Margo Rabb’s “How to Tell a Story.”
Even though it’s not possible that Margo and I were in the same MFA program, this story feels so true to my experience (right down to the sentiment/sentimentality lecture) that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that she was sitting right next to me all that time.
I discovered the story years ago, just before my third year in the program. I thought it was so dead on that I sent copies to classmates with the subject line, “OMG! Is she talking about us?!” In the years since, it has served as a reminder that I’m not the only person who had an F’ed up MFA experience. There are plenty more of us out there, and God Bless us all for surviving it.
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The week in one word: Ugh.
Writing: Well, maybe I do my best writing on the weekend. I’ve only managed about a thousand more words since Tuesday, bringing the non-tome to somewhere around 6,000. I feel a little direction-less. I’m wary of outlines, but I finally sat down and wrote out a rough one this morning around 4:00 a.m. (Yay, insomnia!) There are still lots of blank spaces in the outline and other vague notes (my personal favorite being “something bad happens”), but I have to leave some mystery for myself, don’t I?
I’m employing all sorts of tricks to get myself through this process. The first trick is convincing myself that no one will ever read this. In all likelihood, that’s not a trick, but a truth. On the other hand, if I honestly believe that *I’m* going to be the only audience, then what’s the point? It’s an interesting balancing act, and one that makes me more neurotic by the day.
Revision: Didn’t do any.
Submissions: Still nothing. What the hell, universe?
Overall: I feel really discouraged this week. I’ve come to terms with the fact that, unlike a lot of my former classmates, I have no interest in writing Great Literature. I want to write books that people enjoy reading, but I’m even questioning my ability to do that. Add in a handful annoying reviews and a general fatigue with literary elitism and you have my week in a nutshell.
On a completely unrelated note: I started running again a few weeks ago. I still swear that the only thing that got me through the first two years the MFA program were the nightly runs with my friend Tara. She was a marathoner and managed to get me from not running at all to running 3+ miles a night. It was a very peaceful time for me. It was a chance to clear my head from the day and focus on my silly daydreams. In those days, it was my chance to think not about what I should be writing but about what I wanted to write.
I still run from time to time, but haven’t done so on a regular schedule since I got my first desk job. I want to build my endurance back up, so I’m trying the Couch to 5K running program. I’m hoping running brings back that sense of inner peace.
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My productivity last week centered on typing the first draft of a story I wrote last month. I write longhand. My very first writing teacher said that was a huge waste of time and thus began a long string of advice from writing teachers that I have ignored.
For me, writing longhand is soothing. There’s something about putting pen to paper that allows me to shut off the editorial noises in my head and just write. Typing is for revising and editing. But most importantly, notebooks do not have the Internet and so I can’t click off my story and onto Facebook or Good Reads or chat or any of the other million ways the Internet tempts me to not write.
It’s probably a good thing that most of my work is taken up by mere typing because last week kind of sucked as far as creativity goes. It seems I have some demons to deal with and I’ve been facing them pretty much anytime I sit down to write.
My MFA program cultivated a certain amount of elitism amongst its writers. Between the 40 or so of us in the fiction program, there were unspoken guidelines about what made you a “real” writer[1] as opposed to someone who would leave their MFA and go work in technical writing for the rest of their lives. (Since I have already lost my “real” writer status by doing just that, you’d think I have nothing else to lose.) Real writers, for instance, wrote literary stories. They were usually about drugs and sex and parents and death. The stories were edgy, sometimes violent, and usually involved taking drugs at 12, midgets, monkeys, and other extraordinary elements. They read Borges and Lovecraft and nothing else published after 1975. They didn’t come to readings because they were too busy writing (or thinking about writing while down at the bar). Generally, a lot of the stuff they wrote was very good.
If you didn’t fall into this category, they didn’t quite know what to do with you. When I started the program, I tried desperately to fit into this category. But I developed my love for reading and writing through contemporary fiction and (cough, cough) chick lit. I didn’t grow up with drugs or violence and the story I most enjoyed writing was the anti-love story. In the autumn of my first year of the program, one of the “real” writers who was in her last year at the program suggested I look into romance writing. She did so after she’d sat in on one of my workshops and in a tone that left no question about how little she thought of my work.
I went home, cried for a little while, read through my New Yorkers and Best Americans and resolved to write a better workshop story. I don’t think I ever earned the approval of my peers, but I improved my sentences and my characters. I became a better writer, even if what I was writing wasn’t what I loved. In the end, I liked the stories I was writing and I thought I was doing a pretty good job at them.
And now? I was at a reading a few months ago for the winner of a local short story contest. As the first place winner read, I grew increasingly annoyed. There was the down-and-out protagonist. There were the drugs. There was the fantastical event that existed more in obscure imagery than in clarity. It wasn’t a bad story, it was just the exact same story that I’d spent three years reading in the program. And the epiphany here is more about me than about the story I was hearing: I am simply not interested in the literary genre anymore.
The struggle comes, though, that literary writing is pretty much all I’ve ever known. Prior to the MFA, I had three stories in my name, one of which, I still work on from time to time. I’m having a hard time letting go of what I should be writing and focusing on what I want to write. Of course, the minute I start thinking about what I want to write, I find myself drowning in my own prejudices and elitism.
I’m starting small, but I’m changing that. Last night at the bookstore I bought a couple of books that looked good. They aren’t on any literary lists. They will probably not win any major awards. But dammit, I’m going to start reading what I enjoy again. With any luck, it won’t be a long path back to what I enjoy writing.
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[1] For the record, I hate the term real writer. Do you write? Then you’re a writer. I have no idea what qualifies you to be real.
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