I've wasted my life: thoughts after a week as a reader for a literary journal

In my last post, I was curious what I might learn about the inner workings of a small literary journal, the kind I mostly submit my work to, if I were to take a role as a volunteer reader. I've now been a reader for a week and a half. Answering my main questions having to do with the timelines of these journals was actually pretty quick and easy, and reasonably unsurprising. It's everything else I'm learning that's a little bit of a shock.

The easy stuff

Timing: My main question was: if journals don't immediately dispatch the writing that comes in, how do they not just keep getting further and further behind until the amount of unread submissions becomes practically infinite? The answer, at least for our journal, is that we have submission seasons. We try to guarantee that everyone gets a response within four, preferably three, months. If we are getting close to missing that goal, the editor puts out an "all hands on deck," and we try to catch up. It's that simple. We chip away, and when it gets desperate, we chip some more. I'd guess that journals that don't use a submission season do the same thing, only with "all hands" calls more often. You fall behind, and then you put forth a Herculean effort to catch up.

Process: Ours is a mix of editorial board opinion and a strong editor. The editor is the only one who makes the final decisions, but she relies on the readers to weed through the stacks of entries to find the best stuff for us to kibitz about together. There isn't really an etched-in-stone method for grinding through the grist of the entries; readers kind of just go in, grab something, and vote. Every reader can vote up, down, or maybe on each story, but we're encouraged to keep the maybes to a minimum. "Two votes down is the kiss of death," the editor says, but there isn't really any magic number of yesses that equal an acceptance. She has a rather laissez-faire, Geoffrey-Rush-in-Shakespeare-in-Love "it'll all work out somehow" attitude to the final selections. So far, one that she's accepted was one I pulled off the slush pile. So yay, me, making a difference. 

The hard stuff

Odds of making it: We got about 600 stories in this period. We're picking ten for publication. The math isn't good for anyone, and we're not even that big a journal.

The competition: I had expected that half the stories would be obvious junk from a few sentences in. That isn't the case. The vast majority aren't bad stories. They might not all be great, but maybe 75% of them have some redeemable qualities to them, and I can see why the authors thought they could make good stories out of them. The weeding out is very difficult. Maybe one-fourth seem good enough to me the journal could print them and not be ashamed of the choice. The difference between a story that makes it and one that didn't is very small. I've been trying to be very sparing with my yes votes, but I've already said yes to about 5 out of 30 stories I've read. I'm obviously up-voting far more stories than will make the final cut. And that's with me channeling as much asshole as I've got in me. 

What separates a yes and a no vote: With so many stories to plow through, readers are more likely to take note of a story that explodes rather than one that simmers. That doesn't mean the plot needs to be an action movie. You can still write you heartfelt epistolary story about the orphaned girl in 18th century New England who voices what she cannot say in words through her needlepoint. But it better have a unique voice, and that voice needs to assert itself from the first words and not let up. Flashbacks and exposition that remove the reader from the oomph of the main narrative absolutely kill the impulse to keep reading sympathetically. I've got much more to read--get on with it. And those breaks from the main narrative each need to have their own force behind them, so it feels less like I'm landing after the initial push past inertia and more like I'm being shot from one cannon to another. 

How I'm changing as a result of journal work

I don't read every story all the way through, and I'm looking back at some of my stories and realizing other readers wouldn't, either: I swore when I started reading that I'd read every story beginning to end sympathetically, just like I'd want a reader to do for me. Here, ten days later, I voted no on a story this morning after a paragraph. And it wasn't even a terrible paragraph. I just knew it had enough flaws in it that, small as those flaws may be, the story couldn't right itself. I guess I'm becoming hardened. And I know there are readers assigned to my stories who feel the same way.

