I’ve already given you five reasons to get an MFA and five reasons to stay as far away from an MFA program as possible. Now I’m giving you five more reasons to steer clear.
Again, this has very little to do with the pitfalls of MFA programs themselves. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with MFA programs. They are a good choice for some writers. Other writers may not need or benefit from an MFA. And some writers pursue an MFA for the wrong reasons. So, as I pointed out in my previous post about not getting an MFA, this is more about making sure your motivations for going to grad school to study creative writing are the right ones and to give you a realistic picture of what to expect.
You have no ideas for a major writing project.
If you get to your program with no clearer idea about what you want to do other than “just write,” you will be in a world of hurt. Because those two or three years (or however long your program will let you stick around) are going to go much faster than you ever imagined, and you will also be up against the major time-sucks of coursework and assistantships (or even full- or part-time jobs). You will tell yourself that you will write every single day and you won’t. Before you know it, the first year is gone.
So it’s important to hit the ground running, and you can only do that if you have a specific project in mind. Now, I’m not saying you have to come into your program with a fully formed idea of what your novel will be about, complete with chapter outlines. But you should know whether you want to do a collection of stories or essays, or whether you want to complete a long-form work, like a novel or memoir. You should probably have at least a zygote of a story idea (or ideas). You should have a good sense of an overall style you want to pursue and refine, a literary tradition you want to emulate or update or complicate, and a short list of influences to guide you. Those ideas may shift and evolve over your time in the program, but at least you have a place to start. Because you simply don’t have the time to wander aimlessly through your program waiting for inspiration to strike. That’s a good way to prolong your education, which means more money spent, more time living in crummy rentals with a gaggle of roommates.
The added benefit of having an (even nebulous) idea of what you want your MFA thesis to be and of who your major influences are and why and how you want to pattern your writing after them is that it will make it much easier to write your personal statement, easily the most dreaded part of a graduate school application. Even for the best writers among us, crafting one of those bad boys is tough.
You want time to work on your major writing project.
There is a monstrous lie that your professors will tell you when you enter an MFA program. You will hear it in many forms, but the message is generally the same.
“Pursuing an MFA is a gift you give yourself. The gift of time to work on your writing.” (An actual quote from an actual professor at my orientation)
“The great thing about getting an MFA is that you’ve finally got time to write your novel (or poetry collection or memoir or whatever).”
“You’ll never get another chance like this. You’ve got all this time to write now. Once you’re out of the program, the world will get in the way.”
ALL LIES. The world will get in the way after I graduate? Mmmm, how ‘bout it gets in the way the moment I walk in the classroom?
Picture this. You’re a first-year MFA student. You’re likely not taking thesis credit hours yet, although you are expected to be writing regularly. And if you want to finish your degree on time, you will want to be writing regularly. But you’ve got nine hours you’re taking this semester of coursework. One of those classes is likely a workshop, which on the one hand is great because it gives you deadlines. Gotta have that first chapter done in time to turn it in. On the other hand, you will spend a great deal of time reading your classmates’ work—sometimes reading each piece three or four times—and crafting careful, thoughtful, helpful responses. Being a good workshop companion requires time. It’s time well spent, but still. And then let’s say your other two classes are some blend of theory, lit, pedagogy, etc. You can expect to read a book per week per class, plus articles or chapters from other books meant to inform your reading of the previously mentioned whole book. And you usually are expected to write cogent, insightful reading responses. Or lead a class discussion. Or give a presentation. And then let’s say you were lucky enough to get a teaching assistantship to help fund your MFA adventure, so you’re grading, answering student emails, meeting with students, and attending the class to make sure you know what the professor is teaching. And if your assistantship means you are more or less the professor for the course (e.g. you teach freshman composition or an introductory creative writing course), you will have to craft syllabi, come up with daily lesson plans, keep up with the good ideas other professors are employing, re-read articles you read last year so you can remember what they said. And the grading. Oh God, the grading.
And your thesis? Oh, right. That, too.
