The Mailbox: Is an MFA Worth It?

Is there any reason TO get an MFA in creative writing? 

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. It's okay to ask me about the other side of something I've said.]  

 Sharon asks: 

So I'm about to start an MFA program at SFSU, and about four people have forwarded me your reasons not to get an MFA article. (How does everyone know you?) Now I'm doubting my choice. Do you think there are any reasons to get an MFA in Creative Writing? 

My reply: [I added the link in the question above.]

Everybody tries to say they know me because I'm a big, big super famous star living the life of glamour that is the writer. Hang on, I have to wipe the glitz off the screen so I can keep writing.

There we go.

I live in Oakland and I got my Creative Writing degree from SFSU, so if you're in the area, I may actually know your four friends. I tended to gravitate towards the "serious" students at SFSU, so a number of us are still writing and keep in touch. On the other hand, I've personally witnessed (online) people who I've never actually physically met say to another person who shared one of my articles that they were "close personal friends with the author." So maybe I sort of know them.

Then again maybe they're just dropping names because did I mention the glitz and glamour? Cause that shit is just drizzled all over this job like icing on a coffee cake in a Houston diner.

Anyway, to your question.

It's no mystery that I think most people in MFA programs are wasting their time and money. However, I don't think everyone in an MFA program is wasting their time and money, and I don't think most of the people who are wasting their time and money really know that's what they are doing. Because I think most of them asked the wrong questions before they started their MFA.

I don't actually think MFAs are a bad move. I think they are extraordinarily expensive, time consuming, and counter productive as an, "I-don't-know-what-else-to-do-next" move.

It's important to ask the right question about an MFA. If you cornered me in an alley with a big rusty machete and said "Chris, if the next word out of your mouth isn't yes or no, I'm going to hack you to pieces with this machete. Do you think any good can come from getting an MFA?"

I would tell you yes. Then I would run away and never go to karaoke with you again. Machetes scare me.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I do not have an MFA. I have an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing. (Technically all the concentrations––linguistics, creative writing, literature, technical and professional writing––were B.A.s in English with emphasis.) I worked alongside MFA students during my program, sometimes in the exact same classes, who generally had to produce more work or were required to read and evaluate the work of us undergrads. Many of their classes were essentially the same syllabus and curriculum, simply with their workshops involving other MFA students. Before I went to college, at the time, and since I have talked with hundreds of MFA students and graduates.

There's no doubt that an MFA helps writers become better writers, connect with strong literature and learn more about both craft and how to contextualize modern artistic movements within the arc of literary history as well as a deep sense of the kinds of writing that are accepted within literary reviews today. There is no doubt that an MFA will push a writer to produce a wide body of high quality work--perhaps even publishable work if the writer is willing to continue the process of submission and polishing beyond the classroom. There is no doubt that holding an MFA will be more useful than not having one when attempting to get jobs at publishing houses or literary magazines. There is also no doubt that an MFA is the fastest way to get a bead on the best literary events in the area with free boxed wine.

A master of fine arts in creative writing is a good degree to pursue if a writer is deeply invested in writing with a "literary" tone or within the literary genre. While the MFA hasn't existed for more than 70 years or so (and so every single canon writer before the fifties muddled through just by reading a lot and writing a lot) the process of metacognition that happens in a writing program can help a writer avoid certain pitfalls faster than trial and error alone.

The MFA student will also make connections that may last beyond the frame of school. Many people's MFA cohorts become their peer review for decades. (I still exchange chapters from time to time with a couple of my fellow students.) Some of these people may even go on to be gatekeepers, and the nepotism might be useful. Nothing like reminding an editor of those pictures you didn't post to Facebook (of the night that started with a Hemingway drinking game and ended with a Chaucer-character themed orgy) when you're trying to get published.

These are all good things. They are all benefits. They are all reasons to get an MFA. You are going to have a wild, intellectually-stimulating, artistically mind-blowing couple of years. Enjoy!

