I have to admit that I’ve been fairly lucky as a writer. From time to time, I’ve been favored by flashes of good fortune, but the possibility of not selling my book is starting to get to me. I’m beginning to question my writing skills. I’m questioning my timing. I feel like my short stories must be too long. I feel demoralized. I’m afraid I’m going to run out of agencies, contests, and publishers to submit to. I check my inbox all the time looking for some sliver of hope. I realize the short fiction market is small, but that’s little consolation. I feel stupid for not having written a novel instead of a short story collection–I mean why didn’t I get a clue? Nobody buys short fiction anymore. I wonder whether I wasted all those nights writing a collection of (I think) thoughtful and well constructed stories that will sit in a drawer (well, not even in a drawer but on an external hard drive) until I die.

I feel stuck between things: on the one side a homeless short story collection and on the other a novel that probably (if I’m good and productive) won’t be finished until 2010. Yep, I’m officially depressed about writing.

So I turn to the awesome After the MFA community. Any thoughts? Anyone feel the same way I do? Any suggestions? How do you deal with the constant flow of rejection? How do you deal with frustration?

Cheers
Armand

This would be for CV experience only (I can’t offer pay). I teach college comp in the mornings and am in the process of looking for someone who can come in and sub every once in a great while. I also teach a creative writing course (not at a college but at a community center) in the evenings and would occasionally welcome a guest speaker to break things up.

Again, not a way to make money but good working experience that you can add to your resume or CV.

If you are interested, you can shoot me an email at:
armand_i AT yahoo DOT com

Armand

On submitting

What follows are suggestions for submitting your stories and/or excerpts to small literary journals.

Build an extensive list:

I have a list of just over 100 literary and electronic journals that I submit to, and that’s a fairly small list. One guy I met told me that he had a list of 240 (where he found the other 140 journals—I don’t know).

The least number of times that I have submitted a short story before it was accepted was about 12 times. The most was about 65, so I’m of the opinion that you will have to submit a short story—even a well written one—to many journals before it will find a home.

If you don’t have a list you can start with mine (see ‘THE LIST’ below) and edit as needed.

About the list

This list is a little bit of a mess (and highly personalized—I tried to take out my personal comments, but I might have missed some, so if you see some notes that don’t make sense, just ignore them).

Tiers

Entries are divided into 5 tiers according to my (and other folks’) sense of the importance, relevance, circulation, and payscale of the journals. In addition to five tiers, there is a sixth tier for contests. I usually submit to contests between the times I submit to Tier One and Tier Two.

My advice is to start submitting at Tier One, then go on to contests (if you are so inclined) then work your way down to Tier Five.

By dividing the journals and e-journals into tiers, I don’t mean to insult anyone. There just has to be some way to account for the fact that I would rather have my story rejected first by the New Yorker, then rejected by Bat City Review before finally being rejected by threecandles.org You gotta have publishing priorities.

Word Count

Throughout my list you will see things that look like this: 2,000-8,000 words. Other times I might just write this: 10,000 words. These are all indicators of the word count that the journal will accept. This is pretty straight forward. If you just see one number like 6,000 words, that means the journal will accept stories of up to 6,000 words. Any length means that the journal appears to have no limit on the word count. Any length could also mean that I was unable to find out whether the journal had a word count.

When you can submit (reading periods)

As many journals are published from colleges and universities, they often have schedules that correlate with academic semesters. Many small journals will not accept submissions sent outside their reading periods, so (unless you like wasting postage) it’s important to know when they are open for submissions.

Again, these notations are fairly obvious. I have attempted to note inclusive date ranges like Sep-May. Year round either means that the journal is open for submissions year round or that I was unable to find information as to when they accepted work. Year round? (with a question mark) means that I guessed that they accept work year round, but in truth, I have no idea.

To contest or not to contest

It is my impression that people are divided about whether you should enter contests or not. This is because—many of you probably know this—most contests hosted by literary journals involve some sort of fee. Some writers believe that contests are a good way to strut your stuff and have editors take a closer look than they might have under other circumstances. Other people just think they are a big rip off. In the end you have to decide whether contests are right for you. For many years, I refused to enter my stories in contests—mostly on principal. Last year, however, I changed my mind. I have come to view contests as a chance to have my stuff taken a little more seriously than when I send unsolicited submissions. And I’ve done okay for myself in that area. So a few years ago, I regarded contests as a waste and now I’m sending them $20 checks. Go figure.