I'm rethinking my own writing in two ways:  

First, although the rush to avoid cliched first lines has led to lines so overblown with pretentiousness and falsely hyped tension that these are a cliche of their own, I am now terribly conscious of the need to grab the reader. It's on me. I can't lapse into self-consolatory ideas like "well, if the reader is too dumb and attention-deficit-burdened to need fireworks going off all the time, it's his loss." I have to take responsibility for hooking the reader. As Vonnegut once put it, readers have no reason to be kind. I voted a story down the other day pretty much once I read "it was unseasonably warm that September" in the opening line.

Secondly, although I've said before I'm not a big fan of "flash fiction," it does occur to me that one of the best ways to avoid lulls in the narrative of a story is to keep it short--really, really short. I have to admit that as a reader, when I see 2,200 words instead of a story that pushes our 5,000 word limit and then some, I am a little happier about getting into it. I'm a little more likely to read to the end. Ten pages into a 20-page story, if I'm still not loving it, I'm not going to, and it's not worth another 10 pages just to see if I'm wrong. But five pages into a ten-page story, I'm nearly done. Let's just see where this is going. Plus, a shorter story naturally just has fewer breaks, less exposition. The longer a story is, the more you probably have to refine it to make sure there are no dead patches.

Partly, I feel better about myself seeing all the solid writing out there: Like any writer who gets a lot of rejections, which is almost all writers, I face self-doubt. Am I completely off base with my own self-analysis? I know it's natural to think you're better than you really are, but am I that much worse than I think I am? Turns out, I'm probably not. There are just a lot of good writers and not a lot of space in which to publish them. The stories I write are on par with most of what I read; there's just a lot of stories at that level being written. So when I got two rejections this week from two of the top-tier journals, I didn't feel the inevitable 48 hours of despair I usually feel. 

On the other hand, maybe I am wasting my life: Maybe I'm being vain, but I think it's natural to want to do something where if you died, the world would have a hard time replacing you. To "make a difference," in the tired vernacular. It's hard to think that's what I'm doing. I know, I know--writers write because they can't help it, because they feel compelled to write. And I do feel that compulsion. But I am always faced with the thought that this compulsion is a temptation to be resisted rather than a gift to be indulged. The existence of so many good writers is at least evidence that I'm not making logical life choices from a supply and demand perspective. Even success in this industry means shoving into a glutted market and demanding room for one more. 

There's nothing wrong, of course, with sticking to something you love, come what may.  But if I'm going to put my eggs in that basket, I hope I am doing it, as Anis Shivani said, out of "some belief...that makes one sleepless and distraught," not because I think getting stories published now and again is a nice sop to my vanity.

The curious schedules of literary journals

I recently answered the call of a local literary journal for readers. They claim they had about 6000 submissions for 2016. If I count their output correctly, out of those 6000, they accepted 80. One of the benefits they promised for those taking up the call to help read was getting to see what the submission process looks like from the other side.

I sure hope so. I'm not criticizing literary journals here. In fact, I hereby repent some of what now seems to me harsh language I used about some journals early on in my blog. I wasn't so much trying to vent against journals as I was hoping to voice the thoughts that occur to me in the often discouraging process of submissions. My hope was that others feeling the same frustrations might at least know they weren't alone. It wouldn't have been the first blog to do this, of course, but I still felt it might be useful. I know I found Literary Rejections on Display oddly encouraging when I was struggling to get my first acceptance.

So this isn't meant as a rebuke, but more as a question I'm anxious to get an answer to. Almost all journals take between 3 and 6 months to respond to submissions. Some take much longer; I currently have a story in with one journal that has been in the queue for 13 months. (I have a feeling that they have coded me somehow as a writer they will probably never accept, and are hanging onto the submission as long as they can because it will prevent me from submitting again and clogging up their inbox.)

Nathaniel Tower, the editor of the sadly-soon-to-end Bartleby Snopes, has insisted that the length of time your story sits with editors means nothing in terms of how close you were to being accepted. If it took a week or a year, that's just how long it happened to take for the journal to get to your work. (Nathaniel has written some really useful and entertaining blog posts about behind the scenes stuff at lit journals. I actually can't find the post where he said not to read into how long it takes to get a response, but trust me, he said it somewhere.)

