer from an MFA program, it seems to me that it’s rare for someone to finish their MFA degree with a ready to publish book. Many people finish with a book that needs more work and many people finish with a practice book, something that they learned a lot through writing but something they will never publish. For most people, an MFA program is only an early step in the VERY slow progression toward a successful book publishing career. How far along you are as a writer by the end of the program also greatly varies from person to person and is completely dependent on how much effort you put in. (How many hours a day did you actually spend writing and how many days a month did you convince yourself you simply did not have time to write? How much did you actually pay attention to the feedback you got and how much did you write it off as “that person just isn’t my audience”?)

The second thing you learn is a bit more concrete. I think every single person who has a teaching assistantship learns loads about teaching while they’re in an MFA program and by the time they finish, they should be ready to go out and teach. Sure, there’s still plenty more to learn – teaching (like writing) is one of those things that you learn by doing. You get better and better each semester and, essentially, to become a four star college professor, you just have to keep teaching semester after semester and just keep developing and growing with each class.

Now here’s the rub: An MFA degree, on its own, isn’t worth much as far as getting a solid teaching position is concerned. First, you have to get a book published. Combine a book deal with your MFA, you’ll probably be able to find a decent job. But what do you do for the several years after finishing the program but before making that first book sale?

There are several options. You may decide you don’t really like teaching and just go out and get a job doing something else. This seems to me a pretty solid option, especially since as a teacher you may find it more difficult to write every day when your job essentially uses the same brain faculties as writing requires. But what if you find that you really love teaching?

Well, you can try and find a full time college or university job, but it’s unlikely.

You can scrape by teaching adjunct until you sell that first book – but you better hope you don’t have any student loans or credit card bills to pay in the meantime, because things will be tight and you don’t have any idea how many years you’ll be doing this before you’re in a position to move up.

You can teach at the high school level. This is one I always thought (until just last night as I was talking with some friends who plan to teach high school when they finish the program) would be undesirable, since at the high school level you’re teaching 5 days a week, several classes a day, and on top of that, you’re teaching bratty teenagers. But this might not actually be a bad way to keep teaching, get a decent full time job, and still keep that ultimate goal of teaching at the University level in sight.

The option I’m hoping to take is to go on to get a PhD. With a PhD, you’re more likely to find a good teaching job and it gives you a few more years to work on getting that first book published. My plan is to first get an MA to prepare me more for the research and literature focus in a PhD program, and then stay on at the same school to get a PhD. I love school and so I’d be very happy to extend my time as a student, and on top of that it would give me about 7 more years to get a book published before I have to find a full time teaching job (but I would be able to keep teaching the entire time as a TA).

It’s something I think everybody should start thinking about from day one – maybe even before day one – of an MFA program: What are you going to do with this degree? Be REALISTIC and don’t assume that going through an MFA program will leave you with a publishing career or that an MFA degree will help you get a good job. And hey, being aware that the degree itself is fairly worthless without a published book may help you push yourself that extra bit to actually write every day, to actually get what you planned to get out of the program – to become a better and more serious writer.

Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Part II

2008-11-09T16:00:00.000-05:00

This week I met with one of the members of my reading group and we came to a consensus on how to handle the triple “Maybe” piece we read for Permafrost. While each member of my group had different reservations about the piece, when I sat down and talked with the second reader, the one who had been unsure of the frame, we realized that ultimately, we both have a similar problem: between the frame and the story’s disaster aspect, it felt like there was too much going on. It just wasn’t clear (to us) what these two things added to the story, which was already very interesting and complicated without them.

So together we drafted an e-mail to send to the author, letting him know what we liked about the piece and what we were confused about. We encouraged him to revise the story, if he wants to, and resubmit it. It was a sort of exciting feeling to realize that our problems with the story could be traced to one specific issue, and to think, also, that while we couldn’t accept the piece as it was, we liked it enough to want to see a revision of it . . . in other words, that we were willing, on our end of the journal, to pinpoint why we weren’t accepting it and to let the writer know that if he fixed that issue, we’d be happy to consider it again.