Always update your list

Whether you use my list or make one of your own, it’s important to remember that the literary journal scene is constantly changing. Journals move, shut down or change their submission periods. Additionally, there are new small journals cropping up from time to time. I try to add about 6-12 new journals to my list each year by checking Newpages.com, The Writers Chronicle, The Writer’s Market, and other sources. This helps balance out the small journals that have shut down over the years which I’ve had to remove from my list.

Another excellent tool for keeping track of changes in small journals are rejection notes. Rejection notes will often note changes in address or reading periods. For example, for the longest time, I thought that The Iowa Review’s reading period was from Sep-May. Last year however, I got a rejection notice saying that they only accepted work from Sep 15 to Dec 15 (short window). So I updated my list and resent the story after Sep 15. It was promptly rejected, but that’s beside the point.

Tarry no longer—here is the list [Ed. Note--Armand’s list is so extensive, I have included it here as a PDF rather than posting it all online]: Armand’s List (PDF 164kb)

Now, I love short stories, and I spent about five years writing a short story collection, but the market for short fiction is extremely limited.

Consider the types of books you buy. Even writers are more likely to buy a novel or nonfiction over a short story collection. And (in what has become an endless refrain) short fiction journals are very fond of pointing out that more people submit to them than subscribe. (I’d like to smugly point out that in the last year I’ve subscribed to Western Humanities Review, The Missouri Review and One Story.)

I realize that the short story is a great format for workshopping. You can read an entire short story in one sitting and (unlike a novel) you can revise it over one school semester, so that’s handy. Still, should MFA programs also take into account the difficulty in getting these things published and (even if you do get published) how little it pays?

Questions:

Do MFA programs owe students any sort of assistance or explanation when it comes to marketing their work? Or are MFA programs here to make us better artists, market be damned?

Publishing for money: What are the odds of getting a screenplay published vs. a short story collection vs. creative nonfiction vs. novel? I have no idea, but I have a sense that the non-fiction market is the easiest to crack. If you want to make money, the most difficult form is poetry. Anyone know for sure?

Are my own thoughts on the short story too negative? Maybe the form will come back. In the 80′s everyone thought animation was dead- now we have the Simpsons and Family Guy and a hundred other animated shows. Maybe the short story will have a new Golden Age?

And maybe the novella will come back too!

Should MFA programs add a course to their programs in which you meet with an editor and agent and get to ask questions about marketing and submitting?

Should MFA programs be redesigned for longer courses (maybe workshops that last two years) so that people, can carry a novel the whole way through?

Should MFA programs clearly explain to fiction writers that they would be better off (from a marketing perspective) writing a novel?

Discuss please.

Thanks!

Armand (who often writes short stories)

Commentary Hierarchy

After I find hotspots and possibly do some work on them, the second phase of data mining is considering all the various specific comments that I’ve received and creating a hierarchy. As I said above, I try to separate noise from signal.

**In what might appear to be a total contradiction, I do utilize all comments (‘signal’ and ‘noise’) when trying to find hotspots on my story. This is because I do believe that all comments, even those that may be specifically useless, may point to hotspots. It’s like some subconscious drive points readers toward the important parts of stories. So this places me in the odd position of accepting all comments when mining for hotspots, but then discarding certain ones when looking for specific advice. Go figure.

I believe that, once we start considering the process of mining commentary, we all start to come up with rules of thumb. I’ve noted my own rules below. There’s a good chance that you will disagree with some or all. That’s fine — make your own.

Signs of Noise

These are types of comments that I downplay or even discard:

1. Criticism without specificity: This type of noise involves people telling me that a character, plot point or section is not working, but they cannot articulate why. Criticism without specificity might lead you to discover a “hotspot” in my work (as noted above), but offers little in the way of actual insight on how to revise.
2. There’s nothing new here: The main objection someone offers is that the thing I’ve written has been done before. Of course- Everything’s been done before. If I write a scene with one original idea in it, I’m psyched for days! Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a revolutionary writer. That’s okay. I would argue that originality — the ability to surprise — is a rare quality and can’t be forced anyway. That shouldn’t stop me from writing about what I want to write about.
3. Comments involving the idea of something being “cool”: What’s cool? I’m 36. My cool ratio continues to decline at an inverse ratio to the power of my distance (in years) from age 24, where I reached my own personal tiny apex of cooldom. Although, if I ever write a screen play, I reserve the right to take “cool” into account.

