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ОглавлениеIt is a common misperception that writers write. What a quaint idea! Writers don’t write, they fight for time to write. And when they get this time, they dismantle the procrastination traps scattered ’round their desks, and then they write, a little . . . or rather, they revise, and then the doorbell rings, and at the door is someone with a fire that only the writer can put out, and by the time the writer has got the fire somewhat under control, the forty-five minutes they had allotted to their writing is up, and they have to go out in the world to teach, edit, read, child-mind, blurb, review, and write for other people so that they can afford to find another forty-five minutes in their week to write for themselves.
If you want to see your work published, all of the craft stuff is important: developing a unique voice, learning how to tell a story, learning through trial and error which stories you are best positioned to tell. But if you lack the skills to create, protect, and wisely use your writing time, you won’t have time to write.
Making time to write (and then actually writing)
In 2012, I edited a series for Tin House called the Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers. (I borrowed the title from Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, but he was a contributor, so, fairsies?) The series ended up revealing that a lot of writers have compulsions they indulge in before they can actually write. I drink tea out of the same mug every morning; Matt Bell uses a secret drafting font that is only for his eyes; Jim Shepard has to have an even number of unanswered emails in his inbox before he can write well. But creating the optimal conditions for writing doesn’t mean a writer is going to write. You can light a candle, do some push-ups, and say a couple writing prayers, and still find yourself on Clickhole for two hours. Most writers write on computers, and the only thing between their unfinished manuscript and the World Wide Web is willpower.
Even if the Internet isn’t your procrastination go-to, there are always a hundred other things to do than write. So how do you stay focused when your dirty dishes have taken up long-term residence in your kitchen sink? How do you force yourself to write?
Seek pressure from your peers
Most humans have an innate desire to please people, which is why I shaved off all my arm hair as a ten-year-old when my best friend told me to.
Peer pressure doesn’t always have positive outcomes, but it can help if you need accountability. The author and critic Michele Filgate used to host a Friday writing group called Get Your Ass on the Bench and Write that helped her generate new work because other people were expecting it, and author Tony Tulathimutte credits much of his professional success to the writing group he has been a part of for fifteen years. Writers such as Lisa Ko find parallel work motivational (“It’s hard to go do something else to procrastinate or avoid your work when your friends are busy writing in front of you”), which is why coworking spaces are an attractive option for those who put laundry first and writing seventh when they “work” from home.
There are coworking spaces that exist exclusively for writers that give you access to caffeine, a desk, and a printer for a certain price each month. The downsides are that the printer might not work and you must get into the creative zone alongside a stranger who wants to be published in the exact same places you do; the upside is that you don’t have to bring your computer with you every time you go to the restroom.
Monetize your writing
When author Mira Jacob was unexpectedly laid off from a corporate job she’d held in different capacities for over a decade, her husband convinced her to pretend that her two months of severance pay was an advance for her first novel. Almost immediately, though, Mira started receiving sympathy job offers from professionals who knew she had been the only parent working at a parenting website. “I don’t think I would have had the courage to turn those opportunities down if I hadn’t had an awesome agent who begged me not to take another job,” Mira explains. “She told me, ‘Don’t go back and work for any assholes; this book is going to sell. It will sell for real money. It’s going to change your life.’ I’d been writing that book for almost ten years,” Mira says, “and I finished it in a month.”
Mira wasn’t setting out to get fired, and she certainly doesn’t recommend tacking LAYOFFS! onto your vision board, but it’s true that Mira made advances in her writing when she decided to monetize her work. Regardless of what it is—a novel, a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, or essays—most writers will not be getting paid for their first book before it actually becomes one, so you are going to have to trick yourself into believing in its value while you’re writing it.
Maybe you divert part of your salary to pay yourself a writing wage—an unnecessary visit to Instagram will feel more lamentable if you’re on the clock. If you have the budget, some writers find it useful to rent a separate office or a desk in the kind of communal workspaces we’ve mentioned. Heck, maybe you need to rent a computer by the hour at an old-school Internet café—whatever it takes to shame your inner procrastinator into actually writing.