The question

Here's what I don't understand: if journals have a long queue, how does it not just get ever longer and longer? Some journals have seasons. They take submissions until a fixed date, and then they stop taking them. That makes sense. They get behind, and then they catch up. It's like a doctor's office; they get further and further behind as the season goes on, but just like a doctor's office eventually closes up and finishes with all the patients in the waiting room who didn't die waiting, the journal will catch up during the off-season.


But some journals--many, in fact, don't have an off-season. It's like a doctor's office that never closes, so the patients, one would have to imagine, just get more and more backed up.

If your model isn't in one day out the next, how do you not just get further and further behind until you choke in submissions?

At least a few journals do seem to run a pretty quick turnaround. Bartleby Snopes responded to me in a week with an acceptance. So did Potomac Review. (Bartleby Snopes made it a policy to always try to reply within a week.) A literary agent the other day responded to my query letter on my novel with a "no" the same day I sent it. That's the only business model I can see working. Anything other than clearing the inbox every day seems like a formula for capsizing in submissions.

I can understand if the timing of a journal is periodic--quarterly, say--that a journal might hang onto a piece until near the end of the cutoff for that edition. My thinking is that a journal would, on the first day of the selection period for the next journal, pick the top X number of selections, with X being the number it plans to publish. As new ones come in, they are either judged better than what they already have, in which case they bump those off, or they fail to be as good as what they already have on the board. If it doesn't top what they've already got, it's one day in, one day out. When anything falls off the board, it gets sent back to the writer with a no.

I assume--and this is very much an uninformed assumption on my part--that front-line readers are able to weed out the obvious misses without a lot of oversight from senior editors. Their job is to triage what they get--some to the waste basket, some on to senior editors to look at more closely. So there might be a few days of delay between the initial triage and the final decision.

But no matter how you slice it, if a journal has more coming in on a daily basis than it makes decisions on, the queue is just going to get longer and longer. So this is what I'm anxious to see: how does a model work where the goal isn't in-today, out-today?

Blogging on the edge of Ragnarok

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never come. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumable they have their reward. Men are different.They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

-C.S. Lewis, "Learning in Wartime"

Over a year ago, I wrote what I intended to be my final post. Since then, Cleveland won a major sports title, the Cubs won the World Series, and there was an election in November you've maybe heard about. All of these things make modernity's obsession with post-apocalyptic scenarios seem less like fantasies and more like documentaries. Or maybe reality shows, since that seems to be what we've come down to at this late hour of the world.

The late disturbance has confirmed what a friend of mine keeps insisting is the case: I can't stop writing. I can't stop writing stories, and I can't stop writing cultural critiques from the perspective of someone producing cultural artifacts that are largely unconsumed. So I might as well embrace it and put what I'm writing out here in public for the few who might read it to see.

So how bad is it?

This isn't a political blog. Most of what I know about American history revolves around the 20 years before and the ten years after the Civil War, so I don't have an especially informed perspective. This is a blog about culture. But this past election had a lot to do with culture. Social liberals--a group I very much include myself in, with a few qualifications--changed politics over several decades by changing the culture. This election could be viewed as an attempt to reverse the process and change the culture through politics. So what does the election tell me about the culture?

The bright side: Social liberals hate to confess this, but there were sicknesses in the culture that we helped create. And as much as this election was an extreme political solution, a nuclear bomb to kill those infected so the disease ceased to spread, those sicknesses did need to go. These include things like:

• Liberals use a definition of racism that is different from the vernacular use. In common use, a racist is someone who believes people are inferior based on racial characteristics, knows he thinks this, and is fine with that. Liberals use a more academic definition, one that appeared in the movie Dear White People. 