Signal

Comments I tend to favor:

1. My genre: For the last six years or so, I’ve been writing in what folks sometimes call adult literary fiction which means I favor character over plot, avoid the ear marks of so-called “genre” works (like science fiction and fantasy – both of which I very much love to read- romance, Western, horror, etc.) Therefore, I tend to favor comments from people working in the same area.
2. Criticism with specificity: If someone can criticize my work with a surgeon’s accuracy, I’m much more likely to give credence and weight to their commentary. I like comments that point to the narrator’s voice, word choice, specific plot points and reveals, and comments that point out obvious disconnects or contradictions in plot flow.
3. Folks with similar goals: Again, this goes with #1 above. Specifically, I favor comments from someone like me who has been writing short, adult literary for the last few years with the aim of finishing a collection.
4. The editorial gift: From my perspective, some people have an editorial gift. They might not be the best writers, themselves, but they have a good sense of how a story should flow and they seem to come up with wonderful insights on how scenes could be revised or let the characters and story shine through. I cling desperately to these people.

Again, my interest in not so much to convince you that you should adopt my opinions as much as I’m trying to suggest that, at least for me, it helps to have some filters when it comes to weighing the validity of specific comments.

These filters help me screen out less useful commentary and focus on that which I believe will most strengthen my writing. It’s also helpful to be aware that these screens exist and to use them as part of my writer’s toolbox.

Coming up next: Networking toward the future.

Finding and Using Hotspots

By the time a workshop ends, I usually have extensive notes. I also have notes (typically written on story drafts) from others. If I’m on my game at all, I’ll start using these notes to highlight “hotspots” in my story.

A hot spot is an area that people are commenting on and reacting to. On the one hand, a hotspot may indicate very good writing (everybody liked it). What’s nice about this is that it clarifies which tools are working for me in the story.

I think this is doubly helpful in that, as I write and rewrite my stories, I lose my ability to gauge whether something is working or not. How surprising was the surprise ending? How funny was that line? By the sixth revision, the surprise ending seems to have been given away on page one and those funny lines on page five now seem forced and a little too clever for their own good. The positive feedback of the workshop helps reaffirm my initial instincts and also helps me keep faith in my work.

A hotspot might also indicate areas to work on. My own rule of thumb is that if I’m in a workshop of any real size (let’s say 10 or more people) and if 65% or more of the people are reacting poorly to a section, there’s a good chance that I will rewrite the scene from scratch. Heck — I might get rid of it entirely and replace it with something else. If a large portion of people are reacting poorly, then obviously something’s not working. Maybe the scene lacks clarity. Maybe the writing lacks verve. Maybe the whole thing is confusing and contradicts other parts in the story. I need to start rethinking these negative hotspots. Again, the collective feedback is valuable because it lets me aim my proverbial writing guns at exact targets.

Along these lines, another benefit of spotting negative hotspots is that so often the areas that I thought were going to be problematic receive little or no commentary. In another words, the areas that I was worried about were actually fine — what a relief!

One great example is a short story of mine that I had workshopped a few years ago. In the story there is a scene in which the main character almost drowns but is rescued by a man who seems to have some sort of key to the drowning man’s life. In my head, the whole event — as I wrote it — had a contrived air. I thought, okay, nobody is going to believe that the main character just happens to be saved by this nearly mystical figure — the metaphor is too obvious, the plot is too naked. Guess what? — Everyone was fine with it. There were other sections that people wanted to see changed, other negative hotspots, but my biggest worry didn’t materialize at all. In this case, the workshop refocused me.

Perhaps the most telling hotspot (from my perspective) is the type that gets utterly contradictory responses. Half the people love the scene and the other half hate it. This could be symptomatic of subject matter: maybe I just wrote a grisly torture scene, but if it’s not symptomatic of content, and if I am workshopping with serious writers it usually isn’t, then it’s important to pay attention to these seemingly contradictory responses.

My take is that these scenes (passages, sections) usually rest on a bedrock of an excellent idea: Something deep inside stirs the reader’s passion, but the actual execution is either poor, unclear, or confusing. Again, it is my belief that these sections are among the most important scenes in our collective works, and they deserve care and attention.

The very fact that many people react to a given scene means that something embedded within offers a flash of greatness — it’s a hotspot. From my perspective, some people will be swayed by that flash of greatness and will come to the defense of a scene, even if doesn’t quite work yet. On the other hand, because I did not frame the writing quite correctly (maybe I smothered the scene with too much dialogue or exposition, maybe a character’s motivations seem contradictory or confusing, maybe the actual sequence of events is not clear to the mind’s eye), there is also cause for a strong negative reaction — some readers feel as though they’ve been tricked. For a moment, they saw diamonds in my palm, but when I opened my fist again, they got a lump of coal.