This is something, I’ll admit, that a lot of editors for a lot of journals, especially the higher profile ones, probably rarely have time to do. But it’s a nice thought, somehow, to be reminded that the first priority of a literary journal is to find good stuff to publish and not just to reject, reject, reject. We liked this piece, we enjoyed reading it and felt we would be proud to have it in our next issue. And we didn’t want to reject it, for that reason. But at the same time, as good as it was, it wasn’t good enough, not with those seemingly irrelevant elements still in the story.

It was interesting to consider, too, how much we seemed to influence each other when considering the piece. When I passed the piece on to the second reader, I made sure to let her know how I felt about it, and by the time the story got to the third reader, he had two people’s opinions about it to filter his first reading through. It would be impossible to say how much we influenced each other, but I think we certainly did and I think people can be influenced in the opposite way, too (that is, you get a packet of stories and look at the ones that already have two “No”s - you’re much less likely, aren’t you, to spend too much time on those pieces that you already know the other members of your group didn’t like?)

It’ll be interesting to see, now, what the writer will choose to do. It could very well be that we are simply not getting what he’s trying to do. And that’s fine. Just because it didn’t work for us, doesn’t mean he should feel obligated to change it. But it may be that, once he reads our comments, he’ll agree and rework the story for a much better final product. Either way, the experience demonstrated, I think, some interesting behind the scenes elements of how a literary journal works, how difficult it is to come to a consensus on acceptances, and how much more there is to getting accepted than just having an engaging writing style or an interesting idea.

Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps . . .

2008-11-02T16:35:00.000-05:00

The past couple of weeks I’ve had an interesting experience with my Permafrost reading group. For Permafrost, we divide into reading groups of three people and each person says “Yes” or “No” (and, very sparingly, “Maybe”) to each submission. In order for a submission to get accepted, it generally needs a “Yes” from every single person in the group.

This time, as usual, there were some submissions that everybody said “No” to, without even having to put too much thought into it. And there were some that one person liked but the others didn’t. There was one submission that I read first, and I was completely engaged with the voice of the first person narrator. Yet at the same time, I had some reservations about giving the piece an absolute “Yes.” My major problem with the story had to do with its inclusion of a significant American disaster, one that everybody across the board feels emotional about, to draw some reaction from the reader, rather than the writer doing the work to get this reaction through his own writing abilities (something I have no doubt this writer could pull off with ease).

I gave the piece a “Maybe,” and passed it on to the next reader, and told her about some of my thoughts about the piece. I really wanted, I told her, to say yes to it, but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. So maybe she could put it over the edge and give it an adamant yes, and I would change my mind.

She loved the story and felt that the disaster element was warranted, but she didn’t feel like she could give it an absolute “Yes,” either, on account of some confusion over the frame structure the writer used. I had been okay with the frame part of the story, but once she brought it up, it suddenly did seem unclear how this bit fit in with the rest of the story.

So she gave it a “Maybe,” too, and passed it on to our final reader, explaining to him some of her reservations about the piece first.

He read the story with all of our thoughts about it in the back of his mind, and he was, it sounds like, just okay with the story, though he was very engaged with the voice, as well. He gave it a “Maybe,” but more because we had both given it a “Maybe” already than because he actually liked it that much. I asked him if he would have just said “No” had we not both already expressed to him how much we liked the piece, and he said for sure he would have just given it a “No.”

Now we have the dilemma: what do we do with this piece? We all liked the narration, and were engaged with it enough to justify not saying “No,” though some of us less than others. I suggested we simply reject it, that maybe we had too many problems with it to want it in the journal. But one of the other readers really wanted to find a way to accept it. But we couldn’t, we all agreed, accept it in its current form, not with all of our issues with it.

Should we ask the writer to revise it and tell him we’ll accept it if he makes certain changes? Should we essentially reject it but tell him why and then let him know if he revises it we’d be happy to consider it again? Should we reject it, but with a personal note letting him know how much we really liked it, and encourage him, please, to submit to us again?