That's all well and good. We need to define terms accurately. But liberals then often play a dirty little game where we accuse conservatives of being racist in contexts where it is natural to assume the more common definition applies. This is disingenuous, and it causes anger in people who truly believe--not altogether without evidence--that policies that have been intended to help the racially disadvantaged don't do what they are advertised to do. I disagree, ultimately, but it's not an obvious case. Reasonable people can disagree. So I'm hopeful that we liberals will now be more circumspect in our accusations.

• Liberals, thinking we have already won the cultural war forever, aren't actually terribly good at the basic arguments for the society we want. It's similar to how many scientists aren't good at arguing for evolution. It's just a given. Nobody even learns how to argue for it anymore, because it's absurd to think you have to. But conservatives, meanwhile, have become very good at the basic arguments for the things they believe in. I hope we liberals will up our "evangelical" game.  

• We ignore arguments that ought to have a vigorous answer. "Won't an influx of people who have different views about, say, the roles of women or the morality of homosexuality change the culture to where we no longer possess the very tolerance that allows us to take these people in?" is a tough question that we have not answered adequately. It's impolite for liberals to even discuss the question. This is an inheritance from the Romantics, the recent ancestors of liberals, where we were made to believe that people are basically good (according to our own definition of good), and that if you merely put them in the right social setting, they will act accordingly. But conservatives have always have a good point that people sure don't act good. In fact, liberals believe in strong government action precisely because people don't do the right thing often. Obviously, since I have volunteered working with refugee populations, including Muslims, I think taking in strangers is ultimately good. But how anyone could take it for granted, I don't know. It's undeniable that hyper heterogeneous America has social problems that hyper homogeneous South Korea does not have. So I'm glad we at least can have a debate now. 

The bad: As much as I've tried to convince myself and others to be positive, there's plenty of bad. Culturally, this election signifies two shifts to extremes I find depressing.

1. First is the repudiation of expertise. The polls were all wrong, everyone said Trump would lose, and he won. So what do experts know? And Trump won doing everything everyone said he shouldn't do. So what do experts know? Carry this a little bit further: Who cares about what China experts say about Taiwan? What do experts know? Who cares what scientists say about climate change? What do experts know? Aeon Skoble argues in his chapter on Lisa Simpson from The Simpsons and Philosophy that America "has always had a love-hate relationship with the notion of the intellectual." Our basic democratic ideals make us skeptical of the proposition that one man's opinion might matter more than another, yet we still long to hear from experts. Skoble describes something that probably sounds familiar: "Populist commentators and politicians frequently exploit this resentment of expertise while relying on it as it suits them, for example when a candidate attacks his opponent for being an "Ivy League elitist" while in fact being a product of (or relying on advisers from) a similar educational background." But we are now seeing a President who seems to not need experts at all. He is consciously picking people to lead agencies who have disdain for them. The head of the Department of Energy may soon go from a Ph.D. from MIT to a man who once forgot the name of the department. He ignores his own intelligence community, questions whether they even know what they are talking about. So the pendulum seems to have swung pretty far. So to what end have people like me labored to improve our minds?
   
2.  Secondly, and relatedly, is the notion that because nothing is free of bias, all things are equally biased. NPR is no better than hillarykillzbabies.com. One can't even begin to argue a position, because anything that contradicts what someone else believes is automatically just biased. This spills over into art. There is no standard of good and bad. Everything is relative. (For this, as well, we liberals shoulder a lot of blame, and are now, perhaps being hoisted on our own petard.) 

Why to keep writing...or keep doing anything, really


When friends say they are having a hard time getting motivated to do anything because there doesn't seem to be a point, I try to encourage them, sometimes quoting the C.S. Lewis passage in the epigraph. And as bad as this is, it isn't start-of-World-War-II-in-England bad. But in all honesty, I wonder what the point is of many things I once took for granted.

Since this whole blog is frequently a meditation on the question of "what's the point of writing when I don't know if I'll ever even be read?" I can't deny that I always faced this question long before a Falangist takeover of the White House.  But a crisis, or at least what I feel is likely to push us very close to crisis, adds to this the question, "What's the point of writing literary stories and writing about literature when the world is hanging in the balance?"

