Won't Someone Think of the Straight White Males (Mailbox)

Diversity polls make me feel bad.

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer a couple each week.  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. Full disclosure––this is a composite of five different letters received since I started doing A Year of Diverse Polls.]


C writes:

I just want to say, as a straight white male who is trying to aspire to write, I can no longer abide your page and your "diverse polls." I understand the intention of them, and on one side I think it's great to promote diversity. On the other side, however, it makes me feel like shit. I feel like I'll never get anywhere with writing, and I shouldn't even try because I'm the wrong race, gender, and sexuality.  

I'm not a racist but why can't we just read books and lift them up based on whether they are good enough and not get into all the identity politics?

I just feel like everyone should be supported, and find it impossible to stick around because all I see are the diversity polls, mocking me. I know you probably won't care, but I'm done with your page. [Note: I added the links above.]

My reply:

I almost just answered this with, "Yeah? How does that feel?" and called it a day, but I suspect the folks who most need to hear it would be the least likely to GET it (in a not-the-reason-Mr-Burton-was-put-on-Earth-sort-of-way), so I'll unpack it a bit more.

C, did you INTEND this to look like performance art? I mean....literally and explicitly lifting your feelings up to the importance of diversity itself? Jesus Buttlicking Christ! I had a Creative Writing teacher who would have yelled at me for lack of realism if I'd ever had a character say something like that. ("No one's going to just SAY that, Brecheen! They'll say they love diversity, but you have to show through their actions that their feelings are more important.")

C, I'm only going to say this half a zillion more times, so listen up. You're not the "wrong" race, gender, sexuality. You are the top of the social hierarchy. You will overperform in the results of your efforts no matter what the quality of your writing is, and (as can be clearly seen from a casual look at any bookstore shelf) mediocrity will not prevent you from having a comfortable career.

People who are not like you––not white, not male, not straight, not cis––will have to work much harder to achieve the same success. The more not like you they are, the harder they will have to work to achieve the same bellwethers.

This is to say nothing of if you're good at writing, in which case you will be hailed as brilliant while other writers of comparable and even greater skill will struggle to find legitimacy, platforms, and recognition if they aren't straight white men like you. These days, naked bigotry is in the White House and marching on the streets, daring anyone to do anything about it. You realize some of these people buy books, vote in the Hugos, +1 or like posts, and are even gatekeepers, right? Right?

(Right?)

This is not to say that being a cishet white male guarantees a career (it doesn't), but the whole rest of the world is going to lift you up through mechanisms unconscious and deliberate over the folks who aren't like you. Overperformance doesn't mean it's impossible to fail, just like setting the difficulty on a video game to easy doesn't mean you'll never die. It just means things will be EASIER for you.

So for ONE year, ONE blog (that barely anyone even reads) will have a set of polls that tries to adjust for that massive "background radiation of everpresent inequality." By running some polls for everyone who isn't advantaged by the deep seated (and sometimes shockingly surface) attitudes of a repugnant and revolting cultural acceptance of every bigotry, I try to make a readership that OFTEN remarks that they "didn't even know some of the names on this list" aware that other writers exist.

I will say this, C. I believe you. Even though the diversity polls are between 1-2% of the posts I put up on my Writing About Writing page (consisting of perhaps six posts in a month where I put up 10-15 things a day), they will be like a mark on a movie theater screen––"all [you] see."

Or rather, all you notice.

See, that's the trick of modern white supremacy (and male supremacy and hetero supremacy). At least the kind that isn't marching in liberal cities to try and pick a fight. Most people don't run around hatefully bigoting. They just ignore every. SINGLE. double standard that benefits them. But then they come out swinging when anyone or anything tries to level the playing field even the tiniest bit.

Because that wouldn't be FAIR, and now, all of a sudden, that matters an awful lot.

The point of having a poll like this is that when you were the beneficiary of unfairness, it didn't make you uncomfortable. You didn't feel "like shit." And not once did you threaten to take your ball and go home or sanctimoniously lecture about not "supporting everyone." So for one year, I hope people examine that unconscious bias they have and do some introspection about the world they usually never bother to question.

However, C, you take care of yourself and have a nice life. Self care IS important. I wouldn't want some attempt at diversity to hurt your feels. But we're not going to elevate your feelings to the point of being just as important as representation here.

Just be glad you only ever had to weather the RESPONSE to bigotry instead of the bigotry itself because if having to see yourself not represented in a single year of polls makes you feel like shit, the acute realities of genuine bigotry with institutional power differentials to back it up and actual harm would have absolutely gone Dr. Marr on your crystalline ass. #27yearoldpopculturereferenceFTW

And as always, if you announce your departure like I'm United Airlines, you will find that the door locks behind you.

The Hugos Nominees Were Robbed! (Mailbox)

Why can't we just keep reading Star Wars clones for another forty years.

The Authors at the Hugos were robbed!

[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. And yes, I really do mean that.]  


Bobby writes: 

Not a member, but as a science fiction fan, not giving out awards at a awards show is really a slap in the face. I have not always agreed with the outcomes of the Hugos, but i think the authors who were nominated would likely want to kick the asses of the people who make such decisions. I think the Hugo's just lost a bit of their shine and credibility. As far as entitled white people, you seem fairly entitled yourself, working as a house husband and a writer, a difficult profession to make great money in, even for the talented. I see no winners in the outcome of the Hugo's, no winners at all. Good Luck with your writing. 

