I gave some more thought to
graduate school for writers. Bear in mind, this conversation doesn’t include
writers who intend on creating a life in academia teaching English….that’s
something completely different from what we’re discussing here.
For the rest of us, I think an
MFA in writing is one more way to stay in a comfort zone.
Here, let me make an example. When you’re somewhere in your mid-twenties you will most likely go to your parents for advice on a variety of subjects and you will come to realize they don't know any more about those subjects than you do. And that’s scary because now you're on your own, you have to think for yourself and figure it out for yourself because the one last bastion between you and the unknown, your parents, can’t help you anymore.
To get off track for a moment,
that isn’t all bad because at that point in your life you will develop a true
adult relationship with your parents as individuals.
Anyway, now you should come to
see the MFA program in that same light.
So many people enter the program thinking that they will learn something
they already don’t know or can’t learn on their own or that the teachers in the
program will make you a better writer but they won’t. Writing every day, seven
days a week, even when you don’t want to, makes you a better writer. Being your
own critic makes you a better writer.
The MFA in writing program is a
comfort zone and you will never succeed as a writer as long as you stay within your
comfort zone. You won’t just remain stagnant in the comfort zone; you’ll fail
as a writer. You will not find success as a writer until you step into the uncomfortable,
until you are, for lack of another way to put it, comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Occasionally writing without a defined purpose or trying a different genre just
to see if you can do it or putting years into a novel that may or may not work out, puts you out of your comfort zone and that’s where you need to be, you need to
be writing and not behind a classroom desk hoping the answer is there. The
answer is within you and it more than likely is in whatever practice in our craft that
makes you uncomfortable.