I've had a somewhat encouraging 2016 as a writer. Two stories were published, one winning "story of the month." I won honorable mention in a contest. But I'm still probably never going to have any kind of major cultural impact as a writer. I have to know this with every word I write.

But this isn't any different than the human condition is for almost everyone. All our best efforts, sooner or later, mostly lead to nothing. In the end, humanity will probably ruin itself with its own greed and stupidity. But we keep fighting the good fight until the end, because humanity is roughly equal parts noble and beautiful to his greedy and stupid parts. I was going to lead into a meditation on Norse stoicism in the face of certain doom, but I remembered that Tolkein often corrected the notion of Germanic fatalism as simply "we are all going to die, but we must die on the side of good, anyway." His version was richer. It wasn't faith, the sure belief that things will turn out alright in the end. It was more a grim hope. Things will probably end badly, but you never know until the end, so you might as well keep trying to make it turn out alright until there really is no hope.

Right now, that hope seems like a fool's hope. Writing stories seems like a waste of time. But if we've learned anything from recent history, it's that culture and politics move together. Writers write. We concern ourselves with truth. Politics work themselves out as a necessary corollary.

That doesn't mean we avoid the political. Anis Shivani has written that "a consistent characteristic of contemporary American poetry is the flattening of history in the individual's private agony." I left graduate school because I saw no essential evangelical message in the profession of literature, nothing it had to say to those who were not professional literature theorists. Just as the pendulum has swung in American politics, it now needs to swing in literature. Our characters, our poetic narrators, need to come out of themselves. They need to end the tyranny of pulling the world into their own narrow interior and private lives, to open their own private lives to the public space. This isn't political didacticism. It's just realizing that there is a world outside of art that art must speak to. If we fail to make that appeal, art suffers, just as a political ideology that failed to appeal to the world outside itself just suffered.

Artists aren't that different from the disappointed liberals I spoke of above who've lost the ability to argue their basic tenets because they didn't think they had to. Writers have forgotten to write stories that readers outside the academy love, because they forgot they had to. It was a given that literature had value. Well, it's not a given anymore. Writers have lost the ability to evangelize, a word I've now used three times in this post. It just means "to tell good news." The news doesn't even really have to be all that good. You can say the world is falling apart as long as someone else can hear thoughts they haven' t been able to express and feel less alone in knowing it's falling apart. But to bring others into your imaginative world, you first have to recognize that they even exist.

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.

Speaking of bad readers...

I've posted a few times about how readers don't pay attention to what they read, and so tend to completely miss the point; this can be incredibly frustrating for writers. It's one thing to be criticized for what you actually wrote, but being criticized for the version of what you wrote that exists in the critic's head is maddening. I include myself among those bad readers, by the way. Like anyone, I can be too self-absorbed to give someone's writing its due.

But I may have never seen a more egregious example of willful bad reading than that by Peter Maass in an article from The Intercept on August 11th. In it, Maass revealed what he claimed were seven editorial columns from the National Security Agency's internal website, written by a working-level translator. The translator's name was known to Maass, allowing him to do some basic research on the NSA employee. Maass dubbed the translator "Socrates" because six of the editorials were supposedly written for a column NSA called "The SIGINT Philosopher." (I will call this translator "Melville" instead of "Socrates," because the writer himself joked about how little Philosophy he had studied.) Maass combined these editorials with what he found on what he believed to be Melville's personal, non-work blog about life as a failed fiction writer to create a composite, conjectural portrait. The picture was not flattering, as the title "What Happens when a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy?" might suggest.