DIY your own writing retreat
Customized residencies are a godsend because you don’t have to apply for them; you don’t even need to leave your couch to participate in one. If you need a weekend to turbospeed ahead in a writing project, put up an out-of-office reminder, change your social media avatars to a note saying “Gone writing,” and lock yourself inside your dwelling. (Or have someone lock you up in theirs: when the aforementioned Michele Filgate was trying to finish a difficult personal essay, a friend agreed to keep Michele locked inside their apartment until she finished it, and Lisa Ko has done some of her best writing while pet-sitting for friends.)
Airbnb has homeowners attuned to people’s space needs, and savvy hosts have realized how far writers will travel for solid peace and quiet. Formerly private residences like The Porches in Virginia, Patchwork Farm in Massachusetts, or Spruceton Inn in the Catskills have transitioned into retreat centers with customized residencies for writers, and nothing stops you from contacting a hotel to see if they’ll offer you a discounted rate if you bring your writing group. For writers looking to pack a little vacation into their retreat, Shaw Guides has a titillating list of conferences in destinations like Peru, Greece, and Mexico, as well as a variety of lesser-known retreats and conferences throughout the United States.
Because writers aren’t the only species craving stillness, DIY retreaters should take note of the meditation resources in their communities. Poet Aaron Belz enjoyed many a writing weekend at the Vision of Peace Hermitages in Missouri, where twenty-five dollars a night would get him a private cabin or trailer, with meals delivered by a monk in a golf cart for a pittance more. Cameron Dezen Hammon used to do silent retreats at the Villa de Matel convent in Houston, Texas: it was completely free for day use, and the donation for an overnight stay was up to the retreater’s discretion. Author Samantha Hunt favors the Holy Cross Monastery in upstate New York, where seventy dollars gets her a room, three square meals, and all the silence she can write through. An added benefit of religious and/or mindfulness programs is that alcohol isn’t allowed, which can certainly aid focus.
Know when you work best (and try to write during those times)
When I’m deep into a project, I’m not an easy person to live with. I’m snippy, distracted, disheveled: you interrupt me at my writing desk, I will actually snarl. I have a spouse who also works at home and a young child, and although they’re willing to share space with my wild boar–ness sometimes, every day’s not cool.
After fits, starts, and therapy, I discovered that planning the work week around my energy levels is the only way that I can show up for all my roles. Mondays and Tuesdays I’m at my most energetic, so I reserve these days exclusively for my creative writing. The other days of the week, I eke out life stuff (email, freelance work, groceries, parenting, attempts at human kindness), and I feel calmer about that eking because of my hyperconcentrated work at the beginning of the week. You can’t write all day during a weekday if you have a nine-to-five, but you can learn to honor your energy patterns when you make a writing schedule. If you’re not a morning person, it’s unlikely that you are going to be able to sustain an existence in which you write before your day job. Likewise, if you have responsibilities that leave you exhausted in the evenings, maybe writing after midnight isn’t the best choice. To the extent that you can control for this, try to plan your writing time when you have energy to write.
In order to maximize the time they have for writing, the most successful of our brethren decide what they want to accomplish before they start to work. Writing goals often fall into the three following categories:
Quantity
People balk at the idea that a novel can be written in a month, but National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo) exists to prove the contrary. Participants set ambitious word-count goals per day in order to write the entirety of a novel draft during the month of November, and the website offers fun tools to track your progress and to connect with writing friends.
Although NaNoWriMo has created unnecessary stress for literary agents whose inboxes are flooded with half-baked manuscripts each December, it proves that you can make ambitious writing projects manageable by breaking them down into small parts. A ninety-thousand-word novel, for example, can be written over a year by writing three hundred fifty words on each day of the workweek (reward yourself for your productivity and take the weekend off!). For people who have a hard time visualizing word-count amounts, three hundred fifty words is roughly the length of the desperate, run-on email you just sent to your best friend. So to reach your writing goals, stop writing long emails, and work on your book instead.
Most writers who use the word-count method feel productive if they write one thousand words a day. Regardless of the number you pick, remember that hitting your word-count goal doesn’t perfect the project; revision does. So leave time to revise!