And what of the fact that we each had very different feelings about what wasn’t working about the piece? We all agreed on what we liked, but what I didn’t like the others were fine with. What the second reader didn’t like, I would never have even noticed. And what the third reader didn’t like, in his eyes, was deep rooted enough to reject the story altogether had we not both already made it clear to him that we really really really wanted to accept it.

Chew on that for a week . . . To be continued.

Knowing When You’re Done

2008-10-26T14:08:00.000-04:00

The other day Damien and I went to see Patricia Hampl read out of her new memoir, The Florist's Daughter (which was extremely engaging and now I desperately want to read the entire book). Afterwards, she answered some questions and one of her responses really struck me. One of our Creative Writing Professors here asked if she had any advice for the people finishing books soon, people who would soon be looking to get their first book published. Amongst a lot of the other useful advice that she offered, she mentioned that one important thing, if you’re finishing an MFA program with a book length thesis, is to understand whether this book is actually done or whether you still have more revising ahead of you.

In my experience, many people, after they finish the program here, still have a fair amount of work ahead of them before their thesis is actually publishable. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently since, with only a semester and a half left, I’m going through a very dramatic revision of my novel in which I’m actually rewriting the entire thing on a fresh blank document to make the changes easier to work in smoothly. I had always thought this thing would be done, ready to send out, by the time I finished the program, but now I’m starting to wonder . . .

One important thing that you have to learn as a writer is how to tell when something is ready, (force yourself to stop tinkering already and send it out) and how to tell when something is not. It’s a skill I don’t have a lot of confidence in my own abilities with quite yet, as I’ve had I-can’t-even-say-how-many-times where I’ll be sending something out, getting back rejection after rejection, and then I go back to look at the piece again and find all kinds of ways I can tighten it or even make the plot better. And then there are other pieces where I let it sit on my computer, keep opening it up and looking at it and never find anything to change, but can’t force myself to send it out because what if I’m just missing something . . . and then when I finally do send it out it gets accepted right away.

Being able to recognize whether your piece is ready is an even more important ability when it comes to a book length work, since if you exhaust your options for agents and publishing houses that’s it, you won’t ever be able to get it published, and if you have a book that’s totally ready but you never send it out, it’ll never get published, either. So I’m hoping, for one thing, that my committee will be honest with me next spring and tell me whether they think this book is actually ready or whether they think I have more work to do. And I’m also hoping that, when I finish the program next spring, I’ll have honed that ability of being able to look at my work myself and see whether it’s good enough, yet, whether there are still things to work on or whether it’s done.

But one thing I know I’ll be ready for is the extra work ahead of me if it turns out it isn’t ready this spring. The revision process on my thesis has been exciting and fun, way more fun, actually, than writing the first draft was. If I finish the program with the understanding that I’ve still got several more drafts ahead of me, that’ll be alright. I’ll stick with it. Because I love this book and I think it could be really good, if I just get it to that point, and I do not want to put something out there in the world that could have been really good, if I had kept working on it, but it isn’t good. And now it never will be.

Learning the Art and Craft

2008-10-19T15:23:00.000-04:00

Do you know that when I started at UAF, I really wasn’t thinking of it as a chance for me to learn and grow and become a better writer? I knew, in a vague sort of way, that way where you don’t consciously think about it but if someone asked you directly you’d say “well, yeah, sure,” that the more practice you got at something the better you would become. But I honestly didn’t believe that writing was something you could learn. It was something you just either had in you or you didn’t.

This is a ridiculous opinion, but it’s one I shared with a lot of really successful writers. Thinking about it now, it’s irritating to look at famous writers who have made a lot of money based on hard work but who tell their fans that they were just born with “it.” Sure, they all admit that a lot of it comes down to the work, too, but many of them suggest that part of it is just natural talent and I think that’s a delusional crock.