My reply:

Sometimes a more important question is to whom would the slap be delivered if a problem were ignored. Slaps in the face are no fun for anyone.  Well, they CAN be, but you need a safe wor---eh, you know what, maybe another time.

This comment dropped in my inbox this morning and I put aside what I was working on to answer it. Because we're nothing if not behind the curve on what's topical here at Writing About Writing, and here was my chance to only be a few days behind instead of weeks. Plus we haven't had a good row in a while, so it's honestly time to light things up a bit. (No not lighten things up. Light them up. Like with flames.) There's nothing quite like washing one's hair righteously and fuming in the shower to whip up the creative juices. My hair got SO fucking conditioned, lemmie tell ya! That shit is like five Loreal commercials worth of luster right now.

Bobby, your comment seems to reflect a major misunderstanding both of the timeline of Sad and Rabid puppies and the mechanisms by which the Hugos are awarded, so let me set a couple of things straight. This is a lot less a "slap in the face" and a lot more someone complaining that they got their hand bruised by a martial artist who did a power block on someone TRYING to slap them in the face. "Ow, you hurt my hand. How COULD you! It's all about me!"

Let me explain to you how the Hugos are awarded. Anyone can nominate books, the several books with the most nominations are then voted on by attendees of Worldcon as well as members of the World Science Fiction Convention who purchase a "supporting membership" (at a non trivial price), and then the Hugos basically pass out the awards to the winners. The Hugos aren't "deciding" who wins. There's no panel. No shadowy cabal sat and cackled evilly that they would be denying the white men their due. They're just handing out the awards to the winners that the people vote on. So unless you're ready to go toe to toe with a bald eagle holding a 2nd amendment-approved star spangled assault rifle, I'm assuming you don't have a problem with democracy. Right.....Bobby?

"i think the authors who were nominated would likely want to kick the asses of the people who make such decisions."

Yes, exactly. Let's make sure you understand the timeline, so you can appreciate the full irony of this statement the way I did when I rolled my eyes so hard that I sprained my left pupil. One year ago was something of a "renaissance" the Hugos. The awards, which had typically been given to cishet white men--some of whom were openly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and more--suddenly became diverse. Yes, that was a calculated effort to attempt to achieve diversity, but it was a calculated effort at diversity and inclusion, not literally the opposite.

The kinds of writing that these authors were doing explored cultural tensions like appropriation, othering, privilege and more. They also subverted tropes like the damsel in distress, the one-culture aliens, and the weakness of emotional thought. (Also humans an robots falling in love. Who write about that kind of crap? Jesus!) One might even argue that this is a primary strength of science fiction: to discuss social issues through allegory. These authors won.

Let me make sure that was absolutely clear: these authors were nominated, voted upon, and won. They won their awards.

Did we hear that in the back row?
THEY WON THEIR AWARDS!

Along came Vox Day and the Sad Puppies. They didn't want "big thinky thoughts" in their science fiction. They wanted the same old shit with big ships, bigger explosions, tropes galore and no confusing space ship pictures on the cover tricking them into reading something that wasn't vapid because apparently they can't read a book jacket or something (which tracks with the whole not liking to think thing, tbh). And to remove that disagreeable diversity of voices, they rigged the nomination process, essentially "stuffing the ballot box" with SO many nominations for works by the white, male, cishet authors as to ensure that the final vote would have none of the selections of the diverse authors they took umbrage with. Well, what became very clear, from WHO they nominated, what they were saying about the "forced diversity," and the Rabid Puppy piggy back off of their movement (and who just came out and said they wanted the "Good Ol' Boys" club back) was that what they really had a problem with was the diversity itself, and that the call for empty-headed science fiction that wouldn't challenge them intellectually was just pretense. I'm not going to say they were stone cold racist, but they were basically looking around the country club and saying "This place used to be better before they let anyone in here."

So now you have them deliberately and overtly manipulating the nomination process to "edge out" the kinds of authors who won last year by writing in SO many white men nominations that it was the only thing on the ballot. And they were very vocal and very transparent about doing so. Seriously, some of them pretty much actually twirled their mustaches–promising to fuck up the Nebulas too.

Well, fandom didn't like that. They didn't like that one bit. Rather than allow this kind of brazen bullshit to stand (and because they couldn't necessarily rally around COUNTER-nominees without being just as bad) they put "Noah Ward" (say it out loud) on the ballot in many of the categories.

The Hugos didn't decide to put "Noah Ward" on the ballot. In fact, No Award has always been an option, even before this debacle.

The Hugos didn't decide who would vote more for No Award than for one of the slated writers. These were readers and lovers of sci-fi. So unless the writers who were nominated want to "kick the asses" of thousands of the greatest sci-fi fans in the world, they basically just got hosed by the situation. Many of them withdrew. And like I wrote in the post you replied to, I do feel terrible for them. They got used as pawns in an asshole's power play game, which wasn't their fault; however, ignoring who would have gotten the "slap in the face" if these white, male, cishet authors were simply given their awards and everyone went home would be a grave error in the calculus of the bigger picture. Because that would have meant Sad Puppies got exactly what they want and could rig the whole Hugos process any time they felt things were getting too diverse.

If anything, the Hugos established their credibility. They can't be easily engineered by one group who wants to eliminate the competition. Their integrity is not simply a matter of drumming up angry white men on social media to write in enough nominations.

You're right though, no one "won." Vox day and the puppies saw to that.