Butt-in-the-chair time
“I am for consistency,” says author Gina Sorell. “There have been times in my life I’ve been able to write for a few hours every day, and times when I can only write for a few hours on Saturday mornings. But I find that the consistency of the routine, whatever that may be, is key. Right now, five days a week, I’m at my desk by 5:30 a.m. for two hours, before family life and work life wake up. I’m not bragging about the time of day that I get up,” Gina adds. “I’m a terrible morning person, but dawn is the only time I can feel free of other responsibilities to write.”
You have to be a particular kind of person with a particular work schedule to maintain a daily writing habit. For writers whose day jobs already require that they think, edit, and write all day for the benefit of others, it can be virtually impossible to find the reserves during the week to write creatively for themselves. And, of course, for someone who is responsible for other people in their household (offspring, aging parents), maintaining a daily writing habit is a pipe dream that bursts open during cold and flu season.
Be wary of the people who say that you have to write every day to be a writer: they’re projecting their inadequacies onto you. Think every day about the things that you want to write, and when you have time to get to your desk, honor your intentions. You wouldn’t go grocery shopping during a dermatologist appointment: don’t organize your closet during your writing time.
If your current schedule makes it impossible to carve out windows of writing time each week, try the bingeing route. Pick one day somewhere in your schedule where everything can go to hell except your writing, and write the hell out of that day. The author Cheryl Strayed is a notable binger—in interviews, she’s admitted that she goes for months without writing a word only to “write like a motherf*cker” at artist residencies. An editor I know, who is also a writer, sets aside Saturdays to nest with her own projects: she’ll lock herself away and write for up to ten hours at a time.
Content goals
For the author Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, content goals are the only way she has been able to seesaw between her writing and other responsibilities (of which parenting is one). To make her writing time more effective, she works from an outline and concentrates on completing a certain number of beats. “I focus on plot points,” Miranda says. “Sometimes it’s a whole scene, sometimes there are three or four beats in a scene. Working this way means I can always feel like I’ve accomplished something even when I’ve only had fifteen minutes to write.”
I find content objectives gratifying, too. The first thing I do on my writing days is assess my energy and the amount of time I have to write, and then I give myself a content-related task: I’m going to write the sex scene today; I’m going to work through the father section in this essay; I’m going to get through my research on American-made automobiles in the 1930s for this thing I want to write. It’s easy to identify your manuscript’s trickiest parts: they’re the ones you’re not writing. Tackle those bits first. Start your week by writing those scenes terribly. At least they’re written! If they’re written, you can move on to making them better and more realistic, which is a far more nuanced and interesting job than getting words onto the page. If you do the hardest work first, the rest of the writing can feel like a reward.
Stay off of social media
Social media is the great enabler of procrastinators, so a lot of people protect their writing time by making the Internet difficult to surf. Some writers swear by web-blocking services such as Freedom; others write in cafés where they don’t know the Wi-Fi password; the truly desperate ask their roommates to change the Wi-Fi code in their apartment and to keep the code from them. During a short-lived steampunk phase, I used an old-timey hourglass to regulate my social media use: I couldn’t go online until the sand had transferred from one bulb to another. This was diverting until my cat—who has no respect for whimsy—knocked it to the floor.
These days, I use guilt and old-fashioned self-loathing to regulate my Internet use, and when that fails, I hide my computer and write longhand, which results in meditative, restorative, and completely illegible work.
Whatever your strategy is for getting words onto the page, don’t forget to give yourself a break from all the goal-making and the typing and the writing notes by hand. If you don’t hit your word count, if you take a phone call from a friend during your writing time, if you have a hangover and your soul needs you to watch reruns of Dynasty on your allotted writing day, you are still a writer and you’ll find another time to write.
Killing your inner perfectionist
For reasons we will not get into here, I once attended clown school. We had to do an exercise where we walked around the room in circles at our normal pace. Then we did the exercise walking at “the speed of fun.” “The speed of fun,” explained the instructor, as people started bumping into one another, “is when you’re going too fast to hear your inner critic.”
I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t have an internal naysayer second-guessing all she does. The problem is so common, some psychologists advise giving your self-critic a name and an identity: mindfulness blogger Wendy de Jong refers to hers as “Perf,” and in a Psychology Today article on the same subject, an anonymous client calls hers a “hungry wolf.”
