The Post MFA slump

Why your writing program makes you want to stop writing

Dear Sonal,

I completed my MFA some time ago, and much as I enjoyed the many discussions on craft, my sense is that the value of such discussions needs to be taken in the context of the realities of story-writing.

There is danger in talking about a story as if it was an engineered artifact, a vehicle of intentional, one-way meaning from writer to reader, rather than what it really is: an asynchronous, collaborative, and fluid encounter between a writer and a reader facilitated by a text.

For this reason, high-level abstract analysis has limited value, and if these limitations are not understood they can hinder the writer in her aims of persisting in the effort of producing something of worth by unduly inflating her sense of intentionality (i.e., her belief in her ability to effectively translate high-level analysis into the story as it currently exists on the page) to such an extent that the grinding down of that intentionality by the difficulties of actually writing takes her will to continue working on the story down with it.

This has become more of a rant than a question, but I’m curious as to your thoughts, as this had been my experience post-MFA, and it seemed to be prevalent among my cohort.

Sincerely,
Third Person Editorial

Dear Third Person Editorial,

What you describe sounds very much like the post-MFA slump, which seems to happen to many people after an intensive writing program, but somehow it’s never mentioned in the brochure. Although I suppose “Warning: upon completing this program, you will quit writing, hopefully not forever” isn’t the catchiest marketing.

Your letter identifies one reason for the post-MFA slump—namely, that everything you’ve learned about craft and story analysis and the amazingly brilliant subtleties you discovered in that short story by that author that completely blew your mind—all of that gets into your head and starts codifying itself as the Rules For Brilliant Writing. And so you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a story that follows all these Rules For Brilliant Writing and get no where and never write anything.

Or perhaps you do sit down to write, and with every word you type, the Rules re-assert themselves, making you doubt whether or not you’ve been sufficiently brilliant, whether you’ve truly thought through all the angles, whether there is enough subtle imagery to evoke your writerly intentions or is it too on the nose, does the structure similarly encompass all those intentions in an interesting way, and maybe your intentions are just dumb and unworthy? Perhaps the story gets half-written before you decide that you’ve failed before you even started.

Or perhaps there is something you have written. Maybe it was your MFA thesis, or another project from the program, or maybe you were able to write something new in that first flush of newly-graduated excitement. And now when you sit down to look at it, all you can see is what a giant mess it is, how completely it missed the mark on what you intended it to be, and that this intention was stupid anyway, and why were you so dumb to waste money on this program?

Welcome the the slump. Unlike the jungle, there are no fun and games, but it may very well bring you to your knees. (I was a child of the 80s, okay?)

I think our experiences of the post-MFA slump have a lot to do with why we went into the MFA, how well we knew ourselves as a writer before we began, what the MFA experience was like for us, and what we thought was going to happen afterward. If we went in thinking the MFA will be a transformational experience that will take us from procrastinating hack to accomplished and organized writer…. well, no. You will learn about craft, but the MFA will not teach you about building a sustainable life around writing.

But also note that the intensive environment of an MFA, which hopefully seems energizing while you’re in it and getting all those dopamine hits of finding people who love talking about writing as much as you do, is also draining as fuck.

This idea that many of us secretly had that we will graduate and immediately go on to fame and fortune, or more accurately a book deal that does modestly okay, is an unrealistic fantasy. Yes, there is that one MFA student who did it, but they’re there to make the program look good and everyone else feel like they failed…. I don’t know why it has to be this way, I don’t make the rules. Forget that person. You didn’t fail. That person is an oddity.

Your creative soul needs a break from all of the writing and crafting, and unfortunately no one tells MFA students that, or if they do, everyone believes that they are that person who doesn’t. You are not. Rest. Watch TV. Catch up on all the things you didn’t do because you were in the MFA. You will get back to writing eventually.

You’ve also just gone from an environment of structure and deadlines and accountability, where a workshop full of people was always eagerly awaiting your writing, to…. nothing.

Now you write and no one is waiting for it, no one will read it closely and give you feedback, no one is excited to talk to you about it, nothing you write seems to matter at all. It’s a bummer. It’s also probably a more realistic picture of what your writing life will look like for a while—although trust me that your stories matter—and why you need to build up your writing community, although you will never quite recreate the best of the MFA experience. But hopefully, you can create something more sustainable for you.

Here, I need to note that for some, the MFA experience can be traumatic and damaging—the slump is more than a temporary pause, it’s a tangled up mess of judgement and confusion. Most writing professors are writers themselves, and not all writers are good writing teachers. Some are not even good people. But a well-known writer is often a draw for an MFA program, and many newer writers go traipsing in to be taught by their writing heroes, only to discover that their writing heroes are assholes who enjoy crushing creative souls.

