Blame grad school

Am I really going to write about this again?  I suppose I am.  I have remarked here, from time to time, about the embittered ravings of Anis Shivani, and his loathing of all things academic.  But now here we go again, this time from Cathy Day, writing on themillions.com (via HTMLGIANT, again, thank you Kyle):

...most fiction workshop instructors use the short story—not the novel or the novella or the novel-in-stories—as the primary pedagogical tool in which to discuss the craft of fiction. Why is this so? Simply: the short story is a more manageable form, both for the instructor and the student, and I have been both. For the writer who teaches a full load of courses and is always mindful of balancing “prep” time with writing time, it’s easier to teach short stories than novels, and it’s easier to annotate and critique a work-in-progress that is 10 pages long as opposed to a story that is 300 pages long. It’s advantageous for students, too. Within the limited time frame of a semester, they gain the sense of accomplishment that comes with writing, submitting for discussion, revising, and perhaps even finishing (or publishing!) a short story. It’s a positively Aristotelian experience. Beginning. Middle. End. Badda bing, badda boom. 

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say this: The short story is not experiencing a renaissance. Our current and much-discussed market glut of short fiction is not about any real dedication to the form. The situation exists because the many writers we train simply don’t know how to write anything but short stories. The academy—not the newsroom or the literary salon or the advertising firm—has assumed sole responsibility for incubating young writers.

Oh, for pete's sake.  "Incubating?"  This is not what we're doing, and for those of us who have been in MFA programs, this isn't what we felt was being done to us.  That is, if we were bothering to do anything at all worthwhile.  As students, we were writing whatever the hell we wanted to write, and as teachers, we are teaching according to whatever the hell our students are writing.

"The short story is a more manageable form."  Perhaps.  But you have to be a pretty shitty teacher to value manageability over artistic ambition.  More than half of my current fiction grad students are writing novels, and some of my undergrads are, too.  And I read them all, without hesitation.  BECAUSE THAT'S MY JOB.  Several of my recent grad students are publishing novels as well--good ones.

But how is this possible?  Well, it's because grad students are not fucking idiots, that's why.  They are able to give one another the proper context when they workshop novel excerpts.  They read one another's novel manuscripts.  When their peers workshop short stories, they are able to apply much of what they learned in this process to the process of writing and editing a novel.  They also read lots of novels.  And, at least at Cornell, we have craft-centered literature classes in which the structure, style, and purpose of novels are discussed.

The workshop model is not forcing anyone to write short stories, or any particular kind of short story.  Undergrads like short stories because they're just starting out at fiction and want to give it a try on a smaller scale.  And it's true, we are very ready to accomodate them.  But these stories are not like processed meat, dumped out of a can.  They are wildly different from one another.  And we accomodate students' longer works too--and their memoirs, graphic novels, poem cycles, opera librettos, dance/literature hybrids, experimental film scripts, fine art printing projects, and collaborations with composers.  And yes, I have seen all of these things in my five years at Cornell.  And every time, I've said, "Awesome, let's do this."  Is your writing program not like this?  Then fix your writing program, because it sucks.

Furthermore, much of the work of a writing teacher happens not in workshop but during office hours, or at the coffee shop in the basement, or at a bar after workshop, or on the phone, or via email, or in the many years of professional and personal friendship that often follow a student's years in an MFA program.  We do not run factories.  We provide a place for students to figure out what they want, and then we help them achieve it.  The idea that there is some rigid structure here, or that we are helpless in the face of it, is asinine.

If the publishing world appears to be drowning in a flood of mediocre short stories, that's because it is.  It always was.  Most writing is terrible, and there is a lot of it.  I am tired of people declaring that this era is shittier than all the others, and then blaming me for it.  In fact there is more good fiction being written now than I could read in eight lifetimes, and, much as I'd like to believe otherwise, that's not my fault either.

Kids today!