At any rate, I came to UAF thinking not that I was going to learn a lot about writing, but that I would get three more years to focus on my writing and put off the inevitable moment of having to select a career a little longer. And I did get that benefit, as well as the benefit of developing an absolute passion for teaching, but I also learned A LOT about the craft of writing, how to write better, how to find the balance between what you want your art to be and what an audience will actually appreciate, too.

My first big breakthrough was with a story I wrote for my first graduate writer’s workshop, “Interpretations of Aurora.” I wrote this story in the style I had been practicing for a long time, with a dark, brooding, apathetic narrator who feels removed from the world around him. But just to do it, just because I thought it would be what the workshop would ask me to do, anyway, I included some really vivid descriptions of the setting. Sensory imagery. Movement, too. I had my narrator sitting down on the front steps of his porch folding autumn leaves and then piling them on top of the step below him as he has an argument with his wife.

This was a sort of snide addition on my part. I thought everybody would hate it, and I would think, “a-ha! But this is the very sort of thing you would have told me to include!” In fact, everybody loved it. The sensory imagery makes you feel like you’re really there; and this small, seemingly insignificant action tells so much about this narrator; and when the wife sits down on the step below him and she knocks the leaves onto the floor, it says so much about their relationship without the narrator having to say anything but what happened.

I went back and looked at the scene afterwards and realized that they were right. This was a great, telling moment. It got us out of the narrator’s head and let the reader be involved in the story, rather than just having the apathetic narrator, whose voice I still loved but who was standing in front of the reader’s line of sight, tell the story to the reader. And it had come about entirely by accident, by my trying to prove how pointless this sort of detail was.

I learned a lot during that first semester, and while it was, as I’ve said before, the hardest semester I’ve ever had to endure, it was also the most educational. Once I realized that I wasn’t brilliant and that I actually had to work at it and learn and grow and develop, I began to do just that. And now, as I’m entering the last stretch of the program here at UAF, I feel like I’m a much better writer than I was before I came, and I can only just keep getting better.

Slowly Climbing Up the Ladder

2008-10-12T22:01:00.000-04:00

On Sunday night of this past week, I said to Damien that I was beginning to feel discouraged. I had, the day before, received three different rejections on the same day, and for the past few weeks I’ve been receiving a fairly steady stream of rejections in the mail. By now, I’m so used to rejections they don’t bother me at all . . . unless, it turns out, I open up my PO Box and find a full stack of them waiting for me.

As someone who has toiled on both sides of the literary journal machine (as one who reads submissions and as one who writes and submits them), I have a pretty thorough understanding of how little rejections often mean. It could be as simple as the editor skipped breakfast that morning and wasn’t able to concentrate as they half-assedly read your piece, or maybe that the topic you’re exploring is one that the editor is just not personally interested in. Rejections, as I said, don’t bother me.

But three in one day . . .

I was beginning to wonder if I was deluding myself. If, in my case, the rejections did mean something more. If my stuff was any good wouldn’t someone somewhere want to publish it? On Sunday night I mentioned to Damien that it was a good thing I set a monthly goal to send 10 submissions each month, otherwise I was likely to give up, for the time being, on submitting at all.

Onward and upward and all that, Damien told me. Chin up and have faith and I like your stuff.

And the next day I received an acceptance, and not just any acceptance, my first acceptance from a paying journal. I can actually say I sold a story. For money. Someone liked my story enough to pay me for the right to print it.

This is a small but important step, just like getting that first acceptance from a small, non-paying journal was. Just like getting an acceptance from a larger journal with a bigger circulation will be. And just like (one day) getting an acceptance from a more prestigious journal, a national journal, a journal that you can tell your folks to pick up at their local bookstore.

It may seem like a small thing (let’s be honest, I’m only getting like $30 plus contributor’s copies and a free subscription), but it is a big small thing, an important one. I’m another rung up the ladder, now, and I feel like I’m making progress. I’m slowly but surely moving up and I feel (perhaps temporarily but hey, it still counts) reinvigorated to keep working at it, keep striving, so I can work towards moving that next short rung up.

