Over at the Detectives beyond Borders blog, Peter Rozovsky has a post about the writing in Daniel Woodrell's "The Outlaw Album". The conversation that followed was very interesting and made me wonder just how important an MFA is to a writer. http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2012/02/outlaw-album.html
So here's my questions. Does an MFA make you a better writer? Does it open more doors for an author? Does it make your agent query letter look more important?
And what about places like The Iowa Workshop or Breadloaf or any one of a hundred other literary workshops? Do they make you a better writer or do they just make all writers sound the same? How important are MFA's and literary workshops to an author's career? And can you be a successful (successful being subjective) writer without all the literary trappings?
14 comments:
I suspect this post is my fault :)
I don't think MFAs mean much, personally. I've read great writers who have them and plenty who don't. I think workshops and things can be helpful, but one should avoid getting addicted to them. My experience with a couple here was mostly positive, though my opinion of the MFA suffered.
As for Woodrell -- very hit and miss to my tastes. He really toes that line with overwriting, and often crosses well over it, which is something I don't like. I found The Outlaw Album to be mostly disappointing. I did like Winter's Bone and Tomato Red, though. Have The Bayou Trilogy but haven't read it yet. My experience with The Outlaw Album probably pushed it farther down the TBR pile.
The best kind of "rural noir" collection I've read recently, maybe ever, is Volt by Alan Heathcock. Fantastic stuff, without the constant stream of guns, drugs, and violence porn that some of this other stuff falls into.
Not totally, Brian. This is something I think about often. Sometimes I feel a lack in my writing and wonder if a better education would improve my stories. I know that there are markets I'm never going to crack because my stories don't "sing" in the same key as say, Kyle Minor.
I know what you mean about Woodrell, Chris. I loved Winter's Bone, but Give Us a Kiss didn't do a thing for me. I enjoyed most of the stories in The Outlaw Album but you're right about all the violence. There's so much more to the rural life than guns and drugs. And much of it can be just as devasting on a human life.
I went to Breadloaf and I never have put it on my CV. There was a student in my workshop there who didn't understand POV so that's how selective they are. I enrolled in four writer workshops at a university. All the students, save a few great ones, wrote about getting drunk and flying with Captain Kirk.
I was in one writing group that was sensational. Four people all writing fiction and getting it published. My current one is not nearly as good because they don't read the work ahead.
I think a prestigious MFA program will help you make contacts but other than that, not so much.
Yes, I expect making contacts is the biggest benefit of many of those programs, Patti.
As a semi-avid reader, I don't think an MFA does anything beyond making all the stories read and look the same.
To me, all an MFA means that is you know how to write fiction that doesn't really resonate with the average reader.
Not one single story that I've read in the past 6 years written by a writer with MFA has stuck in my memory.
However, stuff that someone who didn't have that specialized collegiate background wrote has stuck in my memory and will always stick in my memory.
G, I have to disagree with you on your MFA point, though a few months ago I probably would have agreed. This short-story-a-day thing I've been doing this year has been an incredible eye opener. That Heathcock book I mentioned? Fantastic. Benjamin Percy is another one who hits far more than he misses. Read a great collection by Glen Chamberlain (who is a woman, the name may be confusing) that I really loved. Bonnie Jo Campbell. All of these are MFA folks and teachers, and they are all fantastic.
At the same time, one of the collections I've been reading is one from Tin House, and it's a head scratcher. The same can be said for some of the indie/underground collections I'm reading, mostly crime fiction, where much of it really isn't so great.
My point is that a lot of the assumptions I would have been making 4, 5, 6 months ago have been changed. I'm glad of that, it's made me take a long hard look at my own writing. Or, as the case lately, the lack thereof.
I took an undergrad creative writing course in college and had much the same experience as Patti--lot of people regurgitating popular television shows and writing about being drunk. Still, one of the women in the class went on to a fabulous career working for a publisher. (In fact, she's still at the same place she started out.)
I think a workshop would be great if it really pushes you and doesn't just encourage self-congratulation. I had a writer brag to me once that his experience at a well-known (and very expensive) workshop forced him to write ONE STORY EVERY TWO WEEKS. That frequency of output didn't impress me.
Once you take grammar and spelling out of the equation, more education only goes so far in crafting a writer, I think. Of course, if I had an MFA in writing, I might have another opinion.
I agree with Chris on reading literary work, G. It's much the same as genre - there's good and bad. But I'm learning a great deal from the literary forms, especially in word usage and description.
We don't have any workshops available in my area, Katherine. I did sign up for one class that a teacher held in her home once. I was the only pupil but I still learned a lot.
I've read some excellent work by MFA's - the Devil All the Time, and Woodrell. I think Woodrell's short stories try to be very compact and that does lift the language into the realm of overwriting at times, but so does writing flash fiction.
I think MFA will at least make you write often and iron out the kinks, and make you use the talent you have. An MFA can't make you a talented writer, but it can make you avoid the mistakes of inexperience.
But it can't help you avoid all the mistakes of inexperience, Thomas.
I read an article once (can't recall the author's name) that said the MFA programs didn't prepare writers for the reality of submissions and publication. That writers came out of the programs confident that they'd be published. And they couldn't understand how they failed.
No matter how prepared you are, the realities of publication can be a punch to in the gut to many new writers.
I agree that there's good and bad in the literary genre.
But for me, it's been neither good or bad, just average.
For whatever reason, the literary genre has never resonated with me, and I have given it an extended tryout (at one point I had 10 subscriptions to various literary journals) over the years.
If you got an MFA, more power to you. My personal belief is that an MFA doesn't really mean much beyond the fact that you've succeeded in writing for a super narrow niche market and that you got something that might give you a leg up while your querying your latest short story/novel.
ershagetFrom an outsider's point of view, I'd guess that an MFA -- the credential -- might be useful insofar as it forces a writer to finish something.
As for taking "grammar and spelling out of the equation," plenty of writers do, though commenters who take the trouble to italicize the titles of book-length word are obviously in less need of my copy-editing and proofreading services than some of their colleagues.
I'd agree that Woodrell can flirt with overwriting. Further, some of the selections in The Outlaw Album flirt with the anecdotal preciousness of New Yorker stories. But I just read a Mickey Spillane short story last night and, while it hits suitably hard, he would have been just as effective if his prose didn't occasionally go "clunk."
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Short stories are strange creatures, Peter, and not all novelists can write short as well as they do long.
I love beautiful prose, but it doesn't always serve a short very well. You can pull your hair out in frustration trying to find that perfect balance. :)
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