An idea for an anti-workshop

I think I've made it clear I don't like the writing workshop. Lately, though, I've been thinking of trying to teach a writing class, which is making me confront the idea of the workshop. There are two reasons I'm interested in teaching writing. First, I'm dreaming of being able to change jobs some day, and I hope that starting to build a resume in writing, or teaching generally, will help me to do that. Secondly, I'm starting to have enough confidence as a writer that I think I could actually do this and be helpful to others.

I also just really like teaching, at least when I don't have to follow a curriculum someone else created.

Here's my idea for how to handle a fiction writing class: as the instructor and presumed guy who knows what he's doing, I'd handle most of the close critiquing and suggestions for how to make what students give me better. I'd use examples from writing in each meeting/class to demonstrate common mistakes and how to fix them.

Instead of using the class time to go around and let everyone comment on the stories we're commenting on that week, I'd use the class in a different way. Student feedback is important, but not necessarily for improving the mechanics of the stories of their peers. Instead, I'd like to use them as testers of real readers. I'd tell each of them to read the stories we're looking at that week. Then, they would fill out a sheet anonymously saying whether they read all the way to the end or not. If they didn't, they should say where they stopped and why.

Readers are cruel. They have no reason to be nice. It doesn't take any special competence to be able to provide that service to writers trying to develop. Anyone can be a focus group. Even if you have a stupid reason for not liking the story, that's useful, because there are stupid readers that writers will have to deal with. As long as we're framing that feedback as realistic reader feedback and not helpful peer suggestion on how to improve, it's got its use.

I always wished that my creative writing classes in grad school were just one-on-one feedback from the instructors, not peer review. When I asked my adviser why we didn't do it like that, she said it's because the students in the class were, in many cases, going to go on to be writing instructors themselves, and they needed to learn how to give feedback. That's maybe valid at a college MFA program, but I don't think your average developing writer wants that. Most students are there to learn to write better and for no other reason. That's especially true of the classes I'd be looking to teach. So it makes sense to me to give them that and only that.

Anyone ever do a workshop like this? Any other ideas for how to run one, keeping in mind I'd like to avoid the traditional format?

Mini-Gallimaufry: MFA for popular work and an MFA advisor who realizes the current model isn't getting it done

This will be one of my shortest posts ever:

1) After my post yesterday, I was looking to see if any writing programs do, in fact, focus on popular fiction, and I found at least one that does: at University of Southern Maine, the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing has a popular fiction track.

2) A thoughtful article in the New Yorker today from an MFA advisor is the latest to question whether the heavy focus on craft is the right approach. I know it was a problem for me. I was around a lot of smart people who liked to read, but we didn't talk as much about what stories were worth telling as we did about how to tell them.

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. 

A man crush leaves a comment, so I write a critique which is actually more of a general aesthetic treatise

A few posts ago, Anis Shivani, or someone doing a cyber impersonation of him, left a comment after one of my posts. This was pretty exciting for me, since I've quoted him a lot on here and really find a lot to love in his Against the Workshop. He has given voice to a lot of misgivings I've felt not just about workshops and writing programs, but the modern fiction establishment. I suspect when he writes these critiques, he's saying things many have felt, but few have the courage to proclaim.

I decided to read and then write a critique of his first book of short stories, Anatolia and other stories. After reading it a few weeks ago, I've been stymied about how to write this critique. I'd hoped that I'd find in his stories an alternative aesthetic I could aspire to, something different from what dominates the journals and winning short story anthologies year after year. Turns out, I didn't really connect much with this group of stories. I liked them less than I like most modern fiction, not more.

Which led me to ask myself: have I become so inured to a certain hegemonic aesthetic that I'm incapable of responding positively to alternatives? This is a strong possibility. So, rather than write a straight critique of Shivani's work, I've decided instead to try to trace what it is that makes his writing different, what there is about it that makes it belong to another time, and then interrogate my own assumptions about fiction that make me prefer a modern approach, or at least an approach that's more ubiquitous in modern literary fiction.

Hopefully, this will also serve as something of an answer to a friend of mine, who has sent me his fiction before, and I've found myself saying "I like it personally, but I don't think I'd publish it if you sent it to me, because I don't think it succeeds at certain things." I hope this will explain what I mean better than I've done so far.