As for your snipe that I'm entitled I think you're mistaking the word "privileged" and "entitled." I know I'm privileged. I'm a white(ish), cis, middle class, het passing male who speaks English as my first language. I acknowledge that I would have had a much harder life if one or all of those things were different, and that unearned advantages of my birth have played a non-trivial role in where I am today. I have a lovely family that can afford to have one person out of three basically stay home and take care of the kid and the house. [2018 Edit- Sadly, no longer true.] Not every family can afford such a thing and they have to scrape together for child care, work a second shift cleaning, and make the best of it. My needs are taken care of, and I make a little bit for spending and saving–I know far too many people who can't say either of those things.

But entitlement involves thinking I deserve those things or that I achieved them all on my own without any undeserved benefit.  I'm not really telling the world that I deserve to be a househusband or that white men people deserve to be househusbands. I'm not telling anyone that I deserve to write or that I've earned my financial situation all on my own with my bootstraps and not because of the privileges I mentioned above. As for writing....I don't even make enough from writing to even pay rent on a cot in the boiler room. However, I also don't complain that I deserve to make more money or that I deserve read more or I'm entitled to be read by all those readers out there who might prefer to read writers of color, LGBT+ writers, or women writers instead of me. I'm not whining that I haven't made it yet or blaming SJWs for encouraging reading diversity that I haven't yet arrived. In fact, I'm usually blown away and breathless by the traffic that I do get, my donors especially, and my regular readers as well. How did I get so lucky? I don't know. But I don't feel entitled to it.

It's also pretty clear that you've never been a housespouse behind a two year old if you think that's some sort of "cushy" gig. (I could get into how "women's work" is undervalued even when it's really hard, but one war at a time.) I like my three meter commute, and once in a while I can furiously pound out a post while The Contrarian watches Cars, but even with two other parents tagging in regularly, I work 50 hours on a average week and never get a day off. You might want to check your assumptions.

Not ALL MFAs (Mailbox)

But my MFA was different!  

[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. Some days I respond to responses of my responses.]   

My MFA was great/I value my MFA/My program didn't hate genre/My teachers weren't lit snobs/My program wasn't like that/Clearly you just don't respect the MFA/Y U h8 on muhfays?/~screams and flings poo~

My reply:

I begin with a true story: I once wrote two versions of a post, placing one on one social media and another on another. The posts were identical in their valuation of Creative Writing MFA programs as useful to some writers but not others. One post, however, concluded that MFAs were not for everyone and only particular kinds of writers would be able to appreciate them. It framed an MFA as something that only an elite cadre of writers could truly handle. MFA graduates LOVED this post and took the time to tell me how insightful it was. The other post, identical in every other way, said that MFAs were not a good decision for most writers. It framed an MFA as something not every writer would actually want. MFA graduates HATED this post and took the time to tell me how wrong it was.

With the exception of "write every day," my feelings on MFAs gets me the most antipodean feedback. ("You are so right/wrong! I want to shake your hand/punch you in the face. Please have my babies/fall down an elevator shaft....onto some bullets.") Even the spate of cheers and jeers that starts rolling in around August or in response to my Nano caution can't compete with the ongoing attrition people seem fit to visit on me because I've dared approach the question of MFA programs with some nuance.

Two Sundays ago, I got a phone call from a New York Times journalist who had run across my 14 Reasons (Not) to Get an MFA post, and wanted to use parts of it in a piece she's doing on writing programs. (It was mostly just clarifying and background questions–I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything about the piece.)

She seemed to understand the morass of intense feelings that she was about to slog into and asked her questions carefully. I did the best I could to not represent myself as anti-MFA so much as anti-"I-don't-know-what-to-do-next-and-I'm-not-a-famous-novelist-so-I-guess-I'll-get-an-MFA," which is far more accurate. But it reminds me of so many of the comments and conversations I've had about that article, as well as several follow-up posts.

People like to skim the bullet points, file everything under a "good" or "bad" column, ignore nuance (or miss it because it wasn't in the bullet points), and then fire off nasty responses. I'm not sure if they quite realize that I can totally tell. I mean...I'm an English major and an English teacher. One of my superpowers is knowing when someone hasn't really done the reading.

Nobody likes to think maybe they turned left when they should have turned right or that a decision they made wasn't the best. And while I'm not sure why everyone wants their decision to be a one-size-fits-all BEST CHOICE EVER FOR ANYONE EVER, they do seem to get defensive if anyone impugns them.

The problem is that we all want to be special snowflakes, unless it involves other people not wanting what we have. Then you can take that special snowflake and shove it into the oven. It doesn't count if we go our own way for our own reasons. We have to go our own way and be envied by people realizing the folly of not being us. MFAs not being for everyone is okay as long as it's in an elitist way, not a pragmatic one.

Anyway, on to the responses:

Clearly you don't understand why anyone would get an MFA.

Clearly you didn't make it to the end of the article before hitting reply. You should try that in the future. Seriously, it's right there.

I love literary writing. I'm a poet.

Then you probably will enjoy the number two reason I gave for getting an MFA. You did make it all the way to the end, right?

These aren't good reasons not to do something. I want/wanted to get an MFA!

Yes, why on Earth would warning of some pros and cons to spending three years and $30,000 getting a degree with limited pragmatic applications be something anyone does? What WAS I thinking?

Look, if you really want/wanted to get an MFA, and you bothered to read the article, then you already know, you're not really my target audience. You are mentioned explicitly in the last few paragraphs. Do what you burn to do. That's the best any of us will ever get from art.

I got a lot of value out of my MFA! 