Connecting

2008-10-05T19:13:00.000-04:00

I’ve been working on a new draft (my fourth) of my thesis this week and I’m feeling extremely excited and hopeful about where it’s headed. I met with the fabulous Gerri Brightwell, my thesis advisor, a couple of times in the past few weeks to discuss where this book is headed and it’s amazing how, just from talking with her and getting some feedback, I was able to make some very important breakthroughs that I don’t know if I would have come to on my own. She didn’t tell me what to do, she’s not writing the thing for me, but she gave me her thoughts on the current draft which helped me to pinpoint some major structural and voice changes I’d like to make.

And as much as I’m grateful to Gerri for helping me figure this out, part of me feels a little nervous. Because I think these new changes are going to really bring the book together; these changes are essential and are helping to make the novel into a real novel and not just a rambling story that never gets where it’s trying to go. And I don’t know if I would have realized these changes needed to be made without Gerri.

Now, of course, this is why MFA programs are set up like this. This is why you have a thesis committee – to help you find your way through that first publishable book length work. But some part of me wonders, what will I do in the future? What will I do with that next book, for which I won’t have a thesis committee and the sheltered MFA environment to help me along the way?

I think part of what you learn in an MFA program is how to look at your work and give yourself the sort of objective feedback you might expect someone else to give. But part of what you learn, too, is that writing is not an altogether solitary thing. That no matter how good of a writer you may become, you will always need other people to read your drafts and give you thoughts for revision. And my understanding is that the industry has changed so that most editors and agents don’t give feedback, the way they used to for the old school writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

An important benefit of an MFA program is that you meet other writers, and if you’re lucky, you may be able to make some close connections with other people who you can exchange work with and give honest feedback to, and get feedback from. I’m as shy as the next guy, shyer than the next guy, actually, but I’m starting to think more and more that one of the main reasons for going through a program like this is to make friends and establish connections with other writers. Hey, we probably all have plenty in common, so why not?

I’ve been pushing myself recently to come out of my shell. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how much I do genuinely like and want to establish real friendships with some of the other people in my program. I hope these friendships can last, because this may be one of the important deciding factors between who makes it as a writer and who doesn’t (and because, like I said, I genuinely like some of these people a lot). The successful writer is probably one who has a close circle of writer friends to share with and to grow with and to just make connections with.

I’m Nobody! Who Are You?*

2008-09-28T16:40:00.000-04:00

My first winter in Fairbanks I felt completely lost. Moving here, going to grad school, seemed to have been a huge mistake. Damien hated Fairbanks and neither one of us had made any friends. It was cold and dark and there were gigantic ravens everywhere and the pipes in our cabin (ah, our cabin, which we paid twice as much rent on as most people but we had ourselves convinced it was worth it because it had running water) kept freezing up and going out of commission for a week at a time. I hated teaching, I was terrible at it, and I had just barely survived a semester of very painful workshop.
Something had to give.

I was a terrible writer, I saw that now. I was terrible at teaching, too. And my academic essays, which had always had undergrad teachers falling over them and praising my writing skills, left the professors in the graduate level thoroughly unimpressed. As far as I could see, I had two options. I could drop out, cut my losses and find a job somewhere, and Damien and I could start saving up and try to get the hell out of Fairbanks. Or I could use it all as motivation and work harder, improve, become better.

I chose option B and during the winter break of my first year in grad school I set some major goals to get my life back on track. Instead of being hurt at first and then passing into a state of accepting depression (you’re right, I should just give up . . .) when what I was doing was exposed as imperfect, I would learn from these mistakes and become a better writer, learn how to be a good teacher, and become a better student, too, a deeper thinker and a better academic writer.

I spent most of my time off that winter writing new stuff and revising the old stuff that I believed had potential and I vowed to myself that I would get my first publication acceptance in 2007. (I have since learned that it’s a basic rule of goal setting that it’s not useful to set goals that are out of your control. For example, it’s okay to set a goal to, say, write 1,000 words a day for the entire year. It’s not okay to set a goal that you’ll get a story accepted, that’s out of your control and depends on too many outside variables. But I didn’t know that back then. . . .)