Distance between author and narrator

One characteristic of Shivani's collection that's different from most modern fiction is that there is very little daylight between the point-of-view of the narrator, in whose voice the stories are told, and the author, Anis Shivani, lurking behind that narrative voice. Modern fiction-writing theory teaches writers to practice a form of Shakespearean negative capability popularized by the Romantics, that we should withhold ourselves from interjecting too much of our own selves into the work. Shivani (and my friend) are nearly opposite this kind of approach: the author and narrator are often almost one and the same (or the main character is antagonistic to the author's philosophy, and there as a cautionary tale). It's fiction that's strongly tied to the philosophical novel.

Shivanian aesthetic

I know where Shivani, the author behind the works, stands on each piece of fiction in this collection. Because one story is about a writer who goes to a sham of a writer's retreat called "Go Sell it on the Mountain," I don't even have to guess what Shivani's aesthetic is. He tells us. His first-person participant in the retreat says the following lines, both to reject the writing he sees others writing and to describe his own type of story-telling, which is rejected by other participants:

Her ((another writer at the workshop)) writing was curiously glassy on the surface: it gave you no entry point, no means to project your living, breathing mass of flesh onto the consciousness of the author. This kind of writing was in vogue now, while I wrote in the old-fashioned raconteur's spiraling manner, leisurely getting to the core of the story. My models were the forgotten writers of the thirties, forties, and fifties, like Roderick Lull and Morley Callaghan, who killed you with their explosive revelations of your own culpability in injustice.

Or, in another instance, the narrator shares these thoughts in a workshop with another writer, only to have his thoughts attacked by the workshop moderator:

"...what is the narrator's moral stand toward the lead character's afflictions? Does she have a moral opinion? Or is she neutral to her ups and downs? I don't see the author present behind the scenes.

The author in Anatolia and Other Stories is always visible, and often barely behind the scenes. In addition to the story of a writer finding his aesthetic out of place with hucksters selling false hope to the talentless, there is another story of Arthur, an old professor who feels out of place because he is being crowded out of the world by an academy and wife who espouse theoretical notions he thinks are ludicrous. Change "Arthur" to "author" on that one, too.

Summarizing

This voice where the thoughts of the author are often pushing into the narrative has a certain feel to it, like we can only proceed so far before we get a summary of what we've just gone over. There are frequent insertions of phrases like "Of course," usually preceding a sneering recounting of some fallacious habit of some character. (There are 43 instances of "of course" in the book.) In another place, it's "Oh, I'm sure he said something about the need to pace ourselves..."

I used to hate hearing the workshop stock phrase that a story "floats," meaning it doesn't have enough flesh and bones to tie its ideas to Earth. But these stories float a lot. There are powerful ideas in play here, so powerful, in fact, that there cannot be any shortcuts past incarnation. But in many stories, the word comes to dwell among us without first being made flesh.

In no story was this more evident than "Repatriation," a frustrating, semi-apocalyptic tale of people not sufficiently Anglo-Saxon enough being shipped out of the United States to...well, they never do make it anywhere. The story is nearly haunting, nearly palpable, but it keeps resorting to summarizing statements of how we got to where we are, brief quips from a fictional history. There is a tantalizing line in the story about how the refugees on the ship, not allowed to have books with them, "trade in poetry." I wish the whole story had been about that. Instead, it's part tirade, part oh-yeah-by-the-way-some-things-happened-on-the-ship, part details from the life of a hazy first-person narrator before the roundup.

Telling over showing

"Show don't tell" is one of those workshop mantras that rightly deserves some rebellion against it. It's not historical. It rejects the "instruct" in "instruct and delight." It overlooks that wanting moral instruction from stories is a core aspect of human nature.

Shivani tells a lot. Even when he shows, he often follows it up with telling. In "Independence," we get this summary of a character, rather than hints from action, dialogue, etc.:

Was it that he faced his mortality in the mirror the innocent boy held up to him? Was it that he saw in the boy's mindless questions and motiveless harmony some challenge to the ordinary man Saleem himself had become? Saleem had never been a rebel; he'd never gone through the wild phase his university classmates had, putting their fathers through the ropes, driving their poor mothers to distraction.

In one instance, right after we have a scene rendered, with Julie pinching the cheeks and ruffling the hair of her child, we immediately get an explanation of what those actions meant: "The good thing about Julie was that she didn't jump into defending her mothering skills when Saleem accused her of shortfalls in that area. She listened seriously, like a good pupil." Or later, "Their father pinched and rolled his chin, in an expression of concern." That's showing and telling in one sentence, the action and the explanation of the action all in one.

I'm not really criticizing this trait; this is more of a description of where Shivani lies on a spectrum of descriptive and prescriptive narrative. I'd like to see more fiction written near this end of the spectrum. I just didn't find this collection was a particularly effective representative of its spectrum.

