After the MFA

There’s a fantastic essay up on a book marketing blog called Buzz, Balls & Hype. Though it’s called “Letter to an MFA Student” the message within — by writer and writing instructor Joshua Henkin — should be good fodder for any writers, with or without an MFA.

One nugget early in the piece caught my eye:

The same students who want to publish their work are often curiously unconcerned with entertaining their readers, with doing what a friend of mine, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist, calls the writer’s principal obligation: to get the reader to dance with you. In short, they are reluctant to do—indeed, suspicious of doing—what is the cardinal requirement of every writer: to tell the reader a story.

This whole notion of telling a story, is it the core duty of a writer, versus playing with language, subverting the bourgeois paradigm, bringing back the funk, etc? It is for me, and that’s fundamentally what I learned in my writing program.

Of course, just as I was seeing the light, I had reached the end of the academic line. But no one says learning stops with a degree. And so we plot forward…

Good stuff for reading and thinking. Check out all three parts:

Buzz, Balls & Hype: Letter to an MFA Student – Part 1
Buzz, Balls & Hype: Letter to an MFA Student – Part 2
Buzz, Balls & Hype: Letter to an MFA Student – Part 3