W6 reader Jay Livingston emailed me a link to this week's entry in the (really quite good) LA Times Books Blog, which is by the novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro. The gist of the piece is that publishing, and the literary aims of the young, have changed. She helpfully tells us that she has had a successful career, then addresses the shallowness that has overtaken MFA programs in recent years (and allow me to quote this at length):

...the creative writing industry of the mid-1980s now seems like a few mom-and-pop shops scattered on a highway lined with strip malls and mega-stores. Today's young writers don't peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller -- and did.

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn't reward persistence, that doesn't see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn't trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?"

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

Kids today!!!

Actually, there is plenty of time to write in the cold--that's what everyone is doing. Shapiro is looking at the thinnest possible slice of the writing public--a handful of graduate students--at the most volatile moment of their lives--during graduate school--and is drawing from this tiny sample a sweeping and incorrect assessment of what young writers care about.

"I see it in their faces." Seriously? You can look into the eyes of the annual 5,000 MFA grads and, you know, read their minds? She should perhaps ask them what they actually think. Would you rather have a big hit now, or a long and respected career? Let me posit that everyone will pick the latter. Students do care about writing well. That's the only thing they have any control over, and the only thing we're capable of reliably helping them with.

But of course they hope for the "big score." It appears to be doled out at random--why not throw their name into the pot? Fame and riches, however, are not the focus of their creative lives. Dani Shapiro hears about it from her students because she is successful. This is the students' only chance to work their connections--why begrudge them? If careerism annoys her, she should get out of the MFA biz.

Otherwise, humor the kids. They are exactly like you.

MFA application time

At Cornell, we are just now digging in to the massive pile of first reads for next year's fiction MFA class. I'm not going to discuss how we make our decisions, but I can tell you that all previous volume records were broken this year--by a huge margin. And I suspect most other schools are experiencing a similar surge. Who wouldn't want to shield themselves from this economy, and live for a couple of years in their own imaginations?

Anyway, a few tips for those of you who are hoping to be accepted into an MFA writing program this year, to keep you from going too crazy. First, don't spend too much time on the MFA Weblog or other websites and forums--you will drive yourself bananas. Second, don't worry about getting your first choice. Really. If you're any good at all, you will do well wherever. Third, don't worry about not getting in anywhere. If you're any good at all, you will do well without doing it in school.

Yeah--easy for me to say. But it's true, and you all know it. MFA programs are great resources for inspiring writers, but you don't need us. You can be good without help--at least without the formalized assistance of an academic program.

When you get rejected, don't take it personally. How people react to your writing is entirely personal and idiosyncratic--we choose the students we think we want to work with, not the students whom we consider most likely to end up with a three-book deal at Knopf (if, in fact, such contracts even exist any more for literary writers). And so you are not being rejected by the establishment itself--you're being rejected, this time, by a handful of people who don't share your taste. If we don't want you, you probably don't want us, either.

If you get in somewhere, go read your future teachers' work. It's helpful for you to know where they're coming from--and it's helpful for your teachers to be able to refer to their own writing experiences and have you know what they're talking about. If you don't like your teachers' work, no problem--our advice, if we're doing our jobs, is not intended to make you write like us, but to make you write like yourself, only better.

Finally, you may feel, at some point along the way, that the whole world of writing is entirely insular, a tightly-knit community of snobs whose job is to hold back the deluge of wannabes and up-and-comers. Don't succumb to those feelings. Certainly there's as much nepotism, logrolling, and favoritism in publishing as in any other line of work, but the world of writing has little to do with that. The writing is the thing you can control--the publishing is a crapshoot. Focus on the former, no matter what news you get this month.

Good luck!

"What are you looking for?"

At the moment, along with the rest of the creative writing faculty at Cornell, I'm presently engaged in The Big Read--we've divvied up this year's MFA applications and are each reading dozens of them, to prepare for the decisions we'll be making next month on which students are admitted. Seeing me surrounded by mountains of folders, Rhian called my attention to this post on the MFA Weblog, in which applicants ask writing professors questions about the application process, their schools, and being a student writer.