To meet this goal, I had to start submitting again (something I hadn’t been doing at all that entire first semester) and I would have to make the commitment to take writing more seriously, not just assume that everything I produce is gold after one or two polishes and not feel upset but glad to get the feedback when someone doesn’t like what I’ve been doing. And I stuck to it.

I did get my first acceptance in 2007, and shortly after that I got my second, and most of my rejections, these days, come with some sort of written comments on them. But even more important, I finally stopped wanting to be a writer and I feel like I actually became a writer. I’m still getting better, each new story is the best thing I’ve ever written, and, best of all, I plan to just keep getting better and better and better (and I also think I’ve become a damn good teacher and a better student, too). And I owe it all to that miserable first semester in grad school and how it made me face that I was nobody special at all.

*Title comes from Emily Dickinson.

The Unexamined Thesis Is Not Worth Writing

2008-09-21T16:19:00.000-04:00

It goes without saying (then why do you feel the need to say it, Ashley?) that one of the major things you get out of an MFA program (and I would probably say the single most important thing) is you are forced to put together a book length work: your thesis. You will not graduate if you do not have this completed, and whether or not you pass is supposed to be gauged on whether or not your committee believes your thesis is publishable.

We come to grad school with different levels of experience. Some of us have written full novels, or story or poetry collections, (and sometimes even gotten them published!) before starting in the program. Some of us have written several random short stories or poems or maybe began work on a novel but never got past the first chapter. But no matter where you’re at when you begin grad school, by the time you finish the program you should have a book ready, or at least one last revision away from ready, to try to get published.

I came to grad school having already decided what I was going to write for my thesis. My entire first year here I brainstormed and made notes on it. I sat down during my first summer break to write the first draft of it and, instead, I wrote almost 300 pages of a completely different novel altogether. Suddenly I realized this is the story I wanted to tell first; this is the one I’d like to try to break in with.

There were a number of reasons for the decision. One was that this new idea had much more of a hook. It’s high concept, as they say, it’s got a much more pitchable premise, an easy to point at quality that I can say, “here, this is unique, this has never been done before, to my knowledge.”

Another reason I changed my mind is because the main character of the new idea was male, and the other book was about a woman. Why does that matter? I firmly believe that there is a smaller audience for books about women. Women, I think, will read anything, whether it’s about a woman or a man, as long as they like it. But many men are not interested in reading about a woman character (they wouldn’t be able to relate, they say. No offence or anything, they pat you on the back and tell you, just don’t understand the way the female mind works).

But more than anything, the reason why I switched ideas is because, when I sat down to actually write the first draft, I just didn’t feel like writing that other one. This one just seemed way more interesting. This novel is far more complicated than anything I had ever attempted before. It’s not your typical chronological relating of events, a lot hinges on the voice of the narrator, the relationships between the various characters are extremely complicated but must be handled with subtlety, and the structure has numerous components that all have to work together perfectly to get the story across in a believable and engaging way.

In short, I guess, it’s a real novel and not a practice novel, like the unfinished ones I had attempted before or the finished and revised one that will never, thank the god of your choice or Lady Luck, whatever you believe in, make it out of the womb that is the file on my computer titled “Failed Attempts.” It’s the sort of thing I certainly wasn’t ready to tackle, nor even realized that I should, before coming to grad school.

The Old Stuff and the New

2008-09-14T15:26:00.000-04:00

My first semester of Workshop at UAF could reasonably be described as a disaster. Fairly early on, I submitted something that should not have been submitted, spent an hour of class time having my writing abilities attacked from every angle, and then drove home close to tears, seriously considering giving up my quest to be a writer. I just wasn’t any good, I realized.