And so if that's your whole question, then we're done here. Thank you and good night!  ~drops the microphone~

BUT!

But....

but....

Unfortunately these straightforward, two-dimensional questions can be misleading. This would be like asking a nutritionist "Is there anything of any nutritional value in fast food?" Well, of course the answer is yes (there are calories! and I think the tomato might have a vitamin or two and the meat has protein). If you just get your answer and walk away, then you are probably going to miss out on the real answer because the way you asked the question has given you the impression that cheeseburgers and fries are health food.

Most people should be asking more complex questions. Questions about cost/benefit, about chances of favorable outcomes, and about maximum yield for a two or three year block of effort. Either/or questions about the best way to become A Writer™(with capital letters and maybe even a paycheck). Because once you ask these questions, a different picture emerges.

A lot of things can make you a better writer. It doesn't mean that they're not a total waste of your fracken time given what kind of writer you want to be.

When most people who want to be writers are struggling with the decision of whether or not to get an MFA, it is usually because they don't know what else to do. They're sitting around in their mid twenties, maybe with a manuscript or two they wrote during NaNo, and fuck it if they aren't big famous writers yet--or even published. The promise of a formula for success lies in the institutionalized teaching of how to write creatively. Most people head towards an MFA with a kind of "I guess that might help" shrug.  But the question they should be asking themselves isn't "is there any possible benefit to this?"

Because that answer is a no brainer–it will always be yes.

Read my lips. I'm only going to say this fifty gillion more times. "YES THERE IS BENEFIT TO GETTING AN MFA!"

The questions that I believe are more important are questions like, "Will the kind of writing I am being trained to do ever pay for this degree?" When the average Master's degree runs $25k-$75k, the chances that a writer will make back the cost of their degree through a skill that the degree teaches is quite small. (And you may think you will be the exception to that statistic, Sharon, but so does everyone else.) If a writer makes back even 10% of their MFA through creative writing, they are doing (statistically) quite well as a writer.

Extremely well. Unusually well.

From a strictly pragmatic point of view, you would be better to be trained in some kind of professional writing so that your degree might matter to an employer (instead of making them have a good laugh before they fire up the paper shredder), and then take those skills into your creative writing instead of trying vice versa.

The other question beyond the cost of tens of thousands is "is this worth two to three years of my time?" Is an MFA going to be better for you as a writer than simply getting started with the process of writing like woah and submitting the shit out of things (or writing online and trying to build an audience). Because at the end of your MFA, that's what you will have to do anyway.

And the last question is, "Do I want to be shaped and molded by this institution's artistic vision?" Fine arts promote a high-art literary aesthetic--which is largely shaped by other voices who can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars and a few years on fine arts degree. It TENDS to be very bourgeois, whitewashed, upper middle class, "high art" aesthetic. Whether you like that or think it's kind of pretentious bullshit should be very important to your choice. (I kind of like it in small doses myself, but I'm also a white, upper middle class writer, so...think about it.) A lot of people leave MFA programs wanting never to write again because they have been trained to find their own preferences, style, and subject matter "unworthy" by their professors and fellow students.

And don't even talk to me about most MFA's stance on genre; most haven't unpacked how ironic their position is when the speculative nature of the canon is considered.

So when people just hop into an MFA because they want to be A Writer™and they don't know what else to do, I think that's a very bad decision. If someone really believes in high art aesthetic and literary genre style and really wants to get a masters of FINE ARTS and pursue literature as a fine art (or fine arts through the literary medium, if you prefer) I think it's a SUPERB decision. But I feel like a lot of the writing community hasn't figured out how to weigh those values against the costs.

However, if, in the final analysis, they really, actually want to be in an MFA program, then that can be the single best decision they ever make as a writer.