Awesome! I hope it was equal to the value of the time and money you put in because that is the point I've made only about half a billion times. If the corner drug store were giving out MFAs for five bucks, I would have no end of good things to say about them. If MFAs were free and could be done through correspondence courses on the weekends, I would probably be one of their biggest cheerleaders. If MFAs were the vital first step in a career as a published author, I would be the first to let you know that it's just part of the cost of doing business. For most people, with the kind of writing they really want to do, just sitting down to do some hard work would save them a lot of money and three years of navigating pedagogy that might be antithetical to their writing.

I wouldn't have written my novel if it weren't for my MFA.

That sounds like a real problem. I hope you cultivate the discipline to sit down and write on your own because when your MFA is over, you can't just go get another one. Eventually you have to write those novels on your own.

What I learned was worth more than what I paid.

Was it? I mean, really, was it? Look, dewd, this isn't medical school. The ROI on a Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts is the worst of any advanced degree. Let me make sure you understood that. Someone ranked advanced degrees according to which ones got you back their cost in terms of the skills you would learn and employ to make money and the Creative Writing MFA came in....dead last. In addition, a lot of people have a real ideological problem with going into debt to "study" bourgeois art. The professorships look suspiciously like a ponzi scheme (and even if they're not exactly so, that comparison is so accurate it is chilling), and published, successful authors (with only a few exceptions) declare MFAs important to their journey to be a writer. Many of the things MFAs actually teach can be replicated with an internet connection and some dedicated time.

X part of my program isn't like you describe.

There are hundreds of MFA programs in the U.S.  I'd be more surprised if they were all alike. Some have better guest programs. Some explicitly like genre fiction. Some have worked very, very hard to incorporate non white, non male, non cis, non het, non upper middle class voices (and some have even had some success). I hear there's one that doesn't allow boxed wine at their literary events. (Unconfirmed.) My generalizations are based on reading what HUNDREDS of MFA graduates write about their experiences when I was finishing up my undergrad and deciding what I was going to do next. Such an overview necessitates some generalizations.

Most MFAs are funded. They pay you.

This statement is accuracy-challenged. It's not that these programs don't exist--the accuracy-challenged word was "most." A few prestigious programs may be able to pay your tuition and offer you a small stipend if you teach undergrads, but this work won't be idyllic cloud watching, and funded programs amount to a small number of prestigious MFA programs. Most you pay for unless you're in the top couple of percentile. Just like every other graduate degree.

It's not going to hurt your resume.

A lot of things "won't hurt" your resume. I know a guy who still puts winning a hot dog eating contest on his just to prove he's a jocular spirit. No one has ever told him hot dog lovers weren't welcome or that the inappropriateness of that accolade cost him the job. On the other hand, it has also never been the deciding factor in getting him a job. ("Well, we have someone better qualified, but they look like a stick-in-the-mud, and frankly, I'd sort of love to see you working hundreds of meaty phallic symbols...not that you need to head to H.R. after this conversation or anything...okay?") We actually rate the value of most three-year programs that cost as much as the downpayment on a house (outside a major city) not by their inability to cause harm, but by their PROACTIVE ability to be helpful. It's wild and radical, I know, but most people don't have the privilege of spending that kind of time and money on something that "couldn't hurt."

Mandatory hot dog GIF

MFAs are absolutely vital in performing arts.

Um.... You're right. Performing arts are very different from creative writing. You look through a playbill at a professional theater and the question won't be IF someone has an MFA in music or dance, but rather where it's from. However, those programs offer years of intense practice and training that hone voice and dance skills (and have a horrific hazing and attrition rate) which Creative Writing MFAs, outside of the most prestigious programs, notoriously lack.

If MFA's were fierce and rigorous and only the strong survived, you might be cooking with gas, but only a handful of very prestigious programs (U of Iowa, U of Michigan, U of Virginia, UCIrvine...)

Hey, I met agents in my program.

Sure you did. So did I. But those agents weren't there to meet you. They were there to meet all of you. They were there as part of the curriculum. They probably paneled a talk for dozens (maybe hundreds?) of students, maybe glanced at a couple of pages of your writing and gave you some quick advice along with dozens of others. Maybe you got a card. Meeting an agent is really not that difficult, but you still have to impress them with your writing if you want to be taken on. That's no different than someone who isn't in an MFA program. They won't be excited to meet you or keeping a close eye on you unless you're in one of the country's top programs.

MFAs don't cost $20,000. They're much more affordable than you claim.

You're right–well, no, you're not. You're actually dead wrong. But the first half of what you said is right. The current average is closer to $30,000 actually (costhelper.com), and that is JUST textbooks and tuition. The price goes up if you have to take time off of work or fold things like rent and food. So unless you have a very hospitable friend or family member an easy walk from campus, increase that. I was lowballing it when I wrote that article. Thanks for the push to verify my numbers.

As I mentioned above, there are a few fully funded programs (some even with teaching opportunities or stipends), but these are incredibly rare and fiercely competitive. Fewer than five percent of applicants are accepted. I will cross my everything for you if that's your play, but claiming that's a good reason not to consider the cost before you make the choice would be.....not entirely wise. Remember, I don't think MFAs are a bad choice if that's what you want to do; I think they are a bad choice if you can't think of any other next step. But if you have the drive and the will and the determination you'll be leagues ahead of all the others who aren't sure what to do next.

My program wasn't so limited/focused/experimental.