Maass's eight-page article included long sections on his search for information on Melville--not much of a challenge, as Melville was attempting to be found rather than hide on the internet, and Maass already had a lot to go on from the editorials. Maass played a tongue-in-cheek game of "tell you who he is/not tell you who he is," sharing many paragraphs of detail about Melville's life taken from the blog, including hints about his family, apparently to make the point (already known by everyone) that people can find out a lot about you if they are really determined to, even if you work for NSA. He explained that even if readers managed to decipher Melville's true identity, he had a "get out of guilt free card," because he was certain he had interpreted Melville's editorials sufficiently. As he saw it, Melville wanted the government to collect everything on everybody, because it made us all safer. Maass found irony in Melville's desire to keep his name out of Maass's story, because, after all, hadn't Melville just said that the more others know about you, the safer you are?

Since Maass's decision to provide so much personal information on Melville was entirely built on his certainty of his own interpretation, it's odd he spent so little time actually, you know, reading the articles. He and NPR's On the Media referred unproblematically to Melville's belief in "total surveillance." Nobody seemed to notice that this phrase, appearing in some re-posts of the story in quotes as though it were Melville who said it, is Maass's restatement, not Melville's words. As I'm about to show, it isn't a good restatement.

"Melville's" Actual Writing: What it says and doesn't say

What did Melville actually say? Maass dealt mostly with two of the editorials, so I will look at the same two. One editorial was the first Melville wrote as SIGINT Philosopher. With what looks to be roughly a one-page word limit, Melville attempted to answer the question not--as Maass thinks--of whether NSA should grab all communications on Earth, but whether it is morally acceptable to conduct surveillance on foreign targets who are not clearly "enemies." When Melville first stated work, he had misgivings. He wasn't targeting terrorists or drug lords, but foreign government officials who seemed like good people. They were folks, like Melville, who had taken government jobs because work for one's country seemed like a respectable calling in life and because it enabled them to care for their families. They weren't being targeted for doing bad things; they simply knew information that Melville's employer also wanted to know.

Melville then recalled a moment when he was himself a "target": his employer was re-investigating him for his security clearance at work. He apparently had problems with the polygraph (not an uncommon occurrence, even for those who are telling the truth). He passed a month later, it seems, but in the meantime, he felt depressed while waiting to retake the test after failing it. Sardonically, he listed two wishes he had while nursing his wounds:

1) That he could run away from it all, take his family out onto the prairie of old and live in a mud hut.

2) That his employer would just know everything about him, rather than just the flawed information from a polygraph.

I don't think either with was a real wish. If given the chance, he wouldn't go back to the 19th century and rub elbows with Ma and Pa Ingalls. Neither did he really want his employer to look through everything of his. These were his depressed, illogical thoughts, and they are presented as such. These ideas made sense when he was under duress, but now that he has recovered his equilibrium he is making fun of his own thoughts. He's poking fun at himself, not expressing a true desire. These crazy thoughts do relate to what comes after, but the later thought expresses a different wish than total surveillance.

He drew an analogy between himself as a target and his own targets he eavesdrops on. He wanted to be "complete and competent" in monitoring them. Not to listen to everything they said, but to listen to enough to be "competent," to not misunderstand them, to not misrepresent them based on bunk data, such as the bunk data from a polygraph. He said this was as much for the targets as it was for the Unites States, thinking of the repercussions that can result from a powerful agent that misunderstands an innocent target.

This is what David Hume (I think I have this right) would have called an "imperfect analogy." The two parts of Melville as target and Melville as eavesdropper only partly line up. He had a crazy desire to have the government know everything about him, and it led him to a less crazy realization that his job has meaning when he does it well enough to prevent propagating bad information.

I think Melville made a rather important punctuation error at one point. In a paragraph right after talking about his crazy desires, he began with "This is the attitude I have brought to my SIGINT work since then." That makes it sound like he meant "I've taken this crazy idea of the government knowing everything about me and put it to work." Some commenters have found this so outlandish they have even wondered if this was a mock piece, the NSA version of The Onion. But taking the whole article into consideration, I see it as a simple punctuation error. It should have said "This is the attitude I have brought to my SIGINT work since then <COLON>," thereby tying it to what came after.

