Top 5 Things I Learned From My MFA

… Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell, hi!

Yes, for all the morbidly-minded, I AM still alive. And I’m still answering your questions! My form is still open, so you can always send me any questions or ideas for blogs! I’ve just lately been so busy with my other writing that I have been scarce on this side of the internet.

Let’s get on to a prompt sent in by Kelly. Kelly writes:

Hi Robyn! I was wondering what were the top five valuable lessons you learned from your MFA program days? Lessons that helped shape you into the writer you are now. Thank you in advance!

Thank you for writing in and I hope these five top tips are in the ballpark of what you’re looking for!

1. You don’t have to take editing advice from everyone. As a matter of fact, that’s deadly. I would never take editing advice from someone whose writing I didn’t respect. You know, it’s weird; when you’re first tossed into critique groups, your mindset is usually (with the aid of the teacher) to accept everyone’s input. You should do that OUTWARDLY. No one’s saying be a dick. But when you’re at home, looking at everyone’s line edits and notes, toss away the notes of the people you know aren’t who or what you aspire to be like. Really.

2. You don’t have to read ten doorstoppers a month to be a good writer. People will posture and list off all the Pulitzer nominees they’ve read but is that doing them any good? Maybe, maybe not. Writing is about the world, it’s not just about other writing. If you’re ingesting media in general and going out and listening to humans talk and noticing the leaves changing, you’re doing the work.

3. That being said, write a lot. Write all the time. Write when it’s sucky and write when it’s hard. Write when you don’t feel like it, even a paragraph a day, even if it’s just to describe your favorite TV show to a friend who really doesn’t wanna hear it. Write anyway.

4. Publishing your short stories in physical journals and magazines is nice and it impresses people in your program but when you get OUT in the real world, nobody reads those things except your family, so find other ways to get your writing into the world.

5. You need to learn the rules before you can gracefully break them. It’s an old adage but true. Studying older literature is good to learn how to twist it and how to build on it. Nothing exists in a void and everything you do will be considered referential anyway, so you might as well know what you’re doing.

Well, I hoped this helped! These five things are not only things I learned while IN the school but things I’ve realized since leaving. They’re what I realized when I looked around myself to see how far I’ve come.

Hindsight is 20/20.

If you’d like to ask a question, just hit the Contact button here on my site and send one in!

The Common Man

I wrote more when I knew fewer writers. That’s just the truth of it.

I’m not saying that knowing writers or communicating with them is bad (well, I am kinda saying that but) but for me personally it makes me forget why I even started writing in the first place. Because it sure as hell wasn’t so some jumped-up MFA grad boy can shout “CRAFT!” at me every two seconds, or even so I could edit other peoples’ work or even to give talks on writing at all. I’ve touched on it before, but the only reason I ever picked up a laptop was to harass people. That’s the point, that’s the juicy spot. If I’m not harassing anyone, then the goodness of writing is lost on me.

Florida nostalgia from my recent trip down south.

All this to say that knowing writers and being around them overmuch drains the point. Because really, the common man is where it’s at. The guy who couldn’t tell first person plural from third person omni is the guy I wanna talk to about my writing.

“Tell me, Common Man, why isn’t my plot working? What’s going on with this character?” I ask him over a steaming plate of fries at Steak n Shake.

And Common Man will sniff it out every time, more reliable than a trained hog after truffles, and more straightforward than Craft McSentence Level on why he should be up for a Pulitzer. I miss my friend, Common Man. I don’t know him any more.

Back when I was in undergrad, when I was the DEFINITION of prolific, Common Man was my constant companion. That’s not to say Common Man was never knowledgeable in his own field—he could be a biologist or a waiter or a hostess or just a soon-to-be college drop out. He saw my blind spots. He sees yours too. He may not know what to call it, but I could always count on him to do a better job in talking light and straight than the average writer.

And I look on Twitter and cringe sometimes. I see these hashtags and this fucking DISCOURSE. Why the fuck do we have to have discourse? What does it have to do with writing? With storytelling? The writer’s head is so far up their own ass that they NEED Common Man to pull them out again, to gently wipe the shit from their eyes.

I remember going to Waffle House at 1 AM and looking at Common Man over coffee and pecan waffles.

“So, what’d you think of the story?” I asked him.

“The main character’s trying to fuck his friends.” Common Man inhaled a sausage link. “Sounds gay to me.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I said, tears in my eyes. “You’re so right.”

I love him. I miss him. I’m fairly lost without him.

Why You Annoyed Every Girl in Your MFA Cohort

It was your first day of your fiction MFA and you knew this was it; the first day of the rest of your life. You made it. Through all the hardship of high school where no one understood you — and the horror of undergrad at the local state school where no one gave you a second glance just because you couldn’t throw a lousy football or run long. You made it. Out of the gutter and into the sunshine — where you belonged. Smooth sailing from here on out. All you had to do was get that piece of paper at the end of the stage and editors and agents would be throwing themselves at you. Hell, maybe sooner than that, if you played your cards right. It happened to Bret Easton Ellis, and after all, you were way better than him.

When you walked into your Short Story Workshop, no one applauded. Strange. That was okay though; they’d learn.