Understand that the article you're replying to is now pushing three-years old, and it was hardly the first piece of criticism to land about MFA programs at the time it was written. MFA programs have absolutely TANKED in the last decade partially because the extended recession means that fewer people can afford to run off and blow thirty grand, but partially because those writers who go through them and publish have said that they did almost nothing to help in the process of being a published author.

Some programs have really taken an introspective look at themselves and adjusted their pedagogy. Most have not. I'm glad you found one that isn't quagmired. Really. I can't write an article about every program in the English speaking world without making a few broad brushstrokes, and finding the few programs that have/do what you want is absolutely worth the research time if you're driven.

Not every MFA is going to have the same limited voices.

This is a bigger problem than you seem to think. Even academia itself has noticed this issue. It is a mark of extraordinary financial privilege to be able to spend $30,000+ on an education that almost prides itself on a lack of a marketable skill (or of other kinds of privilege to be able to write at the level that can make you competitive for a full ride program before you even start the MFA). The overwhelming majority of MFA populations are upper middle class and white, and even when the students aren't, they are being shepherded by instructors who are. And even when they're not, they've been trained on pedagogy that is based on that.

Don't believe me? Most programs put their faculty profiles online these days and you can check out MFA program's instructors. Like this one here. Notice anything?

Academia is whitewashed. Advanced degrees are even more so. MFAs particularly. It's so bad in Creative Writing programs that many prominent writers of color (Junot Diaz for example) have framed MFAs as antithetical in a dichotomy to POC. Think about that for a second: literally, that the voices of POC and MFA programs are mutually exclusive...

Why do you hate on MFAs. You seem to like good writing.

I don't hate MFA programs; I have some nuanced problems with them being framed as all good. Mostly I think they are a dreadful decision for a writer who just wants to be a working novelist. It's not because they have no value or can't help anyone write better. It is because, for the vast majority of writers, they are undertaken for quite the wrong reasons--usually reasons that would be better served by simply writing.

And unless someone is going to make $30,000 from creative writing (very unlikely), they usually aren't "worth it." And if they're not "worth it," you better get some pretty spectacular intrinsic value. Or drink a WHOLE lot of that free wine.

Keep in mind that MFA programs are a pretty new phenomenon. They are only a couple of generations old and exploded mostly to fulfill a demand for a niche. With the exception of a few authors and works (notably Raymond Carver coming from the Iowa Writers Workshop), most of the canon–that's literature and "good writing"–has been crafted without the benefit of any MFA programs. Most of the good writing from other cultures is likewise crafted without the benefit of MFA programs.

MFAs don't necessarily produce good writing. They produce literary writing. Literary fiction is a genre of its own. It is largely produced gatekeepered, and praised by a particular aesthetic of both form and content. I like literary fiction, but I have never confused its style for an automatic claim to quality and neither should anybody contemplating a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

The Mailbox: How Could You Pick Non Traditional Publishing! How COULD You?

Why would anyone do epub/self pub? 

[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. Hate mail is likely to amuse me more than anything, but it will make me extra snarky when I reply.]  

Today's offerings are the bile squeezings of an anonymous writer out there who apparently thinks that I will sniffle and cry when they try to hurt my feelings instead of using their hate mail to make more page views, money, and hook up crazy hot groupie threesomes.

Anonymous writes:

This blog/e-pub thing is a disgrace to real writers like me. You think you can just write anything and it will be just as good as published material, but it isn't. Any writer with skill would not pick e-pub over traditional, so you must suck. Grow a pair. Submit. Why would you pick e-pub unless you can't write?

I could obviously just write a blog and type anything and call myself a writer. I could even publish my first draft and make all my friends buy a copy. Writing takes more than that. You posers [sic] are putting a lot of bad crap out there and sullying the art. We used to have standards.

My reply:

Apparently you have a definition of writing that I lack, so if you'd like to edify me, you are most welcome. I write every day, I've been read by three quarters of a million people at a rate of about eleven to twelve hundred people every day on average, roughly 500 people follow my blog updates (not including the 11,000 on my Facebook page), I've been read all over the world including The U.K., Egypt, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, Japan, most of Europe, and of course the U.S. I get paid somewhere around $100-$150 a month on average--an amount that is slowly but surely climbing upward.

I guess I'm one of those fake writers. (You might want to look up the True Scotsman fallacy, just for shits and giggles.) I really ought to be read by a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, make no compensation other than invitations to events with free wine and copies of the anthology in which I'm printed, and troll people's blogs to tell them they're doing it wrong. Because clearly in order to be a real writer the gatekeeper has to love me the most of all--that's what the skin horse says, anyway.

According to recent Disney movies, love also helps if you've recently been ice-javelined in the heart.

Honor requires that since you asked to be anonymous, I don't publish your name, but it was actually pretty easy to figure out who you were from your e-mail since you used your regular account. (Rookie move for proper hate mail.) I then Googled your name, and found your Facebook and Linkedin profile, but absolutely no mention of published works, so unless you've scribbled out all your masterpieces under a pen name while managing BevMo during the day, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your loyalty to traditional publishing has not yielded the accolades you're hoping for.

The reason I picked e-pub/self-pub over traditional wasn't actually just to offend you. It is sort of a nuanced decision that has been evolving over the last couple of years, and it's not going to fit in a snarky reply, but I'll try to hit the highlight reel, and I'll use small words so you can follow along.

