Two and a half years ago, I left a job as an editorial assistant in New York for an M.F.A. creative-writing program at the University of Montana. Like many fiction writers in the making, I didn’t do it because I thought I needed to improve my writing. It was for “the time to write,” and because I “needed to get out of the city,” and, anyway, it was funded. As Alexander Chee writes in his contribution to the new essay collection “MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” “New York provided a lot of opportunities to write, but also a lot of opportunities not to write, or to write the wrong things.” Like him, I didn’t think I’d be able to write the book I wanted “while chasing after other people’s copy.”
But I also knew the rap on M.F.A. programs. The archetypal anti-workshop argument was made by David Foster Wallace in “The Fictional Future,” a section of a 1988 essay that is reprinted in “MFA vs NYC.” In his telling, creative-writing programs are filled with teachers who would rather be writing than teaching, and who resent their students for the lost time. Students respond to this hostility by churning out “solid, quiet work … nice, cautious, boring Workshop Stories, stories as tough to find technical fault with as they are to remember after putting them down.” M.F.A. graduates are loosed upon the world to publish formulaic McStories, and then get hired to preach the gospel of drabness at other programs. (“If only it were that easy,” mutter those of us who couldn’t write a story lacking “technical fault” if the ghost of Frank Conroy held a gun to our head.) Add to those fears the free-floating American anxiety about not appearing self-made—“a wine-chugging Hemingway firing a homemade rifle at a rabid shark from the back of a speeding ambulance,” as Chad Harbach puts it, in his introduction to the collection—and you’ve got some good reasons to avoid getting an M.F.A.
Those reasons are nonsense, at least in my experience. Maybe things were different at the University of Arizona, where Wallace got his M.F.A. More likely, he was just a once-in-a-generation genius whose preference for forward-thinking literature rendered the work of his professors and cohort unforgivably dull. In any case, I learned more about writing fiction in one semester at Montana than I did in three years of writing and working in New York. I had excellent teachers, who called me out on bad habits that had developed unchecked for years (“No echoing dialogue.” “No echoing dialogue?” “No, no echoing dialogue”). I made friends who were writing about subjects I knew nothing about, like living in Indiana. I graduated with a couple of decent stories and a daunting but necessary sense of how much harder I would need to work.
In his essay, Chee describes the M.F.A. as “taking twenty years of wondering whether or not your work could reach people and funneling it into two years of finding out.” But, once you achieve that—your work has reached the people in your workshop—things get tricky. The important part of Chee’s essay comes when he describes what happens after the M.F.A. He moves back to New York and works as a waiter for six years while writing his first novel, which he eventually sells. His message to would-be writers isn’t groundbreaking, but it bears repeating: “PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.”
It remains the hardest advice for a young writer to take. Who wants to hear about time and persistence when Téa Obreht was winning prizes and selling books at the age of twenty-six? I sure don’t.
This attitude is, of course, counterproductive. Every hour spent thinking about who is going to publish your work and how it’s going to be received is an hour that could be spent writing. Harbach describes this, less damningly but just as ominously, as the condition of the “NYC writer” in his original “MFA vs NYC” essay, which was published in n+1 in 2010: “Even if years away from finishing her first novel, she constantly and involuntarily collects information about what the publishing industry needs, or thinks it needs,” he writes. “Thus the congeniality of Brooklyn becomes a silky web that binds writers to the demands of the market, demands that insinuate themselves into every detail and email of the writer’s life.”
This situation extends far beyond New York’s borders, even if most writers aren’t aware of the specific concerns and demands of the publishing industry. Everybody wants to sell something to someone, even if “sell” sometimes means “give for free to a graduate student-run literary journal based out of North Dakota.” “MFA vs NYC” is a successful attempt to document certain segments of the literary landscape—what it’s like to attend an M.F.A. program, what it’s like to be a publicist for a New York house, what it’s like to be a published but financially strapped writer—but it rarely reminds the reader why people bother with all this. That is, it isn’t much about writing.