Or am I just a tool of my environment?

Shivani the critic has convincingly--to my mind, anyway--attacked the modern academia-publishing complex in serious fiction for its dogmatic insistence on an unimaginative, bourgeois form of realism, what he would, after over a decade of developing his thoughts, come to call "plastic realism."  I realize that in my critique of Anatolia, I've assumed a position well within the mainstream of this kind of realism. Perhaps, as much as I've railed against M.F.A. programs and suggested I don't find much on the scene that deeply inspires me (all of my top five authors are dead), I have, without meaning to, been commodified by this system. Maybe in the process of trying to get published by literary journals, I've ended up adopting the aesthetic I think is likely to get me published by them, and become, in the process, the sort of person who can't appreciate something like Anatolia that doesn't conform.

I don't think this is the case. I wanted to like these stories. I admire Shivani the critic so much, I was dying to love Shivani the story teller. He commented on my blog. I wanted to write about how I really got his fiction. I just didn't. Not that there was nothing to like in these stories, but nearly all the gold in it were thoughts similar to what Shivani has penned elsewhere in non-fiction form. As a story teller, I think he's a very good critic.

The stories I want to read and write

I don't mind being told how to feel about a story. I like it. I prefer it. But the moral grounding has to come organically from the story, or at least feel like it does. When Dori tells Marlin "It's time to let go!" it's pretty clear we've come to the climax of both the story and of Marlin's narrative arc. There's nothing thematically subtle about that line. But that line also works, because it is grounded in a real drama of a guy trying to find his kid. 

I once tried to write these types of philosophical narratives, where I'd have some thought about the world, stick it into a character, and then try to make that be enough to bring a world to life. It never worked. Jonathan Franzen's intellectual characters work not because they have brilliant thoughts--although they sometimes do--but because their brilliant thoughts do not solve all the problems in their lives. Sometimes, they are the source of nothing but anxiety. Franzen's characters do not exist just to have thoughts Franzen wants them to have. They have thoughts because that's part of what they do as fully formed characters. They might be characters similar to Franzen, but that's not the same as saying they're puppets Franzen has giving us his prophetic vision of life through the guise of a nominal story.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a Philistine, or just an unimaginative critic. Maybe I'm unable to transcend the bourgeois tastes of my time. That's completely possible. Maybe I've developed such a knee-jerk response against what I think won't get published, I've equated it with something that shouldn't get published.

I might be wrong about what I like, but I don't think I've confused what I like for what I ought to like. Not yet. And my requirements for what I like are definitely not modern. I've never improved much upon Horace's "instruct and delight."

Agreeing with Nguyen's view of the "hostile" writing workshop, even while disagreeing with it

Viet Thanh Nguyen, he of the 2016 Pulitzer-Prize winning The Sympathizer, wrote recently for the Times about how writers' workshops can be hostile. I agree with a lot of what he says, even though I have nearly opposite impressions of some aspects of the workshop system from him. Someone who has never been to a workshop would probably have been surprised by some of the assertions Nguyen made.

Show don't tell

Nguyen scores some points early by accusing the workshop of being rife with unquestioned assumptions. One assumption he correctly takes the workshop to task for is the mantra of all writing workshops: "Show, don't tell." He rightly claims this is ahistorical. Most of literary history is full of examples of stories that show and tell. This is one of the central tenets of contemporary commercial aesthetics in literary fiction I struggle to cope with. I feel like I often have to hide the reason why I've written what I've written. This "hiding" isn't new, of course. ("Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." Or, 1800 years closer to the present, "Tell all the truth/but tell it slant.") But I can't help feeling that a lot of fiction/poetry out there that gets the establishment seal of approval has hidden its thematic core so well, it's effectively encrypted beyond breaking.  Jesus may have said that he hid his meaning in parables, but I don't think we find them terribly hard to crack.

Nguyen also calls out a related malady, the depreciated value of plot, which is seen as the province of genre writers. I've suggested before that literary fiction could be defined as "literature in which plot is not very important." Which probably has something to do with why I have pondered that maybe I do not really write literary fiction, although I don't know what other genre I might fit. 

Craftsmanship + workshop=manly aesthetic?

Nguyen, drawing on the connotations of "workshop" and the oft-emphasized notion of "craftsmanship," sees these notions as emphasizing masculinity and physical labor over mental labor. He claims this masculine aesthetic can make the workshop a threatening place for women and minorities. 