• Traditional publishing is shrinking. So more writers than ever before are competing for fewer traditional publishing opportunities. This leads to more competition for less pay. It also means that what gets published is increasingly what gatekeepers think will sell or what gatekeepers think is worthy of being published.
• Gatekeepers in the publishing industry are (still) overwhelmingly white and middle class and predominantly men. While the LGBT community (though really just the LG part) has made wonderful inroads into traditional publishing and the literary world, other voices are still marginalized. That means that what they think will sell (or deserves to be published even though it may not sell) is what resonates with them.
• Traditional writers have to be able to work for years (often for hours a day) without pay. That's not really an option for people who need to work three jobs or are the only care provider for two kids or something. That means that only people with a fair bit of privilege can get through the "hazing process." Other publishing methods can generate at least some income while a writer is improving their craft, and that creates an opportunity for new voices, and often some of the most interesting.
• Traditional gatekeepers are often a bunch of stuck up elitist snotrags--especially about what's good, what's "art," and which dialect of English is "proper."
• Other writing forms are expanding. Computers have changed everything. Right now it is (significantly) easier for an unheard of writer to get started, make inroads and build an audience in non-traditional publishing, and then possibly go hybrid. As is evidenced by the fact that Googling your name turns up no publishing credits whatsoever. Let me know how that "real writer" shit works out for you.
• If you've ever read a Harlequin romance novel or just a really shitty science fiction book, you know full well that just because something is published, does not mean it is good. A gatekeeper's approval doesn't mean you are good. It means they think it will make money. Those are the only standards "we" ever "used to have." All computers have done is make taking a chance on something less risky because the printing costs are a few cents worth of bandwidth and electricity.
• If I can make as much money or more from writing as all you "real" writers without taking advantage of a system that marginalizes others, I'm okay never having a big five contract.

I would also like to offer you a tiny bit of unsolicited advice: when you're writing hate mail to a writer talking about how much better (or "more real") a writer you are than they, it might be a good idea to proofread for things like verb tenses and homophones. While these errors makes for interesting visuals, (like a bunch of bloggers posing for selfies) it's probably not going to cement your superiority. We all make mistakes, and every writer needs an editor, but that's just a particularly ironic time to be writing like a fifth grader.

If you're enjoying this blog, and would like to see more articles like this one, the writer is a guy with a rent and insurance to pay who would love to spend more time writing. Please consider contributing to My Patreon. As little as $12 a year (only one single less-than-a-cup-of-coffee dollar a month) will get you in on backchannel conversations, patron-only polls, and my special ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.

The Mailbox: Why Don't You Become a "Real Writer"?

You're pretty snotty about MFA programs. Are you afraid to become a real writer?

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Thursday as long as I have enough to do.  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.  And if you write me bitchy little anonymous torpedos, it will be, as they say, "so on".]  

Anonymous writes:

You're pretty snotty about your disdain for MFAs in Creative Writing and the literary world.  Is that because we're real writers and you're not?  Are you jealous?  Are you afraid that if you tried to apply for an MFA program, you wouldn't even be accepted, never mind getting published if you had to face *GASP* a gatekeeper.[?] 

My Reply:

[Remember, I'm NOT anti-MFA. I'm really not. But when anonymous asscrumpets from the with-us-or-against-us brigade basically beg me to go to the mat, I've got some game.]

You know...if you had signed this, or had the courage to take responsibility for it in some way, I might have tried to slather some aloe vera all over this burn you gave me before replying to you, but I've been sick for nearly a week, I spiked a fever Tuesday night and since you decided to take a callow anonymous snipe, I'm not going to feel bad about unleashing the full fury of my crankypants. You will learn what apparently even an advanced degree among your own kind has not yet taught you: writers can be vicious if annoyed. I will not be kindly setting aside my writing persona to offer a sincere, conscientious reply.  Oh no. I'm turning this bad boy up to eleven.

So let's take your first question: "Is that because we're real writers and you're not?"

I realize that you're surrounded by people who are very busy sleeping with each other and attending every literary event they can find where there is free wine from a box, so you might have some slightly skewed perceptions about what your writing life is going to be like after graduation, but exactly what, to your mind, makes a writer "real"?

I wake up every morning and start writing. I write for four to six hours. Then I go about the business of my day, cleaning the house, reading, and maybe playing a video game or something.  Twice a week during the school season I go to teach English and ESL for night school at a community college, but every other evening involves a couple more hours of revision. Periodically, I will spend entire days in front of my keyboard.

I have passed my 10,000 hours more than three times over.  Much (but not all) of my writing in the last year has gone into this blog.  Writing About Writing is coming up on its first birthday and there are 417 posts averaging about 2-3 pages each.  If this were a book, it would be the length of War and Peace (and drafted in just under a year--suck it Tolstoy!). It wouldn't be as GOOD as War and Peace, but it would be as long.  I have also been tooling away on some fiction manuscripts when I'm not working on the blog.

Picture of me holding paycheck has been replaced
with a picture of just the amount part.
JUST in case the routing number or account number might
be something I don't want a picture of online.

This is a picture of a paycheck sent to me by Google for the ad revenue this blog has brought me.  I'm covering up the address to avoid stalkers, but rest assured that the cute groupie kind is welcome to message me privately. It's not much, but added to the "Tip Jar" donations, I could pay a bill. This month, it could even be something like the phone bill. My blog is largely creative in nature, including bloggers whose existence is somewhat questionable and events that may not have happened quite exactly the way I said them--like interdimensional wars and stuff.  Mostly it is what I want to write. It is not what someone else wants me to write. What this means is that I have made actual money from creative writing.