I know a couple of writers, both of whom I met during my undergrad program, who wanted to be in the MFA program and liked that kind of writing and wrote in that style and haven't regretted their MFA for a second. (I've even told one of them basically "Nothing I ever write on my blog applies to you because I can really tell this is absolutely the right choice for you as a writer.") Both of them are still working in bohemian obscurity, but they love every artistic-integrity second of it.

So Sharon, I know I answered your question like ten paragraphs ago, but I hope I've also given you more to chew on about whether or not that question is the right question.  Because getting that MFA is analogous to going into arts at all. We don't do it for all the pragmatic reasons out there. We do it because we want to. We burn to. It's in our souls. And if getting an MFA is in your soul, and you yearn for it, you're going to make it worth it in ways that don't matter on paper.

And don't let anything convince you otherwise. Even me.

Earn it!

How to break the rules of writing within your writing...and get away with it.

It's not enough to say to a writer "Don't do this unless you have a good reason."

For starters, every writer will always think they have a good reason. They'll think they have a great reason. They'll think, since the dawn of the written word, they are on the top five best reasons ever to break this rule.

This advice is also probably wrong. Or at least wrong-ish. Or at least not absolute.

Every "rule" in writing is breakable.

Despite my philosophical divide with the pedagogy of SFSU, I really did learn quite a bit while I was there. I would probably not know how to torture lit snob professors by pointing out that canon literature is speculative fiction without having that education. At least not as well.

Plus there was a really good sandwich shop there in the cafeteria...

I must learn to intersperse my trash talking with poignant moments of self reflection. For all my quibbles, it was the best thing I ever did both as a writer and as a person. I did what I went there to do--I honed my craft. I wrote what they told me I "ought to be" writing, and avoided what their syllabi said they did not permit (that "evil trixie genre" writing) and I applied the lessons I'd learned to my own writing in secret–but first I locked the door, swept the room for bugs, and swore to them I was writing a short story about a bisexual Jew living in a halfway house who has AID, a meth addiction, and an unsupportive family.

Then I secretly worked on my genre novel.

One of the strengths of learning craft directly from people who have gone before you is that they can direct your efforts in a way that yields a greater return. Great writers can (and have) done nothing more to study craft than to read voraciously, and most writers (especially some of the MFA types) would do well to remember that before the 1950's or so, that (and maybe a mentor) was the ONLY way writers learned to write.

However, for writers like me with more passion than talent or skill, every improvement has been like passing a kidney stone, and the presence of instructors to point things out can help ease that transition.

Professors are like cranberry juice that way.

One of the instructors it was my honor to learn under enjoyed collecting a mental tally of stories that "broke the rules."

There are a lot of rules in writing, and I'm not talking about grammar. Crack open most books on writing, and a deluge of rules comes spilling out: Don't write in second person. Don't be too abstract. Don't write out dialect. Don't TELL people how to feel.  Don't switch point of view in a short story. Write about a short period of time. Don't write in second person. On and on and on. Some of these rules get as specific as "don't write about little kids," "don't write dreams," or "you should never have more than one adverb per page."

And of course there are today's variations. "Vampires are overdone. Stop writing about schools of wizardry. First person is so five minutes ago–use close third. Quit thinking writing in present tense is edgy."

Pretty much...all bullshit.

Not that this advice is useless, and a writer would do well to understand what they're getting into if they write a present tense book about vampire children at a wizard school who dream a lot. But any rule you can dream up has had unimaginably touching and deep fiction that breaks it–probably even canon literature.

Writers dispense rules all the time. Actually most artists dispense with the rules of their art all the time, and it's when some of the best works show up. (Most artistic movements are basically gaggles of artists flipping the bird to the last generation's "rules.") Still writing has always had this strange relationship among the arts with its own anachronistic advice. Somewhere in the mix of idolizing those writers who have "made it," it seems like advice from writers (even those writers we would never today want to emulate) takes on this mystical veracity that it doesn't in other arts or professions.