It is my humble opinion that most of these contradictory hotspots can be saved by careful rewriting, revision that protects the dynamic elements that first drew the reader to the scene while jettisoning useless or unclear language. In other words, keep the ideas but revise the voice, character and delivery.

Coming up next: Moving from hotspots to creating a hierarchy of comments.

I’d like to add a disclaimer that this is not a how-to column. This column works best as point of reference, a tool by which you can stack my experiences against yours. Somewhere between the two, presumably, lay the truth.

This is After the MFA, so I thought naming this article “After the Workshop” was keeping in the spirit of things. In an effort to keep this from sounding like an advice column, I’ve done my best to switch from “you do this… you do that” to first-person writing. After all, in the end, this is just a testimonial.

After the Workshop: Data Mining, Comment Hierarchy, and Social Networking

There’s been a fair amount written about the effectiveness of the group workshop (Is it the best way to learn writing?) and also about its politics and etiquette (Is your group too nasty? Too nice?). I hope to look at a slightly less addressed topic in this entry: What do I do after the workshop is over?

I’m going to give it my best shot, and I hope that folks will chime in with their own comments.

What is the workshop format?

While I am sure that anyone who comes to this blog is already familiar with workshopping, I’ll include a brief description anyway. Basically, I am addressing the “editorial / revision” type of workshop in which a few students turn a writing sample over to their classmates. Subsequently, the class gather together and each participant offers up criticism (positive and negative) of the submitted work. The commentary is often guided by the instructor.

The main goal, in my opinion, is for us to learn from our own comments. But another goal is for the submitting writer to get a critical perspective of their work and glean comments that might help in strengthening voice, tone, plot, character etc.

Let’s assume workshops can help

For now, let’s assume that we are all MFA students enrolled in workshops with a strong instructor who can spin the workshop format into an excellent teaching vehicle.

Let’s also assume that most of our peers are neither too nasty nor too nice. Let’s assume that we have the optimal conditions for work-shopping; that we are believers in the workshop platform; that we WANT to be helped; and we are not the type of person who a) Doesn’t care what the workshop has to say or b) Only accepts comments that point out grammatical/ spelling errors.

So I just finished my workshop

One of the most difficult parts of being a student in a workshop is that I walk out with a lot of noise in my head. There were twelve other people and each one had a different opinion about what should be done with my work. Not only that, but on some points, there was utter contradiction. Maybe half the workshop wanted me to make clear very early on that Carl was Leona’s father, while the other thought that revealing the information on the last page was the way to go. Not only that, but there was that one person who thought that it would be more effective if Carl was not Leona’s father at all. Furthermore, who cares what all these people think? It’s not their story, it’s mine.

So what do I do? My reaction to work shops is typically a three step process. First I mine the data and notes that I have- so I can find “hot spots” within the story that need work. Then I create a hierarchy of comments. In this case, I want to filter out commentary that I consider less weighty (lets call this noise) and retain commentary that I feel will help me strengthen my story (let’s call this signal). The third step is to start creating a social network of writers with whom I can correspond.

Coming up next: data mining

• Antioch Review
• The Atlantic Monthly (fiction issue): They used to have fiction in every issue, but no more!
• Esquire: They send nice rejection letters.
• Gettysburg Review
• Glimmer Train
• Granta UK: It’s actually hard to find IRC’s around Boston, making it hard to submit.
• Greensboro Review
• Harper’s: Did anybody read their serialized novel, “Happy Land”, last summer? It was great.
• Hudson Review
• Iowa Review: Iowa’s mojo is strong. They are king makers.
• Kenyon Review
• McSweeny’s Quarterly: So hip, it hurts.
• Missouri Review
• The New Yorker: The biggest of the big. Even Iowa must bow to New York.
• Paris Review: Not really from Paris.
• Ploughshares: Hey, this sounds familiar.
• Tin House: (sing it with me now) “She’s a Tin House. Mighty-mighty…” They run a great week-long fiction workshop.
• Zoetrope: Brought to you by Francis Ford Coppola himself.

Enjoy.

Armand

I’d like to add a disclaimer that this is not a how-to column. This column works best as point of reference, a tool by which you can stack my experiences against yours. Somewhere between the two, presumably, lay the truth.