Okay, maybe they aren’t quite so nakedly mean-spirited as that. Some are set in a narrow view of what makes good writing, and heaven forbid you write something else. My friend, whose famous-writer prof said “I have to gird myself to read this” as a cute way to poke fun at her work instead admitting “this piece does innovative things with form and unfortunately it reveals my lack of depth in craft knowledge and inability to empower students to find their voice as writers, as my default suggestion of ‘try it in first person’ doesn’t apply here, so I’m totally lost and possibly feeling a little dumb”—she still feels that sting, and this famous-writer will forever remain on my shit list, and I sincerely hope they fail in everything they do.

I digress. But even in less terrible MFA experiences, we can graduate with a bias towards certain flavours of literary writing, since this is frequently the genre of writing admired in such programs, and this may muddle up our own voice—particularly since many of us don’t know who we are as a writer when we begin the MFA, and so we are easily influenced away from ourselves by other people who seem really authoritative.

Perhaps we are a romance writer, or a science fiction writer, or a mystery writer. Perhaps we are a literary writer, but not the Famous White Dude variety of literary writer. Perhaps we are many kinds of writers all rolled into one. We need to listen to ourselves, and explore who we are as writers.

Still, the issue you describe, Third Person Editorial, is that after the MFA, or any other sort of deep craft-learning, we get into our heads. This is only natural; we spend a lot of our MFA program in our heads learning, analyzing, breaking down stories, critiquing, seeing how all the parts go together.

But the tricky bit, in my view, is that writing doesn’t come from the head. At least, not good writing, unless you consider highly pretentious writing to be good, in which case, what the heck do you see in this newsletter? Good writing is when the heart and soul of the writer pours out onto the page. To do this involves a lot of trusting yourself, a lot of trying stuff that seems completely wrong per the Rules of Brilliant Writing, and a lot of staying in the moment and listening to your gut.

You can see how this is entirely opposite to what we do in the MFA program. In writing something that is true to our creative selves, there’s no analysis, no conscious intentionality, no engineering. There’s just writing the thing that seems in tune with the story wants to say.

So what’s the point of learning all that craft and analysis then?

Because craft can giving scaffolding to help you construct your stories. Craft can help prompt our creative spirit, not by imposing rules but by asking questions. And the answer can always be, no, I’m not doing it that way, and then we have to start interrogating craft to figure out why it is the way it is, and how can we do that differently.

This perhaps gets into a question for another day, but in the interim,

Lincoln Michel

has this excellent piece on how fairy tales break all the rules and how we can use these broken rules to enliven our own work.

Feel free to roll your eyes and tell me I’m being woo-woo. I am. It may seem out of character for my practical soul, but I spent a lot of years struggling to write without being all woo-woo about it, and trying to learn all the rules and follow them, and this resulted in nothing good. Then I spent many years watching my students struggle with trying to follow all the rules and not being woo-woo about it, before guiding them towards trusting themselves, and suddenly their writing got way better. My practical soul is willing to be woo-woo when it works.

Coming back around to the crux of your letter, I think sometimes in the post-MFA world, we get so lost in the Rules of Brilliant Writing and the business of being a writer and landing that agent and getting that grant and chasing that award, that everything starts feeling a little pointless. Who cares if someone pulled off a story in the form of daily restaurant menus? It’s kind of fun, but what’s the point of it all?

And very simply, the point is the reader. And no, not the mythical reader we discuss in workshops who will get confused if you don’t spell everything out and also annoyed by having the obvious stated so often. But the actual reader of our work, who connects to it in some way, who draws something from it that is a mix of what we put into it and where they are in the world.

Writing stories is a powerful act of connection. As writers, we are also readers, and we all have had that experience of reading something that we connected to in a deep way, whether it showed us an entirely new world, or made use feel seen and valued, or simply gave us an escape or comfort or joy or even tears on those days when life was a lot.

Ultimately, that’s the job—to connect. The intellectualizing about craft is secondary. We write stories, and share something of ourselves and our truth and our heart and our soul, and this connects with someone we might never meet. It’s an act of magic. Our humanity meet theirs, across space and time, and there is a powerful act of recognition and empathy and love, that we have somehow encapsulated into words on a page.

It’s okay to be in a slump for a while. You need time to let all that overthinking go, so there’s room for the magic to come in.

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Posts linked in this newsletter

Writer Therapy: Rainbow Sparkles and Unicorn Fairies

To MFA or not to MFA

Time is a Political Issue

Fairy Tale as MFA Antidote