This would have made it clear that the actual attitude he adopts is the next phrase: "If we are going to work on targets that fall short of being technically 'enemies' but are rather informative for our policy makers--and we are--then even looking at it from the target's perspective, we are honor-bound to do more and better monitoring rather than less." The more is not on everyone, only on his small set of foreign targets. And it's not infinite; it's only "more" to the extent it leads to "better."

There is a bizarre finale about seeking a "deity-like monitoring of the target." It's a weird, sudden insertion of a new metaphor of the government spy as God and the target as the humanity that God watches. I don't believe this was even Melville's original line. He's an agnostic. He just said the government "does not have godlike powers" a paragraph before that line. I think there might have even been a smiley-face emoticon stuck in there that didn't show up in Maass's version, and I don't think Melville would EVER use one of those outside a text message.

I'd wager that something happened here Maass can probably relate to. Melville had an editor. The editor thought this was a pithy way to wrap up, and Melville, in his first article, didn't feel he could fight too hard. But even if my textual postulations are wrong, and we take the text at its word, it's clear the text is not calling for monitoring "all of us," as Maass put it during his On the Media interview. It's deity-like monitoring of his targets. Those targets are apparently both foreign and few. He seems to have some level of familiarity with them, which would be impossible if he monitored thousands of people. He's a translator, after all. Ever try to translate just one person? It takes a long time.

All in all, I look at this article as a government employee saying that he finds monitoring other people to be a little unnerving, but that he has come to grips with it by determining to do his job competently. The government is going to do it anyway, so it's better for everyone if they at least get the right information. He has developed an ethic of trying to get "more and better monitoring of (his) targets," so that he can pass on information in a "complete and competent" manner.

This is certainly a position that you could still call into question. It does not interrogate many larger issues about the U.S.'s role internationally as a superpower and the effects thereof. I don't think he could have addressed all of this--short word count. In any event, these critiques, though important, are a long way off from a guy who thinks the government should find out everything about its own citizens.

Contents of second article

In the second article Maass quoted from, Melville, drawing on his newfound love for studying the American Civil War, found lessons from the past for civil servants of today. Melville believed that if he had been an adviser to Lincoln at the start of the war, he'd have urged Lincoln that he couldn't win, and therefore, Lincoln had no choice but to live with secession. Melville would have had a lot of solid-sounding pragmatic reasons why the war was doomed to failure, but his reasons, though brilliant in his own mind, would have been completely wrong. (Partly, he'd have been wrong because he'd have underestimated Lincoln's ability to make the impossible possible.)

Extrapolating from this, he suggested that civil servants like him may want to think twice before opposing too stridently policies they think are wrong. Those civil servants, though well-informed and well-intentioned, might be wrong, even though they could explain so well why there were right. Even if the employees were right and the policies from leaders were wrong, bad policies can sometimes work out: Lee made stupid decisions that his soldiers found a way to make look brilliant just by carrying them out in a brilliant way. (And luck.)

As a former military guy myself, I can't help but interpret this in the context of grousing government employees. Nobody can complain like a government employee can. Melville may have heard a lot of this type of complaint. Although his NSA colleagues are no doubt intelligent people who have brilliant reasons to pick apart policies, Melville apparently felt that to oppose every policy, to think he has everything figured out more than those who made the policy, would amount to hubris.

Maass saw in this a loyal-to-a-fault Melville willing to follow even unethical policies. But Melville did not say that Southerners who opposed slavery should have fought for it because their country demanded it. He said that those who accepted the South's cause were doing the "right thing" (within the context of being utterly wrong about slavery), to try to make the flawed strategies of their leadership work. If NSA employees accept NSA's overall mission of using foreign communications to provide foreign intelligence for America's military and policy makers, then they should generally work to make policies in support of that mission achieve their intended results. In this context, the policies Melville thought that workers might object to are more likely to be inefficient or counter-productive in nature, not unethical. This is clearer if one reads some of the other columns Melville wrote, in which he himself groused about a number of those policies, such as a promotion system that discouraged the collaboration it was supposed to reward.