I'm not going to comment on the specifics of this year's applications, or how we do things at Cornell. But I wanted to respond more generally about a particular breed of question--not representative, by the way, of the whole--that keeps cropping up in the comments of that post. Here are a few examples, from various commenters:

I'd like to ask an MFA faculty member what is the biggest and most common mistake applicants make. What (if anything) makes them place an applicant immediately in the "no" pile?

what is the most common mistake a first year MFA'er makes either specifically in their writing or in their academic work as a whole (so that we can all avoid it, of course =)

I think the question I have for faculty may be unanswerable -- but here goes -- what are you looking for in applicants' writing samples?

Now, I am not going to pretend that the MFA is not a professional degree, or that it's misguided to want to attend an MFA program in order to make connections, learn the ropes of the publishing world, and get an "inside track." Without question, these are benefits that the MFA offers students, and I took advantage of them myself, back when I graduated from the University of Montana in 1995.

But none of this is remotely useful if you don't have something to write. And the questions I quoted above seem to me to be hopelessly misguided--they are focused not upon the writer's work, but on the people who are judging it. And let me tell you, there is nothing that can be done about the latter.

Here's my MFA story: I applied to U of M because I'd never been west of Wisconsin in my life, and I went there because it was the only place I got in. In retrospect, I lucked out--I loved Missoula, and studying there. But the fact is, my application sucked, I didn't know what I was doing, and it was only some bizarre fluke that got me in. Somebody there must have seen something in the hideous muck of my writing that I might someday make something of. But honestly, compared to the people we let in to Cornell, my writing at the time was simply awful. The me of today would have rejected the me of 1993 after a page and a half.

My point is that, the only reason anyone gets in anywhere is that something they wrote connects with somebody who reads it. There is no forumla to this. There's no way of calculating it. It's like falling in love--it just happens, practically at random. Sure, some writers are especially talented, and are able to connect with more people than others, and probably those writers will get offers from a lot of places. But I wasn't one of those writers, and I might easily have not gotten in. And I like to think that, if that were the case, I would have done the right thing--put it out of my mind and dug back in.

If you're asking what we "want," or what mistakes you should avoid, you should go back to square one and do a little soul-searching. Because we don't know what we want, and there are no mistakes. There's only the same kind of connection between people that happens when anyone reads something they like. You have no control over us, but you can control your work. So do that: write what you want to write. If I have one piece of concrete advice, it's that you should do everything you can to forget about your "career," forget about the possibility of teaching, forget about publishing, about book parties, about the "in" crowd, about blogs, about everything except your personal obsessions and their expression. Though it's necessary to get a few recommendations, to write a personal statement, to send transcripts, to take the GRE, those aren't the things that really matter to readers. What they want is what they want when they read anything--to be surprised. To make a connection with another person. To feel some kind of spark. They want the same thing you do, when you read.

And when you send out the applications, forget about them completely and forever. Do not post on the internet about them. Go write something else. If you don't get in, it's nobody's fault, and you didn't do anything wrong. You just got rejected. Rejection is the norm. Most of what I write does not get published; most of my stuff that is published has been rejected a dozen times. It's not failure, and you shouldn't think of it that way. It's just that it didn't stick. That's the way it is now, and it's the way it will be in 25 years, when your tenth novel has just come out. You just have to shut it all out and write.

Ultimately, if we don't want you, you don't want us. It's that simple. The MFA is like any degree: it is all about what you bring to it. You could say that some schools are "better" than others, and I guess there's a case to be made for that. All of us like to think our program is the best, and yes, I'm really proud of the one I teach at. But the fact is, Princeton is "better" than SUNY Binghamton, unless you drink yourself to sleep every night at Princeton and study like a madman at Binghamton, in which case Binghamton is better. The point is that someone with internal resources can take advantage of every opportunity to learn. You need to be that person, so that you can kick ass at Iowa, but could also kick ass in your crap apartment, in your crap town, after your crap job is done for the day. You and your work are all there is, and it's nice to get to do it at school, but if you really mean it, you will do it no matter what. Keep that in mind, and good luck.