With Writing Partners Like These...

You Don't Need an MFA

I love the craft of writing. All of it. To pluck an idea from the air and wrestle it into a story is the closest I have come to magic in my life. A productive brainstorming session can make me feel high. My favorite social activity is talking about books. A good thriller is as indulgent and life-affirming as birthday cake for me. When I feel stuck, in writing or in life, I edit my pages like a poet—line by line, word by word—until I break through whatever is blocking me.

I imagine, then, that getting an MFA would be a delight. I would love nothing more to sit around a big round table with like-minded people, discussing story theory and exchanging work and giving feedback and thinking about nothing else for two straight years. I applied once, nearly 25 years ago, as I was graduating from college. I took the GRE without any prep (that math section—yikes), and sent a stack of Xeroxed poems, my transcripts, and my professor’s half-assed letter of recommendation to 4 or 5 MFA programs. I can’t remember which schools exactly, but NYU and Columbia were among them… ah, the blind confidence of youth.

I didn’t get in anywhere, of course.

I told myself I would study for the GRE and work on my portfolio and try again the following year. In the meantime, I flailed around New York City, working shitty jobs and just getting by. I missed my college workshops and wanted to join a writing group, but all my friends had moved on. They’d landed jobs at publishing houses, magazines, or public relations firms. What did they need with a workshop? They had health insurance now! 

Back then, options were limited. I remember looking on Craigslist for writing partners, which I learned very quickly was… a mistake. You could do university classes or you could do Gotham Writers, so I did both. I enrolled in advanced writing workshops at NYU’s continuing education program, as well as an over-organized group that took place in an elementary school during off hours. These were, for me, very expensive exercises in public speaking— we had to read our work aloud, then received feedback on the spot.

Those years were disillusioning, to say the least, but I did pinpoint a back-up life plan. If I couldn’t be a poet, I decided, I would work in a museum or be an art history professor. The shittier my shitty day jobs became, the more forcefully this idea took hold. Eventually, I swerved and wound up with a career in contemporary art galleries.

If you’ve read my newsletter before, you know the rest. (If you haven’t, you can catch up here.) I did not retake the GRE, and I never applied to another MFA program. But nor did I stop taking classes and workshops and improving my writing skills. 

From 2001-2020, I joined book clubs and went to every reading I could find. I took craft classes at Gotham Writers, NYU, the New School, the University of Cincinnati, the Writers Studio, Sackett Street Writers, New York Writers Workshop, and the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop. I’m sure there are more I can’t remember. I was learning, sure, but I was also looking for something. I just didn’t know what it was yet.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

When I was wrestling with the first draft of TELL THEM YOU LIED, I started exchanging chapters with a group of strangers on Inked Voices. One of them wrote me a long and self-indulgently mansplainy comment that said, and I’m paraphrasing, this is really boring and you should throw it away. In anger, I quit that group the next day.

Around the same time, I enrolled in a novel-writing class at Catapult (which has since unfortunately shut down its school), and connected with a writer named Melissa. Melissa took a second class at Catapult and met two other novelists—Caitlin and Francesca. The four of us started meeting over Zoom.

We all had near-completed manuscripts. Two of us had MFAs. One had an agent. One had a published book. We were all ambitious in the same way. We wanted not just to write, but to make a career out of writing. When we exchanged work, we did not bother with toxic feedback. Nobody said to me, throw this away. And nobody got offended at constructive feedback. Our writing is very different, but we were on the same page.

When I got my R&R from CeCe, I sent it to them. We hopped on a Zoom call and talked about my plot, what to tease out, what to cut, what to add. We brainstormed. We spoke the same language. That call was so clarifying. I understood, finally, that I wasn’t going to get by the way I could get by in all the gallery jobs I had (and all the classes I’d taken, including for my MA). I understood the long, mansplainy note from the Inked Voices guy. My book was boring. I had been writing in circles—one perfect scene, one life-changing moment, over and over, ad infinitum, with no conclusion.

For all intents and purposes, I was still writing poetry. 

I needed Francesca and Caitlin and Melissa (and CeCe) to tell me that. I finally realized what I’d been searching for all this time. My people. I’d finally found them.

If I’d gotten an MFA in the early 2000s like I wanted to, I doubt I’d be farther into my novel-writing career than I am now. Maybe I would have published a poetry chapbook, maybe I’d be teaching classes somewhere, but it still would have taken ages for me to pivot to long form fiction, if I ever did. If I am honest with myself, I always wanted to write novels (I settled for poetry because poetry was short and easy to finish), and to do that I had to learn structure and plot and how to query. I had to write a salable book.

And, no, you do not need an MFA for that.

Maybe twenty years ago you did, but we are so, so lucky now. We live in a golden age of self-teaching.

We have

The Shit About Writing Team

and

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

and writing podcasts galore. We have Zoom classes. We have

Jami Attenberg

and Matt Bell and Jessica Brody. We have Writing Co-Lab (and in particular, this awesome class taught by my writing partner Caitlin this Saturday). We have Manuscript Academy, and craft books, and

Andrea Bartz

on Substack! So much opportunity to learn—and you don’t need to get funding. You don’t even need to leave the house!

Sidenote: Thank you all for the well-wishes for my son. We are out of the hospital and doing better, and still waiting for answers. (Good thing I have a lot of practice waiting for answers.)

Now go find your people!

(Feel free to comment here if you’re looking for a partner. I will do whatever I can to help!)