What being in writing workshops with Nnedi Okorafor taught me about the goal of writing programs

You may not, at this exact moment in history, grasp the significance of the title of this post. But it's likely you soon will. Her fantasy novel is about to be made into an HBO series, and it's backed by none other than George R.R. Martin himself, leading to inevitable claims that her series is the next Game of Thrones. Nnedi's done alright by herself.

That's fine with me. I only remember two people's names from my program in graduate school, and she's one of them. (I was talking recently with a woman who described her graduate writing program as an incestuous group where everyone hung out together, slept with each other, and gossiped about one another. Mine was nothing like that. We were friendly, but there were never any social events other than readings. Or maybe there were, and I just wasn't invited?)

What I remember most about Nnedi is that nobody knew what to do with her novel when it came up in workshops. Graduate workshops are generally geared toward literary fiction.

Defining what literary fiction is isn't easy. It is sometimes defined in opposition to other types of literature, which are tarred with the term "genre fiction." "Genre fiction" may or may not be seen as pejorative. I would say literary fiction is fiction which aspires to be regarded as serious, which hopes to say something significant about the human condition, about society, about the universe. It is literature the author hopes will be assigned as reading in universities one day.

That's the model for graduate writing programs at American universities. The programs teach students to write like the works those students are reading in their literature classes. (Most MFA's have at least some reading component, and my M.A. program was exactly half literature study, half workshops.)

Nnedi wrote YA post-apocalyptic fiction with a Nigerian bent, even then. The class wasn't rude about it. We commented on her work as energetically as we did anything. As I've said before, I don't think the feedback from classmates was useful to me at all. If it wasn't useful to her, I wouldn't be surprised. (I did once give her this feedback: I thought it seemed morally questionable for the children in her world to have super powers as a result of nuclear fallout, because that might make young people think nuclear war was desirable. I guess I can say I once gave advice to a famous writer.) I wouldn't presume to speak for her on how valuable she found the workshops. She stayed for her Ph.D., whereas I left after my M.A., so I'd guess she found some value in it.

Post-apocalyptic fiction, but from an entirely different cultural wellspring than what we're used to

What seems interesting to me looking back on it now is the conversation we had one day about her work. I want to say a comment by the instructor started it. It wasn't a particularly nasty comment, or even dismissive. My advisor was a fairly supportive person. I think she may have asked a question about the book and qualified it by saying she herself did not read a lot of this kind of fiction. Whatever she said, the class ended up in a sidebar about the merits of YA fiction, namely whether there were any. Nnedi and quite a few others defended YA. They declared that Harry Potter--the YA champion of the time--was actually quite complex and sophisticated and had intrinsic worth beyond being a bestseller. (I had no opinion then. I've read Harry Potter now, because now I'm a father, and I agree. It's a great series.)

It wasn't really a vitriolic conversation, but it seems odd to me now that it was a conversation we had at all. In law school, I doubt whether anyone has conversations over whether tort law is real law or just something for ambulance chasers to make a buck off of. I doubt if the status of plastic surgery is looked at askance in medicals schools. That's because these are really professionalizing programs. The end goal is to perform in an industry. To use an example more directly analogous, do drama programs only teach Shakespearean stage performance? Or do they also teach how to act in a movie or on TV?

I'm not sure why teaching to the job market is not a model for writing programs. Or maybe it is. It's just that when literary fiction is the presumed type of writing, the reality is that the vast majority of graduates won't be able to make a living writing. So the academy is teaching students to teach writing workshops as much as teaching them to write. To the extent it is teaching writing, it is teaching how to write stories that will be published in places where most of the readers are other writers who graduated from the same types of programs and publish in the same types of journals.

A few lucky literary fiction writers do succeed commercially, of course. They are the ones who won major awards so that their books were assigned in universities, or who got onto Oprah's book club and became one of the few "good for you" books Americans can be shamed into reading every year. But they are very much the exception that proves the rule.

I've been out of grad school for 15 years, of course, and the game may have changed. But I wonder why these schools don't offer mystery, fantasy, YA, romance, or any of the other genres that actually DO sell as part of the curriculum.

Part of it assuredly has to do with universities justifiably feeling that their mission is to promote human knowledge. But I'd bet there's at least some fear behind the choices. What if graduate programs cannot produce commercial success in fiction reliably? Right now, they're not really expected to. They're simply expected to produce occasional bright lights who can get published by the kinds of journals the school itself probably runs. They're expected to produce writers who win awards proctored by other MFA grads. You can teach people how to write for a system. But teaching people to write to be read widely is tough. Agents and publishers, whose whole lives revolve around trying to bet right on it, fail all the time at guessing what the next hot item will be.

That's why writing programs are as much about teaching students to teach writing programs themselves as they are about teaching them to write.

This shouldn't be seen as a personal complaint, by the way. As I told a friend the other day, even if I wanted to write genre fiction just to be read, I wouldn't know how. I don't have one in me. My literary hero in grad school was Herman Melville, a man whose greatest work was ignored in his own lifetime. So this isn't sour grapes that nobody taught me to write a NY Times bestseller. This is just to note that Nnedi's wonderful success was such an unusual dream for a writing program student back then that we almost didn't know what to do with it.

Keep this in mind if you want to follow her path to greatness.

Congratulations to Nnedi. I'll be getting some of her books and reading them. I like fantasy enough to know every single thing the Lord of the Rings movies did wrong, but it'll be nice to see what someone can do with it drawing from a completely different mythological tradition.