An MFA won't produce writing
My brother Bob sent along this link from Salon.com. In a letter to the site's advice columnist, a recent MFA grad struggles with the task of getting the words onto the page after attaining an MFA. Read the Cary Tennis column here
Graduation from an MFA program leaves a writer with plenty of bad critique habits, the need to stay within that MFA style, and sometimes no better writing discipline than when they were accepted.
Better just to keep on writing. An auto-didactic approach, to get specific.
posted by Ron Seybold at 8:42 AM
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2 Comments:
The article inspires me to embrace being "wholly reprehensible." I feel wilder just thinking about it.
Thanks Ron. This is just what I needed tonight.
Happy Writing,
Laurie
I've tried being an auto-didact, reading and writing throughout my twenties, pushing myself to improve. Now I'm in my early thirties and have a choice. I can select to enter a fully-funded MFA program that will pay a generous fellowship or I can struggle on as I have been, writing in snatched hours late at night.
I've tried every resource for classes and writing groups on the local level, and turned up no peers or mentors. I've tried online groups and classes, and been very disappointed by the spotty participation. And, of course, I've tried reading from the canon and absorbing any lessons about writing I can.
An MFA program won't produce work. I have to produce that work, and it will be much easier for me to do so with mentors and peers, the resources of a large university, and fellowship money that will free me from the household drudgery and round-the-clock childcare that take up most of my time now.
I fail to understand why a writer would develop better critique habits outside of an MFA program than inside one. I've taken many workshops with non-MFA writers, and plenty of them have no idea how to critique work. And there are enough MFA programs out there to conclude that there is diversity to the workshp experience and no monolithic approach to critiquing.
The woman who wrote to Salon admitted that she wasn't taking the time to write, and that her goal was more success than writing anything of literary quality. She did not even mention writing a thesis of (hypothetically) publishable quality, which she should have done to graduate. The fault lies with her, not with MFA programs.
My interest has been confined to the most selective MFA programs, because I want an intelligent and talented peer group and I do not intend to pay for an art degree. Not every MFA program offers the same degree of rigor to its students, and some expensive and unfunded ones are hardly more than scams. However, most people who get into a selective program and who work hard can expect that their work will mature and improve.
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