Not to mention having, you know, some semblance of a life. Personal or romantic relationships. Sporadic phone calls to your mother. Doing laundry every once in a great while. Cleaning the pink ring in your toilet bowl. (Real talk. You’ve already let it turn into a heaving black mass of mold and bacteria that is threatening to conglomerate into a sentient monster that will take over your house and haunt your dreams.)
If you enter a three-year program, you hopefully will have two years in which you complete coursework while teaching. Your third year will be devoted to thesis hours and teaching. If you enter a two-year program, like I did, you will be doing all three at once. I was lucky to be in bed by midnight. (Sorry, I’m not one of those night owl insomniac writers. I like to sleep very much, thank you.) Up again at 4:30—that’s in the morning, folks—so I could grade student essays before finishing the homework for my own classes due later that day, meet with a student organization, answer emails, hold office hours, and somehow at some point before I devolved into a quivering mess of caffeine and nerves and junk food work on my thesis.
I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m just saying that if you have rosy ideas about living in a cool loft apartment with a bunch of fellow creatives, writing the next great American novel while you puff on clove cigarettes and listen to the Decemberists on vinyl, knowing your student loans are paying for your wifi, you are in for a rude awakening. In real life, you will often berate yourself for not being more disciplined, for not managing your time more efficiently, and for leaving all your coursework until the last minute. You will not get enough sleep. You will have mini-breakdowns so early in the semester that you will think you are in a time warp. (Seriously, as an undergrad, didn’t it take at least until midterms before the meltdowns began?)
The world will always get in the way of your writing. It’s just that in grad school, the daily minutiae look different. As in the “real world,” it will always be up to you to find the time to write and force yourself to take advantage of it when all you really want to do is sleep.
P.S. Five-Hour Energy is life, y’all.
You want to write YA and/or genre fiction.
To start, this is not me saying that YA or genre writing is not worthwhile or high-brow enough. I know you YA and genre writers are a wee bit touchy about that. So let me just say, okay, yes, YA and genre fiction can be “literary.” You can put away your torches and pitchforks.
I mean only that if your goal is to write YA or genre fiction, you should proceed with caution into a traditional MFA program. This is because traditional MFA programs are geared toward writers and readers of literary fiction (and we can debate all day about how fair or not that term is, but for the sake of this blog, you all know what I’m talking about). The fiction faculty in traditional MFA programs tend to be writers of literary fiction. They are well versed in the theory, practice, and conventions of literary fiction.
In other words, they might not know exactly what to do with you. That could hamper the quality of feedback you receive, which could have a negative impact on your growth as a writer.
Not that it’s the faculty’s fault necessarily. If you have someone who doesn’t read a lot of sci-fi or horror or cop procedural, they’re simply not going to know the conventions of that genre. They won’t know fun, innovative ways to play with or subvert those conventions. They likely won’t be able to guide you in the best use of those conventions or advise you on when to throw genre conventions to the wind. They may end up trying to push you to make your work fit the conventions of literary fiction (which could be great or could be a disaster depending on what you want your writing to accomplish).
And same goes for your fellow students. If you’ve got someone in workshop whose idea of a good time is reading William Faulkner or David Foster Wallace or Cormac McCarthy, they may not even realize the ways you’re doing surprising things with genre conventions in your graphic narrative about time travel in a dystopian future populated only by mutant teenagers. And so they’re probably not going to give you the most useful feedback. Which is going to be frustrating for both you and them.
And if you go into a traditional MFA program, it may be a little unrealistic and, perhaps, unfair to expect your professors and classmates to “get” your genre affinity. Everyone has their personal literary preferences. And even generational differences can be at play. But your job as an MFA student is not to prove to the Faulkner fans that vampire comics are a legitimate form of literary expression. It’s to improve your own writing. And so if your program is full of Faulkner fans, you may not be able to improve and grow and experiment as much as you could in a more genre-friendly program.
So you’ll have to do some additional research before choosing a program. Are there any faculty that specialize in a particular genre? Any faculty that write, for example, YA in addition to more traditional literary fiction? Or are there students already in the program who share your love for anime, K-Pop, hobbits, historical romance, and aliens? No matter where you end up, you’ll want to seek them out. They may be best equipped to give you useful feedback.