Perfectionism can be a good trait in a writer: it drives you to deliver work that is spell-checked, fact-checked, and free of glitchy formatting, while also including such essentials as nice sentences and plot. To this end, your editors will appreciate your perfectionism because it saves them time.
But perfectionism can hold you back. So many people are afraid of writing badly, when the truth is that bad writing is the only way you’re going to start writing well. “I’m unable to write that really shitty first draft,” says the writer Hallie Goodman, who admits to being stunted by her “perfectionist bullshit.” “I’m unable to suspend judgment, I line edit as I’m writing. For me, it’s a scarcity-of-time issue. I feel like nothing can be wasted. I’m afraid of wasting time.”
Hallie has been able to indulge this fear because she does lack time. In addition to writing and freelancing for magazines, she also runs a successful reading and workshop series called Volume, which keeps her in constant contact with authors and their publicists, students, and local commerce owners, troubleshooting and event managing to keep everything on track. But recently, Hallie was awarded a monthlong fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, and her excuses didn’t hold water anymore. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t tell myself I didn’t have time to write,” she says, “because time was all I had.”
One thing that comforted Hallie, and ultimately got her writing, was realizing that so many other writers had the exact same problem. She met people who had affirmations tacked up all over their studios, writers who forced themselves to write two thousand words a day without a single concern for quality—the idea was just to write.
“I had to do all these infantilizing tricks,” Hallie admits. “I put up notes like, ‘There is no bypass. You must write that shitty first draft.’ And god, I made myself a star chart,” she laughs, recounting how she walked to CVS to get herself some puffy glitter star stickers that she would put up when she allowed herself to write atrociously.
Perfectionism can negatively affect not just how you write, but what you write, as well. Author Amy Brill spent fifteen years working on her first novel about a female astronomer in 1845 Nantucket, and her perfectionist drive to incorporate all her research nearly derailed the book. “I was so sure I had to adhere to every minute fact, every turn of phrase, every one-hundred-sixty-year-old date,” Amy admits, “that I ended up with hundreds of pages of deadly boring epistolary junk. Its verisimilitude was admirable, but as a novel, not so much.”
When Amy lost an entire crop of research in a backpack she misplaced, what at first felt like a tragedy turned into a liberation. “The original questions—what would make a teenaged girl spend the entire night on her roof, in every season, searching for something in the night sky that would change her life—had been engulfed by thee and thou and other things that barely belong in a novel, much less on every page. I had to start over, and I did. The next version kept some of the facts about the inspiration for my character, but dispensed with most of them. If I wanted to tell the story of that girl on the roof, I had to make it up. That’s the book that became my first published novel, The Movement of Stars.”
If you’re into disassociation, hire your inner critic to be your copy editor. But do not let her write. And take heed if you’re paralyzed by the idea of a bad draft: a good book usually takes about seven shitty versions, not one.
Narrative voice is your literary aura, your essence, the thing that allows writers the world over to write about the same topics in thrillingly different ways. Even though it’s yours, your voice can take a long, long time to find.
Postcollege, I spent two years trying to write like Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver I am not. But I got it into my head that this is what serious writing sounded like: alcoholic, importantly mundane. It was depressing to try to write like this, but the shorter my sentences got, the more I felt like I was approaching publication somewhere really big. It took me hundreds of rejections to give myself permission to dance like no one was watching—clearly, no one was. I embraced my inner freak and incorporated humor into my writing. And I started getting published.
I think a lot of young writers make similar detours—they start out writing a certain way for a specific audience, before eventually coming to the realization that they don’t like this kind of writing—or these people!—very much. In a popular lecture the author Claire Vaye Watkins delivered at the Tin House Summer Workshop called “On Pandering,” she admitted that she herself spent much of her early career writing for old white men. “Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati,” Claire said in the lecture, which was published as an essay in issue 66 of the magazine. “Not only acquiescence but a beseeching, approval seeking, people pleasing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire?”