I'm tempted to blow this off, because as a former jock and Marine, I've met actual masculine people, and the folks I knew in graduate school did not fit the description. Furthermore, the very aesthetic he critiques, the "show, don't tell" approach, seems to me like a feminine one. At least, it seems like something that came into play when feminism and other isms that challenged white, male hegemony of the university were gaining influence. Nguyen himself claims the rise of the workshop aesthetic coincided with the post-war era, and this is precisely why it is apolitical--because strongly held political feelings were associated with communism. I accept his timeline, but question the outcome. Rather than result in hyper-masculine literature that preached a certain way of living, it resulted in hyper-detailed, ethereal writing that avoided politics. 

Of course, this is based on my own white, male perspective. I don't say that sarcastically. My race and gender come with limitations and blind spots. I'm equating "feminine" with a type of writing I don't like, one I find a little bit frivolous. (Not unlike Hawthorne, who complained of the tribe of "scribbling women" writers.) If women and minorities find the workshop hostile, I do not discount their feelings. They perceive it that way, and that means something. 

Masculine or feminine, the current aesthetic itself isn't all bad: I don't want to read a bunch of allegory all the time. It's nice to give characters the semblance of real agency. I just don't want that agency to get beyond the plan of the creating intelligence. Watch your kids. 

Can any part of college be apolitical?

I'd guess most people who haven't been in a writing program would be surprised to hear a complaint that they are apolitical. If anything, most people would suspect they are lousy with politics. After all, aren't agitating professors turning every campus in America into a political training ground?

But Nguyen is actually only too dead-on. Another Asian-American critic of the literary establishment I quote a lot, Anis Shivani, has explained the apolitical nature of the current American fictional aesthetic:

Contemporary literary fiction has chosen to marginalize itself from mainstream culture. It has its own niche, like specialized Foucauldian sociology or Derridean philosophy, catering to the sensibilities of other experts in the field. The writer adopts a politics-neutral stance, excluding any sense that characters' lives are influenced by politics. The fear is of being branded politicized, in which case no serious reviewer will want to deal with the writer anymore, and of being called preachy or moralistic or sermonizing by the reviewing community.

The typical fiction writer tends to be vaguely liberal about womens' or gays' or minorities' rights. He is ultra-sensitive about not writing anything offensive to any constituency, and mortally fearful of painting with broad brushstrokes. He takes care to mark down any budding writer who might want to speak truthfully about minority or majority groups (it's open season, however, on white males, in the teacher's own writing). Beyond that, he doesn't have a grasp of politics. 

Nguyen sees a lack of seriousness in literature, an unwillingness to talk about the things that matter most to him, that matter most to all of us: politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology. (I'd add religion and science.) American literature has, in fact, gotten to a place where only outsiders, it seems, can talk seriously about anything. I recently wrote a story that attempted to respond to the reality of the Trump era, and I know it will never get published. I didn't hide what it was about enough.

That being the case, although I am heartily sorry that minorities and women feel like outcasts in the workshop, I hope they will take heart in knowing that being treated with hostility is a sign you are onto something. If they coddle you, it means you lack talent and they just want you to stay in the program and pay your tuition. But actual opposition is a positive sign.

Why an M.F.A. in writing is not worth the cost

My first course in graduate school was a survey on Melville. Melville is my favorite writer. The professor for the class was Brian Higgins, one of the great Melville scholars in the world. (I'm sorry to find out that Brian died in May.) This was as close to Heaven as I would ever find in life. He told a story about fellow Melville scholar Hershel Parker. A former student of Parker's drunk-dialed him in the middle of the night once, his plaintive voice pleading for an answer to the question, "My God, Hershel, what does Moby Dick mean?" Parker was reportedly proud of the answer he managed to scrape together while still half-asleep: "When you go up against the universe, you're likely to get the shit kicked out of you."

I hope you liked that anecdote. It cost me about $50,000.

It also illustrates one of the reasons I left graduate school after my M.A., instead of continuing on for a Ph.D. and a life centered around literature. Recently, Blake Kimzey, the guy who edited my story and who I was then a jerk to before realizing he'd actually done a good job, tweeted about his "Ahab-like quest to be a writer." Obviously, I identify with Ahab. Anyone who "gets" Moby Dick identifies with Ahab. I can imagine being caught up as a member of the crew on the quarterdeck when Ahab nails the coin to the mast and cries, "God hunt us all, if we hunt not Moby Dick to his death!" The whale for me in my twenties was to become a writer, to fire back at an indifferent universe with words. My words might not hurt the universe at all, but that wasn't the point. Get the whale or die trying. That was the point.