This starts with Harbach’s essay, the germ of the collection. Despite the title, he doesn’t posit an adversarial relationship between the academic creative-writing track and the publishing industry; rather, he explains that they create different motivations and goals in the writer, and thus produce different kinds of work. In his account, the M.F.A. writer publishes stories, gets hired by a writing program, and is then free of commercial publishing obligations—free of the obligation, in fact, to publish at all. (He even argues that there is administrative pressure not to publish, which doesn’t quite ring true. The ideal situation for a school is a professor who continues to publish attention-getting work, thus drawing attention, better students, and more money to the program, no?) The New York writer, on the other hand, without the safety net of academia, feels an obligation to publish novels, and submits “to an unconscious yet powerful pressure toward readability.” (Anyone who’s tried to get through the big novels of a given publishing season might say, “Not powerful enough.”)
In his introduction, Harbach writes that much of the mail he received after the publication of the original “MFA vs NYC” essay was from people who found the essay “extremely depressing.” He suggests that this is because he depicts the fiction writer “as a person constrained by circumstance—a person who needs money, and whose milieu influences the way she lives, reads, thinks, and writes.” On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a reason to hit the whiskey—yes, writers are people, and people need money. I think what makes the essay depressing is Harbach’s assumption that anyone interested in writing fiction is operating with such narrow motivations. You might get the impression from the essay, and from the book as a whole, that people write fiction either to get a good teaching gig or to be toasted forevermore at New York parties, while commanding big advances. (Though even a good advance runs out pretty quickly, as detailed in the book by both Keith Gessen and Emily Gould.) If this were the case, as Elif Batuman writes in her essay about “program fiction,” this system would “not generate good books, except by accident.”
Luckily, it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s not that this collection doesn’t show that—in fact, one of the purposes of the collection is to show that—but the dichotomy of the title essay and its implication hangs over everything that comes after. The book is frustrating because the things that make good fiction—things like families, relationships, and death—have very little to do with either M.F.A.s or New York City. (I leave out lawyers on the run and dystopian teens because Harbach, and everyone else in this book, assumes, correctly, that no one reading “MFA vs NYC” wants to be the next John Grisham or Suzanne Collins.)
Most people would agree that choosing to write fiction is a bad career move, even with the increased possibility of a middle-class teaching life thanks to the rise of M.F.A. programs. But it seems to me that the only thing that would make it an inexcusable career choice would be spending one’s writing life trying to appeal to a dim, shifting notion of what either the academic or publishing marketplace wants. Good luck guessing right: the wind will have shifted half a dozen times in the course of writing a book. And, worse, as one of my former professors never tires of telling me, even if you somehow sell a lot of books and win awards and get a profile in the Times, you’re still going to wake up and have to be yourself.
There’s a smart, muted version of this attitude on the second-to-last page of the book, under the heading “Advice.” Caleb Crain writes, “I don’t think you should beat yourself up for not having published a book at the age of 28, but I think that a young person should keep a journal, and read seriously, and, you know, think about everything that happens.” And in Gessen’s refreshingly sane piece, called “Money (2014),” about the real work and benefit of a creative-writing class, he lays out the reasons for his reluctance to teach a fiction workshop. “Students don’t take French or history classes because they want to become French or history professors; they take them because they want to learn about French and history,” he writes. Writing students, however, inevitably want to become writers. “And so by teaching such a class, weren’t you taking part in that deception, in the deception that all these students might become writers? And weren’t you also forced, all the time, to lie to them, in effect, whether mildly or baldly, about their work?”
When he does end up teaching a writing class (because, you know, it pays), he finds it less morally compromising than he expected. He likes his students, and finds that he can usually be honest with them. When he can’t, he takes part in the time-honored tradition of complaining about it with a faculty colleague. Sure, preparing for class is hard when you have literary and journalistic obligations, and yes, his students are paying an absurd amount of money to gain an intangible set of skills. But, over the course of the semester, the students’ work gets better, and one of them shows serious promise she didn’t know she had. Gessen builds a syllabus he can use in perpetuity, cutting down on dreaded prep time. “So what’s the problem?” he writes. “There’s no problem.”
Great! As for the question of “MFA vs NYC”: both, probably? Move away for a while, maybe somewhere warmer than Montana. Put down the book about careers in writing. Write something good.
Andrew Martin’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and his essays have appeared in the Times Book Review and on the New York Review of Books Web site.
Read Barry Harbaugh’s related post about “MFA vs NYC.”
Illustration by Jordan Awan.
