But MFA candidates aren’t taking out vast student loans to be told to quit. We hear that enough from all the practical, worried people around us. You enroll in an MFA program to learn all you can about how to create the poems, stories or novels you want to create. And that ought to happen in a supportive, optimistic environment because learning to write well is a struggle.

Last year I won a one-hour meeting with an author who has published at least five commercial novels. She started writing romances and now writes mainstream fiction which sells alright locally. Personally, I find her stuff hard to get through - it just has nothing fresh to offer.

Her advice to me was to write chick-lit or something genre, just to get my name on a published book. Her experience was that once she was published, getting published again was easier, and that now she has more control over what she wants to write. Her goal was to earn a living writing, but I’m not interested in writing schlock. There are easier ways to make the rent. And I think most MFA students, at least those I met, who tended not to be fresh out of college, know the score.

I added it for him- Armand

**
from Benjamin Chambers:

I realize you’re being provocative, but I’ll take the bait.

It’s unrealistic to expect MFA programs to stop using short stories as a basis for teaching, for all the reasons that have been stated. But I think you’re right that MFA programs do very little to prepare their students for succeeding commercially.

This is because MFA programs aren’t run by commercial writers, in general, so they tend not to be focused on the market; instead, they seek to help writers develop their art, regardless of the market. That’s okay for many of those who attend - it’s why they go in the first place.

I got my MFA from Washington University in 1989, and never in two years did anyone actually teach me basic issues of craft or plot (eventually, I found the right how-to books for this). First, it was assumed that all of us who’d gotten into the program already knew all this stuff (and only one of us had actually studied or been explicitly taught the craft of fiction as an undergraduate). Second, it was assumed that we were writing literature (i.e., not with a market in mind), and that to pay attention to plot necessarily meant producing formula fiction. The faculty there still had an amazing amount to teach me, but looking back, I wish they’d spent more time drilling us on plot and craft. They didn’t, I suspect, because they were going largely on instinct themselves. Furthermore, they’d never had to pay attention to the market to get where they had: teaching graduate students to make ends meet while they did their own writing.

If you’re writing literature and hope to survive, the obvious way to do it is to teach, which is the path that most writing teachers offer their students, explicitly or implicitly. I certainly left my MFA program expecting to get a job teaching somewhere eventually. However, I remember seeing a summary in the Associated Writing Programs journal last year or the year before that totaled the number of writing programs, the number of graduates … and the pitifully small number of teaching posts available. I’d bet that this is something that no writing program ever discusses with its students.

Now, I’m a literature wonk, so I’m okay with literature that won’t ever appeal to a huge audience — in fact, in 2003 I founded an online literary journal to focus specifically on the hard-to-publish novella and long essay (and even so, I have trouble getting enough quality submissions to fill the issues) — but I agree that writing programs should be more market-focused. Your point about bringing in editors and agents to talk to students is dead-on; so was the point about teaching writing for the web (though I would argue that the future is in multi-media writing). Short stories, too, could be used to teach genre fiction — there’s a ton of mystery and science fiction short stories, and there’s probably as many romance and horror stories as well. If nothing else, the writers who don’t care for genre fiction would still benefit from a thorough education in how to plot.

Nonetheless, the basic truth that writing programs need to convey to new writers isn’t that novels will be more marketable than short fiction — it’s that creative writing of any sort almost never pays. For anyone. It’s like wanting to be a pro basketball player: if you’re supernaturally talented or supernaturally lucky, you might get to the pros. Most aspirants never will. As writers, we can improve the odds by writing novels instead of short stories, nonfiction instead of fiction, or *anything* but poetry, but the fact is that precious little of what gets written ever gets published (or should be), and an even smaller percentage of what is published ever actually makes any money for the author.

Writing programs that truly want to prepare their students to make a living writing should also teach them how to write grants, ad copy, technical manuals, etc. It’s not a s g ratifying, but you can make a great living doing it while you learn how to tell ever better stories — and maybe more marketable ones, to boot.

I apologize for the problems.

Let me know if you’d like me to delete your comment above — g AT afterthemfa.com

Gordon has complete admin. control over the site, so he would be able to help you out with that.

I sometimes have weird troubles posting to blogs too, so it’s not just you.

If you need to, you can email me at armand_i@yahoo.com

Armand

I tried to post a comment to this post several times yesterday, but I was having trouble with the interface. Hope I didn’t bombard you with duplicates, but I see a comment I made to one of Gordon’s posts got through okay (and faster), while this comment never showed up at all, so I’m wondering if I should try reposting. Would you mind dropping me an e-mail to let me know? Thanks.

-BC

Armand — a welcome and avid guest contributor — got his MFA from Emerson, I believe.

Thanks for your comments. Please keep reading and commenting.

-gordon

First, I agree that the short form is easier to critique and workshop, so it gets a lot of emphasis. I happen to like writing creative nonfiction, and I particularly like essays. Like short fiction, this is not an easy sell. But I learned a lot from writing an essay collection, and so far have placed three essays, which keeps me going.

However, the part I’d like to comment on is your conclusion about teaching online writing. I absolutely agree that how to write for the Web should be part of the curriculum. (That said, I had a wonderful education… no complaints there!)

Anyway, keep blogging and keep writing. I enjoy your blog.

Since one question that seems to be arising here concerns marketing, I have to say I think part of the answer is literally staring us in the face: blogs. Musicians and photographers are using online tools to showcase their art. Why aren’t more “serious writers” (read: published) putting quality stuff online? Not just in the form of an “ebook,” or a manufactured article which has been approved by a publisher. But as a blog post?

Part of the reason, I think, is that the “blog” has received a bad connotation in the “literary” world as being trivial and somehow not writing and only useful in terms of marketing. I think once today’s twenty-somethings become tenured professors, the community will begin to change their opinion on this and see the blog as less of a “marketing tool” and more of a creative medium unto itself. Writers, by their very skillset have the opportunity to maintain really good blogs. There are certainly blogs out there I would consider “literary” in their own right, but most of those come from Web professionals who also happen to be good writers. MFA’s might do well to teach students how to use the medium not just as a way to “establish an online presence” but as a viable way to practice their art, build an audience, and yes even make money as an ‘indie writer,’ if that’s a goal.

As for helping the student market themselves, I think MFA in Creative Writing programs should only do as much as an art program would do for their students. Now, since I don’t have an art degree, I’m not sure what that entails. Any thoughts?