They didn’t like the plot. Didn’t think the characters were interesting. Didn’t like the metafictional technique I had tried to employ. Thought it was riddled with clichés and pointless. By the end of the session, the discussion degenerated into complaining about the sentence structure (not enough variety, bland and boring to read . . .) and one woman came damn close to saying that anyone who would write something like this couldn’t possibly be a good writer.

For the rest of the semester I felt anxious and scared every time I had to submit something. I stopped reading the written comments by all but the teacher and two or three other people who I knew made an effort to say nice things on top of pointing out the problems, and who, when they pointed out problems, didn’t try to turn it into a story they would have written or suggest that these are mistakes only a very bad writer would make.

And I didn’t submit a single thing for publication the entire semester.

The problem was that I had turned in to Workshop something that I had written as an undergrad, a full year before. It was a piece that I thought was pretty much ready already. I’ve since noticed similar problems in other people’s work. There will be a story that seems of much lower quality than the other stuff that writer submits, and you find out later that this is one he or she wrote several years before. I would almost say that when you start grad school, you should write 100% new stuff and accept that everything you wrote before, or at least most of it, was just practice. But at least dramatically revise anything old that you do feel has potential (and I mean preferably rewrite the entire thing from page one).

You grow as a writer extremely quickly in an intensive grad school setting, and it doesn’t take long for your skills to far surpass wherever you were at before you started the program. This is a good thing. But it also means that you have to accept that not everything you ever wrote is good. I’ve heard that it generally takes something like 100,000 words of crap before anyone can write anything publishable and while a number like that (my own approximation of an approximation) isn’t exact, certainly not for each different individual, I think it’s true that you get better and better as you go and most people don’t start getting really good until they begin to seriously devote themselves to honing their craft.

One way that a lot of people do that is by joining an MFA program. Yes, you have to be at a high enough level that the people reviewing applications see your potential for you to get into an MFA program to begin with. But still, you’ll most likely become such a better writer so fast that most anything you had written previously won’t be a good representation of what you do. And if you’re dusting off stuff that you wrote a year before just to have something to turn in, you’re not really getting one of the major benefits of Workshop: motivation to always be writing new stuff.

Hard Work and Perspiration

2008-09-07T16:32:00.000-04:00

This summer we had several recurring students at the Writing Center. Some of them came back repeatedly because their teachers required it or maybe offered them extra credit. But some of them came back over and over again, having us look over each new draft of the same paper until it was due, simply because they wanted to get that paper as good as it could be and because they genuinely wanted to be better academic writers.

One of these students was sort of an inspiration to me. I didn’t work with him on his early drafts, but I know from talking to his teacher and the Writing Center tutor who did work with him that he had a lot of problems when he first started coming in. Trouble forming coherent ideas. Habitually going off on tangents that seemed perfectly relevant to him but had little or nothing to do with the actual thesis. Unable to organize his thoughts on a topic into a logical order that actually backs up the thesis.

This student would come in everyday, sit at a computer for several hours working on his paper, and ask to work with a tutor often two or three times in the same day. And his hard work paid off. His writing slowly but surely began to take shape, he began to understand what wasn’t working with his old papers, and he actually started catching problems on his own, without needing them to be pointed out.

The last draft of his final paper that I saw was an amazing transformation from the jumbled set of meandering ideas I had seen a couple of weeks before, and I imagine the final draft that he actually handed in was even better. No, he didn’t go from terrible to pure genius in a manner of weeks, but he did drastically improve and it’s all because he was willing to put the effort in and work, work, work.

The same, I believe, is true of creative writing. I’ve said before I don’t believe in innate talent, and whether you agree or not, you can probably at least agree that whatever level you’re at right now, you can always stand to improve, and the only way to improve is hard work. This means actually writing, for one thing, something that some would-be writers seem to do very little of, but it also means spending time revising (and understanding that there’s a difference between revising and editing), it means reading a lot to have a broader understanding of what’s been done, what works and what doesn’t, and it means not sitting around daydreaming about the day someone will realize how brilliant a writer you are and, instead, actually being a writer.