Always Room to Grow

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.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

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.

The Question of the PhD

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

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 Finish Line

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!

In Defense of the Thesis Defense

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

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

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.

There Is No Good and There Is No Bad

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

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.

Letting It Be Real

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.

Connecting

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.

Training for the Gold

The comparison of writing to athletic disciplines has been made many times before but I’m going to go ahead and make it again as the 2008 Beijing Olympics (and what an Olympics! Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, world record after world record . . . but I digress) draws to a close. The reason why this comparison gets made again and again is because, let’s face it, it’s true. Whether you believe that there is such a thing as natural talent or whether you think it's all about practice, either way you surely must admit that ultimately, success as a writer, or as an athlete, comes down to a whole lot of hard work.

And training is key.

This is where an MFA program comes in. I would never suggest that there is no other way to train at writing than MFA programs; that would be absurd. But I will say it’s an excellent option for those who have three years or so to dedicate to it. In an MFA program you’re pushed hard to constantly work (always be producing and revising), you’re pushed to go out there and compete (by submitting and entering contests), you’re set up with a group of peers to work with and to work against (share your stuff, trade feedback, but also remember that in the race for the Gold it might be you or them so you’ve got to try your best to hold your own), and you’ve got coaches, all who have been through it themselves in different ways, to encourage and guide you along the way (the MFA faculty, obviously).

Okay, so writing is much more subjective than most Olympic Sports. It’s not like a race where there will be three people who were objectively faster than all the rest. In writing, you can train and train and train and get to where you, personally, want to be, and still have some people who read your stuff and go “Eh, it’s just not my kind of thing.” Even if you win the writing Gold, say you snag one of the many prestigious writing awards, or your latest book makes the New York Times Bestseller List, there will still be people who read your stuff and say “Eh. Overrated.”

So what that means is there will never be an end to your training. You will never have one specific goal that you’ll retire after reaching. The training you go through in your MFA program isn’t really the means to an end. It’s more like the beginning of a lifetime of training that, if you’re in it for what I would consider the right reasons (again, a very subjective issue), will prove to be its own kind of Gold medal in itself.

Faculty Guidance

I just finished reading Cold Country by Gerri Brightwell, the head of my thesis committee, and I was ecstatic to find that it was an excellent book. I recently listened to and enjoyed her latest book, The Dark Lantern, on audiobook and I decided it was high time I went back and read her first novel. It was absolutely packed with beautiful sentences, a strong voice, engaging and quirky characters and a plot that I just could not wait to watch unfold. It reminds me how much I really am getting out of the MFA program here.

When I started at UAF the MFA program was kind of in transition (actually, I think it still pretty much is) and one member of the fiction faculty had up and quit, I guess unexpectedly, over the summer. So there was only one fiction faculty member and my first semester here I took two classes, Forms of Fiction and Workshop, with the same professor, Gerri Brightwell.

Naturally, I asked Gerri to head my thesis committee and have not once regretted the decision. When I first started working on my thesis I found myself kind of floundering with how to get across this huge theme into a 300 or so page novel. I’ve been writing unfinished novels since I was a little kid, and as an undergrad I actually finished and revised one complete novel (which I realized partway through the first revision could never be more than a practice novel). And even as I set out to write a novel for my thesis, I didn’t feel confident in my abilities to really make a full novel come together.

I wrote the entire first draft with a third person narrator and then brought in the first few chapters and an outline of the entire story for Gerri to read. Right off the bat she wanted to know why I had chosen third person. The fact that I didn’t have a good enough answer was answer, enough.

There were other things, too, issues with the plot and the main character, that I didn’t quite know how to deal with. Gerri did an amazing job of steering me in the right direction, mostly by asking questions about why did I make this choice and what had I hoped to accomplish with that? It’s startling, really, to see how much simply having someone ask you questions about your work can make you realize what isn’t working (and how to fix it).

After meeting with Gerri a couple of times I was charged to do a complete rewrite for the second draft, now with a fairly new plot, a first person narrator, and some essential changes to the main character’s personality that made a dramatic difference in getting out the major theme I’m trying to play with.

Now that I’m done with my third draft, I’m extremely anxious to finally pass it on to Gerri and have her read, for the first time, a complete draft of my novel. It’s kind of scary, having someone whose work you really respect look at your work. But it’s exhilarating, too, because I know she’s going to make me see all kinds of new things I hadn’t even thought about before and I know I can really trust what she has to say.

I wonder if this is maybe the most useful thing you get out of an MFA program – working with successful and talented writers who you admire and respect. People who know what they’re talking about, who have been there and can tell you all about it. I’ve gotten really lucky because I feel a real affinity with Gerri’s writing style and it happened by chance. I hadn’t even read her stuff before I joined the program nor had I known, when I came, that there would be only one fiction faculty member there during my first semester.

But at the same time, I think it isn’t really luck. MFA faculties generally consist of excellent writers who are willing to share what they’ve learned to help the next generation of writers find their way. And that, even if you gain nothing else from an MFA program, is worth it right there.