In a normal discipline, if a teacher tells you to always or never do something, there's this response that seems almost second nature to the students of, "Let's figure out why this is a rule so we can bend or break it." But writers have stuffed that part of their brain with Tennyson quotes and dirty limericks, so they don't always take this advice with respect and a grain of salt.

For some reason, writers tend to go all or nothing. Or they go the other way and just ignore it altogether and never learn why it where its wisdom comes from. Every writer is a special snowflake and their story is so fucking brilliant that they are exempt from traditional wisdom.  Because "if you really want to" or "unless you have a good reason" isn't even a speed bump when it comes to many writer's sense of their work's importance. So now you have a bunch of abstract second person stories about vampire wizard kids telling you how to feel and the writers don't really understand what the problem is because they are all convinced that their reason was a really "good reason."

Or they go the other way and take the advice as some commandment-level rule. Hating themselves for every perceived slight they have made against a set of advice by a 100 year old novelist who would never ever EVER EV-ER find an audience among today's readers.

Enter Janusprof.

I know when I felt it was time to move on from Janusprof, I really felt like it was time to move on–being told LeGuin didn't have any real social messages will do that to a science fiction fan–but while I studied the force at the foot of the Emperor, I learned a lot.

What was great about this professor is that for pretty much any rule you could name, he had this mental list of a half a dozen stories that had successfully and beautifully broken it. Most of the stories were from authors that your average reader would recognize. He always had a sense that if you knew WHY something was a problem that was better than just trying to obscurely declare it to be so. So instead of spending his time worrying about what people shouldn't write (except....apparently when it came to genre) he instead had a catch phrase.

"Earn it."

Do the work that can make the writing happen. Earn the scene. If you want a character to wax abstract about their feelings, it's going to take a lot of concrete details around that moment to ground your reader so they don't just feel like they're being ham-handedly TOLD what to feel. If you want to write about little kids, earn that by showing how major events can take on strange and different meaning to them. If you want to write in second person, figure out what the strengths are of that voice and earn it like Loorie Moore or Jay McInerney.

Write your vampire story. Even your sexy angsty 90210 teen vampire story if that's what your soul burns to write. But also learn why that shit is overdone and publishers are avoiding it and then bring a fresh perspective to the table as well.

Rules beg to be broken. It's like telling a little kid "Okay, I'm going to leave now–don't look in the closet."

As you grow up, your relationship with rules changes. You learn to measure things like risk and consequences and to carefully break the rules you don't like. (If you make sure everyone's really gone, and you don't leave any evidence, but also you accept that you might be ruining your birthday present surprise, you can look in the closet.) Most people who do illegal things (like drugs or speeding) understand this relationship with rules. It doesn't mean they totally ignore them just because fuck rules–driving 120 through a school zone or blowing pot smoke into a cop's face. But they do know when and how to get away with strategically ignoring them.

Writing advice isn't really any different. Ignoring it because "I had a good reason" or because one simply doesn't understand why it's advice in the first place won't make the prose any better or more readable. And following every bit of advice like it's the Code of the Writer™ will leave work stilted and unwilling to risk.

Instead when writers focus on doing what it takes to make successfully execute their problematic moments.

"Earn it" is so much better than many of its contemporary bits of advice. Forget the reason. Forget whether it was even a good reason.

I don't care if it was a dare or if two groupies told you they would have a threesome with you if you would just publish something in second person. Your reason doesn't matter.  Your sense of whether its importance doesn't matter.

You don't ever have to justify your writing to yourself. Just sit down and write. You have to justify your writing to your readers. And for that there is no personal excuse. You must simply, without prejudice or passion, pay the toll of making it work.

Earn it.

"Earn it," casts off the veil of glamour and mystique about writing. There isn't some mystical force that will tell you when a reason is "good enough" to break a rule. This isn't magic that drips from your fingers into the pen or keyboard and spills out onto the page. What will get your from an unearned scene to an earned scene is not the pen of Poe or the finger bone of Shakespeare or talent or even having a really good reason. It's work–hard work.

The only rule is you have to earn it.