But less than two years later, I had pretty much given up the hunt. I think it partly had to do with reading the book The Comedy of Survival, by Joseph Meeker. Meeker looked at Western literature from an ecological perspective, thinking about how literature plays a role in survival. He felt that a tragic mindset, like, say, Hamlet's, was much less helpful to survival than a comedic mindset, like the hero of the Picaresque adventure Lazarillo de Tormes. The tragic mindset is willing to die for abstract causes. Meeker argues that this is unnatural. He recalls a story of an elk whose child was killed by a bear as the mother watched. The elk didn't track the bear seeking revenge. The elk didn't drink or suffer from depression. The elk moved on with the herd. What else could it do?

If Ahab were just taking a jet-ski and a harpoon gun on his own into the deep blue to seek the whale, we might be right to admire him.  But he sinks a ship full of people, people who went on board the Pequod for reasons of survival, to earn a living for families. He's an asshole, albeit a sublime asshole.

I didn't want to be Ahab, to be so focused on my own obsession that I brought down myself and others with me. I didn't have the strength to keep punching at the universe. I could either preach, unnoticed, on a street corner about the evils of a world that allows children to starve, or I could get a job and feed a mouth or two.

Mammon-the unavoidable reality
 
This is the main reason I wouldn't advise getting an M.F.A., or really any advanced degree in the humanities. School is a huge expense. The fact is that an advanced degree in the humanities doesn't pay for itself in most cases. (This is contrasted with an undergraduate degree in the humanities, which might actually be worth it. I believe this is because a lot of good jobs just require a college degree in "anything." My job is one of them.I still think you might be better off getting a specific, job-related degree. But I digress.)

Look, at 23, it's hard to accept that 40 years of claims adjustments for an insurance company or managing a call center isn't a bad way to spend your life. It's tempting to think that if you could put that off for a while and learn more, maybe you could make your dream of living for art and beauty and anarchistic freedom a reality. We tend to reinforce this idea in society with movies, TV, etc. about people who dreamed big and made their dreams come true. These stories tend to set up a false dichotomy between "selling out" and "remaining true to yourself." Ever see a story that celebrates a would-be poet forsaking a long-shot dream so he can help his brother pay for care for his special-needs child? A teacher who wanted to work in films, but who now tutors extra hours so she can pay for granola bars and school supplies for her students? A real estate agent who used to be a musician, who now works three jobs to pay for coyotes to take her family out of dangerous countries? Did any of these people sell out? Not at all. In fact, if you're planning to go all-in on trying to be a full-time artist, the odds are that at some point in time, you're going to owe your ability to eat to someone like this.

Let's say you decide you need beauty in your life. You get your Ph.D. Your best job prospect is at 42K a year teaching in Montana. You have a 300/month student loan payment. That's 3600 a year. To make that much after tax, you'd have to earn about 5000 gross, give or take. So your effective salary is now down to 37K. It's probably living wage. Unless you also ran up your credit cards for surgery for your pet Labrador while in school. And to fix the brakes on your old car. Now, you're down to 32K a year. You buy a new car, because yours has finally had it, and you finally got the job you were promising everyone you'd get, and can't ask them for more help. It goes on. Your decision to enjoy life at 25 can make your life miserable well into your forties.

But aren't there things more important than money, just making it through? Of course. But know what you're choosing. If you want to live for art and beauty, please, don't have a family. Not until you finally make it, or find a decent fall-back plan and pay off your debts. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the decision not to have kids. If more people chose it, the world would probably be a better place. Just know what you're getting into.

All this is moot if you have a family to take care of you. And there's nothing wrong with that, either. If your family is fine footing the bill while you try to get your career off the ground, well, that's kind of the whole reason people work hard: to be able to offer their kids a chance at their dreams. Go for it. Also, if you have a scholarship or T.A. deal with the school, and can get through without debt, that's another matter altogether. But I still don't think that an M.F.A. is the best way to go about becoming a writer, for the reason below.

The workshop: how to waste your time in a pointless meeting without even having a job

 I got an M.A., not an M.F.A., but I took five graduate level workshops. Two were in novels, two in short stories, and one in poetry. I know what awaits you as an M.F.A. candidate. You will be put into workshops with about ten or so students. You will take turns reading work from other students, probably two per class. You will get your work looked at every four or five weeks. You'll try to provide good feedback to other students, but you'll have a hard time with it. Some work will strike you as very poor. You'll wonder why that person is in grad school at all. What advice do you offer to fix a manuscript that is rotten from beginning to end?