You sat across the long table from the professor. As she would soon learn, you had as much wisdom to share as she did, and students would gradually turn from her end of the room to yours, waiting to see what you would say.

Students filed in and chatted unnecessarily. Wasting words, wasting words. You sat there quietly in your tweed jacket, with your leather bound notebook and quill pen at the ready. Class began when the professor glided in — she was edging on fifty and grey-haired and tall with easy eyes. You’d read one of her short stories in The New Yorker six months ago and thought she had some things to learn. You wrote down some edits on a piece of parchment and planned on delivering them to her with your thesis at the end of your stay.

She looked around the room pleasantly and invited everyone to take turns introducing themselves. She started with the girl to her left; a lithe young thing who you could see yourself having a one-week bohemian affair with and then dumping when you saw her woefully minimalist writing style.

“I’m Ann,” she said, smiling. “I’m from Tampa originally, went to Florida State for undergrad, and I have three dogs. I love Netflix and dubstep.”

The room welcomed her. All but you. Your thoughts of the affair were instantly dashed. She hardly deserved your scorn.

The rest of the room proceeded in a similar fashion. No one listed their favorite author, their favorite book, their favorite review. TV, movies, streaming, games, stargazing — what oh what was the writing world coming to? You all but swooned in your chair at the state of this school’s MFA program if this is what they’d let in beside you. But you were given a fellowship, so at least you knew the committee had some sense. Surely these people had to pay their way in. They would not last long.

Finally, all eyes turned to you, as was your due.

“Greetings,” you said, relaxing your shoulders down. “I’m Craft McSentence Level. My nom de plume will be Crafterson, however, so please address me thuswise. I don’t have favorite authors, as I feel we all can improve, but those I most identify with are Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. My writing style has been described as torrid. I’m twenty-one years old and plan to be out of this program in a year and a half. My thesis will be an enlightening treatise on the unjust affairs of the middle east. I don’t like wasting time, as time is a finite resource, so I’ve copied some flash fiction pieces I worked on over the summer. I was hoping we’d have time to review them.”

You held up your stack of papers. Everyone looked at you wide-eyed, breathless. Surely even they could recognize it — the hot white flame of greatness. John Updike’s classmates must have felt similarly.

Class ended without any time given to your materials but that was okay with you, deep down. Best to space out the important stuff or else its importance might be lost. Your fellow classmates exited quickly, none looking at you. The poor things must have felt embarrassed to have given such paltry first impressions.

Before you left, the professor called out to you.

“Craft, that was—”

“Crafterson, please.”

She smiled wider. “Crafterson. That was quite an introduction.”

“Yes. Please expect more of the same from me.”

“I surely will.”

You left the room with your breast full, your mind at ease. You went home to check your email. An agent must have heard about you by now.

Saying Goodbye to the First Draft

Picture it: Boston, 2016. There was a young female—in fact, 3 years younger than she is now. She was in the midst of an MFA in fiction writing at Emerson College and, like most arts-focused people, had very little to do outside of her chosen art and playing video games. There were definitely times in that young girl’s life where she had forsaken writing for the aloof hobby that it is, but when she was in the MFA she was all in. She wrote in that year alone about 300,000 words on various projects both for professors and in secret. She drank coffee and Red Bull all the time. She feared the oncoming of carpel tunnel.

Readers, that young girl was me. And one of those projects… just got edited.

So what do we talk about when we talk about editing? See, the thing is, this whale started at 95,000 words when I picked it up, dusted it off, and said, “You know, this can be something. Just because it was an idea formed by my younger self, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit.” (And if we’re being honest, a lot of my ideas were formed by my younger self — my sense of humor never grew up.)

I took the project on a long journey of hacking, tamping down, molding. Basically editing. It went from 95K to 80K throughout this journey and that son of a bitch is looking lean and sexy. I didn’t take out that much of the sex though, let’s be honest.

15K words of superfluousness. 15K words of didn’t need to be said. 15K words of what was I thinking.

Everyone likes to talk about killing your darlings like it’s such a big deal and, hell, it is, but only when Time has not tempered your love. Think about it, when you knock out a first draft, ratty as it may be, you see a newborn. A baby you made yourself without any pesky sperm getting in the way. Something your own. You’re not going to want to kill that.

But let’s do what my prof said once: Put it in the drawer for six months. If you’re on a time crunch, you could probably wait a bit less but you have to give yourself a substantial amount of time to love it less. That’s just the bottom line. Because when you pull it out again and read it through, like I did with my project from three years ago, you see that your child is a bit ugly.

Let’s talk about my child’s blemishes for a second.

For example, I spent a lot of this second draft paring down my wordiness and, basically, changing the narrative’s voice which not only took away a great repetitiveness but made it seem cleaner immediately. I’m a great proponent of setting the scene and I like to know where and what characters are doing, so stage directions are used often, and I continue to, but there was an overwhelming amount. I had to trust that my reader has enough imagination and willingness to use that imagination to fill in the gaps.

15K sounds like a lot, and it is. But it’s the difference between so much fat it doesn’t taste good to just enough fat to make you savor. If I had to say, between writing the first draft and writing the second, writing the second is probably even my favorite. Yes, the first draft can be ballistic fun and it’s private and doesn’t have to even make much sense, but the second draft is where your brain starts understanding what your heart was trying to do.