This is a picture of my analytics for the life of the blog.  As you can see, hundreds of people stop by every day. On really good days, I break a thousand. Eighty thousand people have come by my blog since I started it. I have articles on Stumbleupon with thousands of "likes" and by tracking my analytics I can tell you that I have lots of return readers and lots of people who find my site and then stay to poke around rather than immediately leaving.  If you look at a graph of my analytics, they look like a mountain that people would climb to prove how awesome they are. My fiction pieces, Falling From Orbit and Penumbra, have been read by hundreds.

So, let's take an inventory. I write every day, I'm read by thousands, and I'm even starting to make a little tiny bit of money at it.  So here is my question back to you, Anonymous:

WHAT POSSIBLE FUCKING DEFINITION OF "REAL WRITER" ARE YOU USING?

Seriously? What bellwether? What yardstick? How are you defining this phrase "real writer" that I don't measure up? Is the self-congratulatory circle jerk within the Ivory Tower so cloistered that you've managed to actually convince yourself that your average grad student is the unsung literary hero of the writing world and that all other writers aren't "real"? Or is there actually some secret handshake definition you use that I'm missing like, "must use prose rhythm about being gay in as banal a world as possible and publish in a literary review" that I have failed to meet?


Your next question: "Are you jealous?"

Are you the creator of How I Met Your Mother (the early seasons), for you are making me laugh.

I've talked to a lot of MFA program faculty over the years, and asked about their program's success in generating writers who go on to some measure of success with writing. They all say the same thing. (After hemming and hawing and telling me about how they really teach "critical thinking within the field of humanities that come into play in any job" and "conveying the aesthetic of high artistic integrity" and something about "you should study what you love and let the rest fall into place".) The numbers are abysmal. Unless you're in a program like Iowa City, Ann Arbor, Madison, Brown, Cornell or some other program on the short list of awesomesauce, the number of writers who will go on to make a career from creative writing is something like one in every four or five batches of graduates. Not one in every four or five students, mind you. One person in every four or five graduating classes. 1% would be a Scrooge-on-Christmas-morning generous estimate. It's more like half a percent...or less. With programs LIKE Iowa and Ann Arbor, it is difficult to claim correlation proves causation as their programs are so hard to get into, it requires some pretty fierce dedication to writing and self-selection bias just to be there.

Fuck, the faculty at SFSU are still bragging about Anne Rice. She graduated before most of them even got there.

Lots of students publish a short story or two (I'm told that number is roughly around 25%) and a few even publish a single novel through small press (which doesn't pay) but very few keep writing after graduation and a fraction of a percentage of MFA graduates ever make money at it. Most take their MFA's and go manage restaurants or sell real estate. Many end up writing in some other capacity like freelance writing or tech writing, but not creative writing. Some get into the Creative Writing field as publishers, editors, or literary events managers but do very little of their own writing. A few will try to get into academia where they will compete with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of their peers for a single position. They will then struggle to be faculty instead of lecturer and make tenure essentially by outlasting their colleagues in a years long endurance race where they must tolerate the intense demands of their position teaching undergrads while making less than the janitors. They will be tested against each other in various "Survivor-esque" trials like power ass kissing and how fast they can tell undergrads that science fiction isn't real literature. They will also be up against a flood of recent graduates of the newly formed PhD of Creative Writing programs that are starting to pop up, so they may not even be considered to have the terminal degree appropriate to teach college within a few more years.

The average MFA publishes "a couple" of short stories, and I am assured that this is very much an average as most MFA students publish nothing (just wanting to get their degree and get out) and the occasional student publishes several. These are usually submitted to literary journals, which are prestigious publications with fierce gatekeepers who make Cerberus look cute and fluffy.  These journals are mostly purchased by other MFA students, graduates, proud mothers, and supportive friends and are very much "literary" in focus.  Esoteric would be a kind word. "Experimental or Avant Guarde" is more common. You can imagine what it's called outside the very insular world of literary fiction. I kind of like it myself, in small doses, but it's easy to see why it doesn't have much mainstream appeal. It is not because of the myth that there's no money in good writing either, as the sales for Catcher in the Rye or Catch 22 can attest to.

A good literary magazine will have a circulation of 2000-2500. Most are actually even smaller. A few are bigger, but those are very difficult to get published in. Usually you find that it is faculty of other institutions (not graduate students) publishing in them. They do this to keep up their publication requirements where they teach. Occasionally it is graduates who are still writing. The reviews most grad students get published in have even more modest numbers. And while it is a kick to see one's name in print, these journals often lose money for the universities where they are published, and are mostly considered to be a learning experience for the editors and staff rather than a revenue stream for the college. The literary magazine for which I was managing editor considered it a kick ass semester if they could keep their losses to only three figures. No one gets paid for submitting to these kinds of journals. Ever. Usually they get something like three to five copies of the journal itself. All these journals really give the writer is the promise of exposure and something to put on their resume. (And if that sounds vaguely, unsettlingly familiar, it's because it's the same thing people say when they don't want to actually pay freelancers.)

I would have to have published 64 stories in the last year into some fairly decent journals to get as many readers as I've had on Writing About Writing. (I'll assume that every proud mom and and supportive friend of all the other authors still read the lit mag cover to cover if you'll assume that everyone who stopped by my site for a herpes picture search read an entire article--each seems equally implausible.) That's more than one successful submission every week.  Most MFA's are feeling pretty writerly if they earn themselves a rejection slip a month. A REJECTION slip, mind you. But, by all means, please let me know if a thousand people a day are reading your work (and not just the folks who will fail the class if they don't).