Some students will seem to get the basics of writing, but will write about subjects that bore you, or in a style you already decided you hated back in high school. You'll try to offer helpful suggestions to the guy who writes all in stream of consciousness or the girl who writes entirely in second person. You'll feel like you weren't very helpful.

When it's finally your turn to get feedback, you'll find that the other students had as much trouble figuring out what to say about your work as you did about theirs. You'll wonder if some even tried, or if they are just cruising until it's their turn to go again. Soon, you'll start to do the same for them.

The 60-90 minutes spent discussing your work will be mostly a waste of time. Each student will offer their half thought-out critiques. They have other classes and jobs and families, and your work is the easiest thing to fluff on. One student will have something semi-useful to say that kind of interests you, but then he'll be shouted down by the one student who never shuts up (the same one you can't believe is actually in an M.F.A. program). The one person who won't have much to say is the professor, the one person in the class who has presumably published some work of renown, and whose opinion might, therefore, matter. The professor will hand you back her copy of your work with her comments. These will be margin notes and half a page of general thoughts. For this, you have just borrowed $5,000 at 4% interest.

I'm sure there are advocates of the workshop. I'm sure some professors run them in a more useful fashion than this. But I have a feeling the situation I just described is the rule, just as it's the rule that most meetings in any organization are an incredible waste of time. The people running the meetings seem to be incapable of determining purpose, scope, and method and then keeping everyone on task.

Contrast this with Carve magazine's literary services.  If you want to just get general thoughts and a line-by-line edit on a 6,000 word short story, you can do it for $150. General thoughts only on a 4000 word story is just $50. (For reference, in most semester-long workshops in grad school, you'll probably get your work looked at twice.) For that money, someone who has at least published some work will give you reasonably considered feedback. It isn't perfect feedback, maybe, but from my experience, it is better than almost any feedback you'll get in a graduate program. The most expensive package they offer is $1500. For that, you get three months of intensive coaching. This includes up to 50,000 words reviewed, if you've got that much. You get six meetings, and weekly in-depth feedback. This would probably equal more individual care than I got in four semesters of grad school combined.

Plus, these are things you can do while you continue to work. That means you'll not only be not getting into debt, but you'll be getting new life experiences to write about. (Even writers are bored by writing about being a writer.)

Your adviser in graduate school is not going to be your best friend

I had three workshop leaders in graduate school. Cris Mazza, Gene Wildman, and Luis Urrea. All three were fine people. Luis is a goddamned beautiful human being. I had just enough self-respect in graduate school to refrain from being his stalker. Cris was my adviser. She surprised me by treating me most of the time like she thought I was kind of smart. Gene's class must have led the league in curse words, but never in an angry way.

They were three really nice people, and fairly talented. I didn't really like Cris's subject matter in her books, but it was clear she could write. None of them gave me a cold shoulder. I had occasional e-mails and meetings with them.

I just don't think I got $50,000 worth of advice from them. Not really their fault. They were working on their own writing, their own careers. They had families. It's not like they could clear their schedules to spontaneously invite me to a six-hour dinner after class. (They'd have had to pay for it, too. I was fucking broke.)

I have to imagine this will be the case for most grad students. I think one reason people pay big bucks is the hope that an adviser will help you get a break, will put in a good word for you with an editor somewhere. Maybe that an adviser will generally adopt you and make your success the whole purpose of his/her existence. That you'll cry and hug her when you accept your Nobel.

Someone may have a different experience, but I just don't think this is going to happen. I think you'll get responses to e-mails that answer your questions, albeit not in an expansive way. I think you'll get office hours meetings if you ask for them. I think you'll get a half a page of feedback each time it's your turn to go in a workshop. But you're not going to get a literary parent figure. Advisers have their own agendas, and they need to have boundaries.

Writing is hard work, and there is no substitute for knowing the basics and just writing

I got through an M.A. in English without ever reading Shakespeare in college. I've read a fair amount on my own; it just was never part of a class I took. (Probably because we spent way too much time reading bullshit literary theory to spend time on actual literature.) Likewise, I managed to collect a graduate degree "with a concentration in creative writing" without ever reading a single book about how to write. I think I believed that writing couldn't be taught, that I'd just read the greats and something would happen. I hardly ever even read anything that had been written after, say, 1975. I didn't even know what contemporary literature looked like.

Maybe my graduate program assumed we had read books on how to write in undergrad. Maybe I wrote well enough to make it look like I had some idea what I was doing, but not well enough to succeed. But I can't understand how I can get an M.A. or M.F.A or whatever without ever being required to read books of "craft." (I hate that word, but that's really what I'm talking about.) Thinking back, it's obvious a lot of students besides me had never read about how to write. If we had, we wouldn't all have made so many point-of-view mistakes.