In fact, Melville listed three valid responses to policies employees might not like. One was "I might be wrong." Second was "I might be right, but the wrong thing might work anyway." Third was--directly quoting here: "My oath is to uphold the constitution, and as long as those decision makers are operating constitutionally, I will put my own feelings aside, and support them." (Bold mine.) Melville was willing to give his leaders a lot of latitude, but not infinitely so.

Melville's far from a perfect writer. His blog is sometimes intolerably self-indulgent. In his SIGINT Philosopher columns, he tried to avoid bureaucratic speech and write something interesting, but in the process he left daylight for an uncautious reader to arrive at interpretations that I don't think he meant. But there is no reason to read the worst into what is there unless you've already made your mind up beforehand that you know what he's talking about. That is to say, you might not have the necessary context, and should approach with caution. Melville was wary about pretending he knew more about his targets than he really did (one of his columns was entirely about this). That's why he wanted to know more about those targets. He was worried that the government might take action against the target based on a faulty understanding of the context.

Maass seems to have done exactly the thing Melville wanted to avoid in his work. He pulled the trigger on an accusatory story without having enough context. He read into Melville what he assumed he would find. He assumed, anachronistically, that Melville's admonition to follow policies he didn't like was about NSA metadata programs that have since come under fire (even though those weren't an issue of public debate until months after Melville wrote). It seems more likely, though, that Melville was referring to something entirely different, possibly government policies Melville thught were counterproductive concerning parts of the world he cared about. Maass also assumed that Melville meant "more" monitoring equaled "total" monitoring, and monitoring of everyone, and for whatever reasons suited his fancy. A remotely careful reading, though, clearly shows Melville wanted better monitoring of a limited number of foreign targets picked for specific reasons so that the government had the correct information.

I don't fault The Intercept, The Guardian, or any other venues for trying to write stories about NSA. The Intercept does some important journalism. Last month, they had a story about women on Riker's Island who faced sexual abuse for seeking medical care.  After the Kalief Browder story, I don't see how anyone could not see this as critical journalism. Giving a voice to the voiceless is journalism at its best. But a story like Maass's, so blatantly missing the point of writing that was right there in front of him, calls his reliability into question. By extension, it calls The Intercept into question. As the de facto mediators between the Snowden documents and the public, they have to do better than this, or the entire public discourse about surveillance will be off course.

I understand, given the age we live in, anxiety over monitoring of electronic communications. The public will never feel easy about monitoring its government does in secret, just like Melville did not feel easy about his employer monitoring him. NSA must do a better job of explaining how it balances the 4th Amendment rights of its citizens against the need to protect its citizens. A much better job. As in, it should allow the people who actually do and know the work to explain their jobs instead of marching its leaders in front of us to give broad and generic reassurances. Providing a declassified version of USSID SPOO18, NSA's regulations for protecting 4th Amendment rights while carrying out the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was a great start, but there is much more NSA could do to make clear to Americans what NSA actually does.

It won't be easy. NSA is, I imagine, worried that every reassurance it makes to the American people has a cost in what it teaches adversaries about how to evade NSA. And they might be right--since we don't know everything about how they work, we can't imagine how seemingly innocent revelations might hurt NSA. But it can be done. It just takes creativity and political willpower. I appreciate that The Intercept is part of creating that political willpower, although they are doing it, like all us writers are, imperfectly. Because honestly, nobody would rather see NSA open up more to its citizens about how it does what it does than I would.

In any event, it's another warning to writers. Do everything you can to avoid being misread. But know you'll still be misread, anyway. Me, I take solace in recalling the scorn the real Melville, Herman, received for Moby Dick when it came out. Commenters in America noted that it didn't make any sense how Ishmael was telling the story, when the entire crew of the Pequod died. But it was a simple printer error. The American version left off the end, "I alone have escaped to tell thee," where Ishmael survives. There's no end to things that can go wrong in writing. But keep writing anyway. Someday, perhaps, you'll be vindicated.