Most publishers will gleefully tell you they have absolutely no interest in the CV of a writer. None. They are interested in the writing itself and maybe past publication. This isn't like professional theater where the question isn't IF you have an MFA, but rather where you got it from. An MFA will not raise anyone's chances of getting published. And, in fact, many MFA's who do go on to writing success will tell you the MFA itself was pretty damned useless to them beyond just the continued structured writing practice, something most writers need to learn to do for themselves at some point anyway.

If all that doesn't convince you, I have written a list of reasons NOT to get an MFA in Creative Writing. Please feel free to take a gander at it if you still have some sort of doubt about how much my heart really, REALLY does not yearn to be fettered to most MFA programs.

Oh my goodness lord, I almost forgot. An MFA is about $30,000 (on average) and takes two to three years at minimum.

So...I have more people reading me by an order of magnitude.  I'm a year into my career efforts instead of a year into a 2-3 year degree that will probably produce nothing more than an unpublishable thesis in a genre I don't enjoy and no actual job prospects.  And I am up by roughly $30,000 bucks.

Oh wait...$30,000 plus a cell phone bill, actually. My bad.

So am I jealous?  No.  No, I am not.


Am I afraid of gatekeepers?  No.  Mostly I feel sorry for them, for their power is in rapid decline but they're still acting like...well important gatekeepers. Some have managed to walk into the new century and make careers that even involve these newfangled internet contraptions, but many still seem to think that writers have no back alleys or cobblestone paths around those gates they're so busy keeping, so they can be as eccentric and anachronistic as they want. And when they get port rounded by something like The Martian, or Cory Doctorow, they scratch their heads...again....and again...and again. They aren't noticing that electronic media are changing everything and are acting exactly like the music industry did about ten years ago when they thought they could do anything they wanted.   Some of these fucking fossiles won't take submissions electronically or update their websites OR EVEN KNOW THEIR OWN SUBMISSION GUIDELINES.

I made a very deliberate decision to approach writing in a way that factored in the many changes to the industry that are happening RIGHT NOW.  I listened closely to the cutting edge people explain how market shares were shifting into e-publishing, electronic readers and multimedia, and paid a lot of attention to how the old guard sounded as they denied the changes. ("Oh, I don't publish my writers on Kindle. Who would want a book they couldn't smell?" Then later: "Well...sales are down. People just don't read as much anymore!") And what the new guard said. ("Well if you account for Kindle sales, up to 20% of the market and growing, book sales are actually up from five years ago.") I heard cutting edge publishers talking about how zines were not the stigma of a decade ago, and many writers lament that it is actually their worst work, rather than their best, that readers will find from Googling their name. And I listened to several people tell me about marketing in the new world through electronic media. It wasn't fear that motivated me to start a blog. It was a very deliberate, "maximum yield" calculation.

Honestly it's more like I have 80,000 gatekeepers now. My art is out there and people can either love it or hate it without any ONE person ever having to decide if it's going to make money and/or advance their personal aesthetic of good art. No one approved it before it went out, but sometimes that means there's no real quality control either. I get feedback--good and bad--from all over the country and even the world. And if you think that any gatekeeper, who can still maintain a semblance of professional decorum while rejecting something, would be as uncivil and juvenile as, say, a nasty anonymous comment asking me if I'm jealous of "real writers," you would be very, very wrong. I am ten times more nervous about anonymous comments than submission replies. That shit stings.


As to your last question:  Am I afraid that I wouldn't be accepted into an MFA?

No. I'm not. I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a 3.94, so I could probably get into most graduate programs with a couple of cleaned up stories, and I even have a few from my undergrad efforts that aren't "nasty genre" that I could revise and have professionally edited for my portfolio. I already teach too, so I could probably even get a fellowship and not have to cover so much of the cost myself. No, that's not what I'm afraid of.

What I'm afraid of is that I would be bored...for the entire three years. I would be bored by workshops where people haven't really read my work (and then only because it's required for the class--not because they wanted to). Bored by the fact that I'm grouped up with readers not by mutual interest or writing style, but by where I chose to sit on the first day of class or my last name. Bored by the transparent ways in which people who simply don't have a taste for what I'm writing, and try to twist it to be more like what THEY'RE writing. Bored by the homogeneous writing that is being produced in MFA programs today that somehow manages to be linguistically "experimental" and still all alike when it comes to tropes and cliches. Bored by the hyperfocus on language and character and disdain for plot and setting.  Bored by tiptoeing around departmental pedagogy that forbids genre fiction despite its considerable merit. Bored by how the hazing process for Creative Writing faculty is so long and difficult and filled with such sycophancy that the end result becomes cookie cutter faculty with no real fresh blood or ideas. Bored by being told what to write and precisely how to write it rather than simply being given skills to write anything I please at a higher quality level. Bored by spending two to three years in a program that won't actually give me a skill set that might improve my chances of employment. Bored by being told what I ought to like rather than the tools to make my own informed decisions in that matter. Bored by the elitism of people who think that because they're not commercially successful, it somehow makes them better writers. And mostly bored by people like you, who have their heads so far up the asses of this arrogant, elitist, circle jerk mentality that they think they're in a position to decide what makes for a "real writer."

Hope that answers your questions.


If you're enjoying this blog, and would like to see more articles like this one, the writer is a guy with a rent and insurance to pay who would love to spend more time writing. Please consider contributing to My Patreon. As little as $12 a year (only one single less-than-a-cup-of-coffee dollar a month) will get you in on backchannel conversations, patron-only polls, and my special ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.