Rather than waste time, I think it would have been far more useful to have readings on craft included as part of the curriculum. Once we all had a common vocabulary, we could have spent our workshop hours much more usefully.

I don't understand why the basic model isn't this:

1) Know the basics of your craft and prove you can use the terminology
2) Submit every week
3) Get feedback from your professor every week.
4) Apply feedback and submit again the next week.

Why do other students even enter into it? You could certainly look to them for moral support and a sense of community, but the guy who supposedly knows something should be the one giving you most of the advice. For $5,000, it seems like you ought to be able to expect that. Carve is offering it for $1500.

At some point in time, if you want to write, you're going to have to learn the basics of how it's done and then write a lot. Unless you're very talented, you'll have to write a whole lot of stuff that isn't very good before it all clicks. (I say "talented," not "smart." You can be very smart and not really "get" writing.)

A lot of people say the benefit of an M.F.A. program is that is forces you to have the discipline to write by a deadline. I think that if you need an external reason to write, you will never have the discipline to write. I knew a lot of guys in the Marine Corps who came in fat and were hoping they'd learn the discipline in the Marine Corps to be in shape. They're all fat again now. An M.F.A. is not a deus ex machina to get you off your ass (well, for a writer, I guess "on your ass," technically) and in front of the keyboard. If you can't get yourself to write on your own, you won't be a writer.

If you've written and written and written and read up on how to write and then written and written and written some more, and you're still not getting anywhere, and you're willing to take the anchorite vows of making it as a writer or bust, then go try a graduate program. But if you haven't already filled a library with attempts to succeed before you get there, I really don't believe you'll succeed afterwards.

And that's why I'm done with the blog

My purpose in posting so much about doubts and difficulties as a marginally gifted writer was to help people struggling with similar situations.  If someone else with thirty stories, one publication and five encouraging notes from editors could see that it's not just them throwing their hands up in exasperation, maybe they could at least face the frustration knowing they're not crazy or alone.

But I can't do as many things as I'd like to do. I can't blog about writing and write and do my day job and take care of my family and floss and lift weights and wash my clothes and, hopefully, get back to volunteer work again soon. So the blog has to go. I thought a couple of weeks ago that I could just write about all the things that bother me about fiction writing and exorcise them and be done, but really, I haven't even scratched the surface. Maybe if I actually, you know, succeed one day at fiction, I'll write about all the problems I had breaking in, and people will actually care because I finally figured it out. But for now, I'll worry about solving the problems rather than recording them in excruciating detail.

Thanks to everyone who read, and the few who even commented. If you'd like to leave a comment in the future, I'll probably see it eventually.

I wish any aspiring writers the very wildest of success, but I also wish success in life to those who give up writing to tend to more important, other things.

UPDATE: 11-7-2016

I wrote five more stories since this post. Two were published: one in Bartleby Snopes, and one coming up soon in The Potomac Review. That story was actually selected by two journals on the same day, leaving me in the unprecedented position of actually turning a journal down. I had a short story collection win honorable mention in Leapfrog's 2016 fiction contest.

I wrote my novel in the spring of this year. It was a farce about my day job. I sent it off to a few literary agents, but haven't heard anything back. I doubt I will. It's apparently very hard to break in. I could always go the self-publishing route, but I just don't have the energy to expend in self-marketing. It's a pretty good bet it would be one more ignored, self-published book on the digital heap. Even if I did score a traditional publishing contract, apparently that hardly means I'd get much readership.

I've been getting rejected hard lately with stories I sent off to the major league journals. I've sent what I thought was my best work to many of the journals from this list of the best in the country. One got form rejected in five days. None have gotten so much as a "we liked it, but can't publish it right now."

Fiction is hard, and it's unlikely to ever get you fame or fortune. That's really all every writing program should tell its students.

Letting the Atlantic do the talking for me

Getting an M.F.A. is a terrible financial decision for almost everyone. (I'd say that so is getting almost any advanced degree in the humanities, but let's start with the M.F.A.)

Article from Atlantic from last year that makes this argument

Article from Village Voice cited in above article, in which the M.F.A. is compared to a Ponzi scheme

Ultimately, young writers with stars in their eyes will probably say that it is worth all the money to become a better writer. You can't put a price on art, you Philistine.