What’s Lit Crit?
This might have changed in the five years or so since I graduated, but based on my experience at Emerson and conversations I’ve had with other MFA students, most MFA programs tend to have similar course requirements: a mix of workshops, seminars on literature and some combination of electives. The literary seminars are what I want to write about today.

Back in my grad school days, I (along with some friends) called these types of seminars “Lit-Crit” (literary criticism) courses. These are courses in which you study literature, (whether it be poetry, classic novels, modern novels or whatever), read lots of books, write papers about the books, and then probably do some kind of presentation.

Before I delve into this topic, let me say that I have nothing against Lit-Crit courses. I think the study of literature and all the tools and theories that go with it are great. I think it’s a fabulous idea to study literature and write books about books. I met one of my favorite professors through a Lit-Crit course. What I do not like is the way Lit-Crit is handled in context of MFA programs. Again, I am only speaking from my narrow frame of experience. If someone else had a different experience, please speak up.

The Residue of PhD Programs
Why even have Lit Crit? I think the answer is that most MFA programs are set up not by MFA’s but by PhD’s from English Departments. These folks have a hard time imagining the idea of handing a diploma to someone who hasn’t read many books and listened to lectures and written papers about them. This is all fine and nice, but I will tell you that I spent too much time reading a one novel a week and preparing papers and presentations and researching said papers and presentations in the library. What suffered in the meantime? My own writing.

Many of the people who’ve commented on this very blog have described a desire to use their time in an MFA program to finish a book. Very few have expressed the desire to study and comment on the classics. Not because commenting on the classics isn’t worth doing, it’s just that you only have so much time in a day.

A Small Burden
In my case (and in the case of others) this proved to be a burden. The problem was that I reverted back to my undergraduate self, the self who spent a lot of time becoming very good at writing term papers. When you get your bachelor’s degree (come on, you remember this), writing papers is very important. In fact, in the case of many liberal arts classes, your midterm and final papers are your sole graded assignments. It was very easy for me to slip back into that mode. My backwards reasoning was that since my own writing was creative, I could do it whenever. If I wanted to finish my Lit-Crit papers, however, I knew I’d have to be disciplined. Which means read the reading, set up an outline, hit the library and write a good paper. In my first academic years, I spent way too much time preparing and writing papers. I found myself rushing my own fiction work and the result was that I was not bringing my best work to workshops.

But shouldn’t writers read?
Again, I’m all for reading. What I object to is the tendency of Lit Crit professors to assign work to MFA students as though Lit Crit work is of equal value to someone who wants to write in the contemporary scene. And writing term papers might make me a better term paper writer, but when’s the last time you went to Barnes and Noble and bought yourself a nice term paper to read on your flight home? Does writing a book about Chaucer’s novel give you any real sense of what it takes to write a contemporary novel? I would argue that , if you write books about novels, it means that you’ll get better at writing more books about novels.

I’ll always remember taking a literary seminar on the Modern Novel that was taught by a very smart literary PhD who was a very good lecturer. We had just read “The Great Gatsby” and the lecturer was discussing the green light on the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock when a fellow MFA student (and writer) asked the lecturer what F. Scott Fitzgerald might have been thinking when he wrote that. But it was the wrong kind of question to ask a Lit Crit person. The lecturer answered her by discussing how symbols might work in a novel, but what he was really talking about was the way literary researchers approach symbols in other peoples’ novels.

Again, I could be wrong, but most writers whom I know don’t plan symbols, and they certainly don’t spend time thinking about how their writing might fall under the aegis of a movement (like Post-Modernism or whatever).

Also for me personally and for other writers I know, it is far more advantageous to read contemporary works (the kind assigned as homework for your writing workshops) than to read anything written before, say, 1880 or so. Stuff written before Joyce, Chekhov and their ilk may be of general interest but you’re generally not going to be able to employ that writing style (except in ironic tones) and get published. In fact a lot of the stuff written before 1950 — especially in tone, length, word choice and voice — feels fairly archaic.

So How Do I Get Off The Lit Crit Tip?
The obvious answer (since they’re not going to change the curriculum on your behalf) is to slack off in your Lit Crit class. Don’t put as much effort into your papers, don’t worry about the grade as long as you’re getting a C or higher and don’t kill yourself to read all the literature. Skim the literature for main points before you go to class, so you can participate in class discussion, but your first priority should beyour own book. If you have finished your creative writing work for the week, then turn your attention to the Lit Crit homework.

I would further suggest that GPA doesn’t matter so much in the case of getting an MFA. I don’t put my GPA on my CV. And if your goal is to become a writer (and not a teacher at all), then you don’t really need a GPA. Hell, you don’t even really need the degree.