Or write a thesis that is literary fiction and keep your genre work as a side project. Two fellow students in my program–Will Wight and one writing under the name Edgar M. Dawn–did that and are finding significant success with their respective fantasy and science fiction projects.
The good news is that programs tailored to your writing goals are beginning to crop up. There’s the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ well known MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. MFA programs in graphic narrative are gaining in popularity. And just this year, Bret Anthony Johnston hinted that the creative writing program at Harvard was thinking of adding a YA author to their faculty.
You can’t handle criticism or become defensive any time someone doesn’t recognize your obvious genius.
If you were that good, you’d already have a multi-book deal through a major publishing house with a six-figure advance. The point of an MFA program is to help you improve as a writer. That won’t happen if all you ever hear is praise. “You’re doing everything right” is no motivation to change. But change is exactly what needs to happen for you to get better.
No, not everyone is going to get what you’re going for. And there are going to be people in your workshop that you think are stupid, talentless hacks. That’s fine. Figure out which professors and classmates understand your goals and take their feedback seriously. This is no time to get your feelings hurt. A critique of your writing is not a critique of your character or personality, though sometimes it may feel that way.
In other words, it’s time to put your big-girl panties on and let people rip your writing to shreds.
If you are sensitive, if you need to be coddled, or if you can’t function without effusive praise, then an MFA program may not be right for you. Because there are some classmates who, like me, think that a brutally honest approach to workshop critiques is best (i.e. “let’s not sugarcoat this mess, princess”). Because there are some classmates who struggle with jealousy or who feel threatened (i.e. they will crap all over your work simply because it’s good). Because there are alliances and cliques (i.e. even in adulthood, there are always the “cool kids”). Because there are some classmates who simply won’t get you (i.e. bless their hearts).
If you find criticism tough to take but still want to get an MFA, here’s a good rule of thumb: if a critique makes your mad or hurt or dumbfounded, put it aside for a week or two. Read it again when the emotions have subsided. Be honest with yourself—is there a nugget of truth somewhere in that critique? Then use it. Be brutal with your own writing.
If you still think the critique is way off base or stupid or just plain wrong, you can do what I do. Write hate limericks about that person.
You have to pay for it out of pocket.
It was surprising to me as an MFA student to learn how controversial this statement is. I never would have dreamed of paying for my degree. An undergraduate professor who I respected told me never to pay for my degree. But there are many—sooooooooo many—who disagree with me.
Do you know how grad school funding works in the sciences? No one pays. Not one cent. Funding often comes through a specific professor. Let’s say Dr. Rocksforjocks got a grant from the National Science Foundation to study volcanic landslides. That grant usually supports at least a couple grad students who, with added financial assistance from the university, complete the actual research. They get to be co-authors with Dr. Rocksforjocks on any published articles and, in the meantime, earn their MS or PhD.
The humanities deserve that, too. And while I understand that it’s harder to get outside funding since our “research” is quite different in nature from the STEM fields, if we don’t demand funding from our institutions, we’ll never get it. And if talented students start turning away from MFA programs that won’t fund them, this gives the faculty leverage to pressure the administration for more money.
Additionally, an MFA doesn’t lead to any kind of specific employment. And the employment opportunities out there don’t pay a whole lot. It will not be easy to pay off those student loans.
There are some who might say that the writing instruction you receive and the opportunities you encounter to grow as a writer and to build a CV are worth the money and the debt. Fair point. But why pay for it when there are places you can get it for free?
If your application is not strong enough to qualify for funding, then take some time to strengthen it. Study for and retake the GRE. Take some undergrad lit and creative writing courses, perhaps at a community college, to boost your GPA. Attend writing workshops and conferences at libraries or local artists’ colonies to improve your writing sample. Join a writers’ group. Find a mentor to give your feedback. Then reapply. And never be afraid to ask for money. Writing careers are hard enough to build. Doing it under a mountain of debt is not going to make it easier.
Additionally, a lot of the assistantships that come with funding are great CV-builders and will make you more employable after graduation.
Do you have more reasons to add to this list? More reasons that writers should get MFAs? Do you, like my mother, think I am cynical and self-important? (I mean, she’s right, as always.) Tell me in the comments.