I'll address that idea more fully in a later post, maybe in the final one I'm going to do in a few weeks. My short response is that I don't think anything happens in an M.F.A. program you couldn't replicate for yourself in a much more focused, individualized manner for far, far less money. And money should matter to you if you want to be a writer, unless you come from money or have married well. You're probably not going to make a ton of it. If you throw a lot of debt on top of that, it's going to be something that will cause you stress for a long, long time to come. In other words, it will be something that will sap the energy you might otherwise have put into writing.

Man up or give up, Weber

Got some nice feedback on my writing and this blog yesterday:

If I have any advice for you it would be this: don't take the rejection so hard. I've been reading your blog and I wonder if what is making you doubt yourself is writing about the doubt and the rejection, which is something you have no control over (and seems counter productive). Rejection, more than anything else for a writer (save solitary confinement at the keyboard) is the one constant. You will always hear no and you'll hear it often, but you also have many publications ahead of you because you are a fine writer, Jake, and I think you should put your energy into creative writing instead of questioning editorial decisions and the stories that are being published today. You are now a voice among them, and I think as soon as you accept that rejection will always be there, you will enter a new and productive period of writing that is solely focused on your work. The bookshelf is large and journals abound and all of it is so damn subjective, but as long as you don't give up you'll keep seeing your work out in the world where readers will find you. I felt compelled to offer you this ra-ra speech after reading one hell of a story. Keep going, and focus on the positives and the things you are absolutely in control of, which is your own writing practice. The marketplace will/has found you, so keep going and forget about the rest.

In the Marine Corps, folks would have put this less diplomatically, and asked if a part of my anatomy that I do not actually have because I am not a woman had gotten sand in it. Quit bitching about what people publish or don't publish, about you not getting published, and just write stories already, if that's what you want to do.

There is undeniable wisdom is this kind of no-excuses advice. (I'm talking about my imaginary advice I'm putting in the mouth of imaginary people, not the much nicer advice I got from this person.) I've been thinking of putting the blog on hold to get back to more fiction writing for a while now. (There was already a blog gap in September when I wrote non-stop to make a deadline.) But first, here's why I do this blog.

First of all, I think graduate school in writing was a giant waste of time and money, and want to make sure I leave that message to the world to help others not make the same mistake. Seriously, if you really want to make 22K a year teaching four comp classes, then get an advanced degree in English. If you want to write, though, learn to do something that pays reasonably well and that you don't hate. Then, buy some writing books, get someone to critique you whose taste you respect, and write.

Secondly, I don't want to write if nobody is going to ever read what I write (other than family and a few friends who feel compelled to). I don't think there's any value in that. If I knew that nothing I wrote from this moment on would find an audience, I'd stop writing this instant. So I want to work through the question of how realistic it is that I will find an audience.

Like a lot of writers, I do feel some sense of compulsion to write that is independent of the audience question. But the audience is there in my mind at an early stage. I think one important reason I write has to do with wanting to have more stories that I like to read out there. Nobody else is going to write them, so I have to write them. When I write something and accomplish my goal in writing it, I like it. But if I can't find others to agree, what does that say about me? Or about them? Either way, it makes writing seem futile.

If I can write stories and they can find an audience and those stories help make the lives of others better in some way, then writing is utterly worth it. If not, it's worth nothing.

That's where I've been for a long time. But my adviser is right--there really are no guarantees. I hate "faith," which I take to mean "thinking you know something that you don't really know." But I have some admiration for hope, which I interpret as "acting as though something matters when you have no idea if it really does." So I'll get back to it and quit bitching.

But not without limits. I put writing away for a decade so I could raise a family (and quit mooching off mine). I'm going to keep writing and sending off until the end of the year, then I'm putting it away again for a while. C.S. Lewis said that "the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world," and while I don't share his faith, I do think that I would trade a Nobel for a loaf of bread if that loaf of bread would be of more use than all my writing could.

A book I should have read a long time ago

I just ordered Against the Academy: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies by Anis Shivani. Given that this whole blog is nominally dedicated to my dislike of the university workshop (and the literature it engenders, which seems to occupy most of the journals considered worth reading by the literati), I guess I should have read this a long time ago. I've been busy. Mostly doing stuff having nothing to do with literature.

I found the book when I came this review while looking for criticisms of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I just read. Man, Shivani is a strident son of a bitch. Too strident, I thought, in his sweeping smashing of nearly all literature that DOESN'T deal with death and the thinness of capitalism. But maybe that will be just the ticket for something I think is as obviously a failure as university writing programs, but that seems to go on and on like McCarthy's road. I am planning to read it just to enjoy vicariously feeling his seething rage and he makes points I've thought about, but do not have the wit to phrase as sharply as him.