You may feel compelled to do a very good job in your Lit Crit class. You might feel this way because you are very conscientious (like me), or maybe you’re afraid of getting low grades (see the above paragraph about GPA), or maybe (also like me) you fall back into that undergraduate feeling that classes that require big papers are more important than those that require personal writing. Or perhaps you figure that the people who put the curriculum together are smarter and more successful than you, and therefore they understand the reason why you should be taking Lit Crit classes, and someday you will be thankful that they made that choice for you.

If this is the case, please consider that, even though colleges don’t like to admit it, they are selling us a service. Actually, in undergraduate programs, they are selling a service to students and parents. In grad school, especially modern grad schools that teach the arts, they are basically selling a service directly to you, the student. Chances are that you’re either spending thousands of dollars of your own money or borrowing thousands of dollars for tuition and other fees. What is the money for? As several other posters have mentioned, it’s so you can find the time and support to write your novel, creative nonfiction, poetry or story collection. What the money is not for is for you to research the themes, symbol and whatever of someone else’s books and write papers about them.

Aren’t You Getting a Little Worked Up About This Then?
Probably, but the main reason that I am writing this series is to give potential MFA’ers a sense of the options they have going into a grad school program. I am being very honest when I say this is a list of things I wish I’d known — and I consider my MFA experience to be a fairly positive one- because had someone sat down and talked to me about some of these things, my MFA experience would have been even better.

To summarize: Be aware of the amount of your time you are giving over to theory and Lit Crit courses, especially if it is reducing your own creative writing time. Give first priority to your own book. Don’t assume someone with an English PhD has the same skill set or perspective as a creative writer. Don’t allow yourself to be cowed by departmental administrators- most likely they’re not paying you, you’re the one paying them.

Cheers,
Armand

Avoid debt.

Work full time while in school and take classes part time. Borrow as little as possible. There is no need to graduate quickly. More likely than not, there is no golden paycheck waiting for you once you graduate.

College loans are nice and tempting — especially the money you get to keep after tuition and books. But, no matter how far away it seems, you will graduate some day and need to pay it back. In my case, I racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debt which I am still paying back — and will be for years. It was in my third year at Emerson when I realized my error. At that point, I started attending school part-time and working full time. The result was that I needed to borrow less money and, in fact, I was able to pay my final semester’s tuition out of my own pocket. By then, of course, it was a little late.

There are several reasons to avoid debt. First, there are a number of MFA programs that are inexpensive or even offer a free ride in the forms of grants, stipends and aid. Some people (guilty) avoid applying to these programs because they are often in small towns in the deep south or midwest or the mountains. My desire to stay in a cosmopolitan area and ‘on a coast’ channeled me away from a number of MFA programs in which the departments offer substantial financial aid.

MFAs don’t guarantee you work.

Here’s a short list of the type of job for which an MFA gives you favored status: teaching creative writing. That’s it. That’s all. If you want to go into publishing, you may as well get an MA in Publishing. Want to teach literature? Then you’re up against PhD’s. How about advertising agencies? Nah. Newpapers? An MFA doesn’t really hold any special standing when it comes to reporting, besides, haven’t you heard that print is dieing?

Let’s say you get a job teaching writing. A full time position pays, what? Anywhere between $35k – $65k per year- and odds are that it won’t be full time job. The people I know with degrees, the ones who teach, are part timers. They drive from school to school without any real office. Again (as a rough ball park figure) probably making $40k a year or more if they work extra hard in the summers.

Sorry to sound bleak, but the whole idea of going into debt for college is that the job you get after you graduate will more than make up for the debt. This is certainly not the case for me or others whom I know. After three years of job hunting, I did manage to find an MFA-based job that more than repays my monthly loan fees (part time teaching, of course), but make no mistake, it is a part time, second job. I still need my day job to make ends meet.

Work a full-time job.

Finally, when I came around and decided to work full time and just take only one class per semester, I found my whole life changing for the better. Working full time means that you are the boss of your own money. It means you can afford to go out and buy books and do interesting things. Also, going to school part time means that you can devote more time and energy to just a class or two. You can really focus and hone your skills rather than trying to juggle say, a term paper for one class, reading a novel for another, and writing short stories for two different workshops.

Summarizing my thoughts. Take fewer classes. Keep your day job. Apply to schools that have generous grant (rather than loan) programs, and don’t worry about graduating quickly.

Armand