Purists argue that once you’ve found your voice, you need to keep it isolated in order to protect it: don’t read work by any other writer while you’re working on a project; live inside your words. IMHO, these people are wrong (and also maybe need to be checked on? It sounds like they haven’t left their house in quite some time). If you want to be a writer, you need to engage with the writing world. You need to purchase, read, and celebrate the work of other writers, editors, and translators. There will come a time when you might need to protect the slant or tonality of a project by isolating yourself, aesthetically, but that point is not at the beginning of your career.
Much is said about the merits of reading other writers, but it’s important to go out and hear them, too. Something instructive happens at live readings. You will hear people who are merely reading from their writing, and you will also see people perform. You’ll see jokes land, and you will also watch them fall so flat that people have to step around them where they lie, cowering, on the floor.
Having a piece bomb at a live reading is a form of rejection, but rejections can be way finders. As your confidence builds, you’ll come to learn the difference between bad-faith rejections (rejections that come because the rejecter is prejudiced against you or what you stand for in some way) and useful rejections, which indicate whether you are close (hot!) to or far (cold!) from finding your own voice.
When you do find your voice, you’ll still encounter rejection, but it won’t sting as much: you have fuel now, you have water in the desert, you have found your core. So write. Submit. Get on stage and bomb. Get excited by your rejections. They are road maps toward the kind of work that you were born to write.
Making the most of your writing workshop
Writing workshops take many forms. They might be a compulsory part of your MFA program, they might take place during a summer conference you’ve signed up for, or you might be in a homegrown workshop comprising writers you have been working alongside for many years.
In case you’re not familiar with the workshop scenario: each participant gets to have a piece of writing “workshopped” by the other writers in the class. You’ll usually have about a half hour to hear what your fellow writers thought of your piece, starting with positive feedback, and working, gradually, as your heart rate rises, to the “constructive feedback” portion: i.e., what you’re doing wrong.
In my experience, workshops are an invaluable tool if you know what to do with the feedback you are given, some of which will be insightful and beneficial, some of which will be biased or dead wrong. Follow me for a moment on a tangent to the supermarket. Let’s say you have gone there to gather ingredients to make a chicken curry. For this chicken curry, you need some chicken, but you don’t see any there. There is a man working in this supermarket; you ask him about the lack of poultry products in the store. He says not to worry, and he hands you five eggplants, a bottle of laundry detergent, and a mini horse. Don’t worry, he repeats, when he registers your surprise. These items are free. You will need them on your journey. You should take them from the store.
You have been raised to be polite; you don’t want to hurt this man’s feelings, especially if these items are gratis. So you take the eggplants and the detergent and the horse and you try to make the curry when you get to your apartment, but you don’t have what you need to make it; instead you have a horse. He’s cute, certainly, but you can’t help but feel like your life has taken a direction that you did not want it to go in. You feed the curry, which isn’t very good, to the horse, who poops on your rug.
Is it possible to get what you actually need out of a workshop, instead of the desire to never write again? Can you make a curry with some detergent and a horse?
Ask for what you need
Now that I’ve been writing and publishing for a while, it’s mind-altering to realize that workshops do not have to be a vomitorium of disgruntlements from your workshop peers. Did you know that you can ask for specific feedback? Did you know that you can challenge people to give you more than meh?
“I think it’s a nice idea to tell people what you specifically want help with when your piece goes up for workshop,” says author Julia Fierro, who founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002. “Pacing, plot, the narrative structure, the pace of dialogue . . . If you don’t ask for what you need, you can have this out-of-body experience during the workshop; I’m here, but I’m not here.”
To protect yourself against the tepid feedback that the author and founder of the workshop program CRIT, Tony Tulathimutte, calls “the bland reading the bland,” encourage specificity from your peers when your piece is on the chopping block. If someone says that they don’t like one of your characters, ask if there is a technical choice that impacted the way they feel. And as a workshopper, you should challenge yourself to the same standards. Saying that you “liked” or “didn’t like” something isn’t helpful: offering ideas the writer can use to solve a problem or improve a passage is.
Learn what to let go of
You’ll encounter different personality types in workshop, and if you take all of their advice to heart, the only thing you’re going to want to write at the end of workshop is an SOS.
“You can get wounded in a way in workshop that you will eventually figure out is time wasting and pointless,” says Tony on the topic of bad feedback. “There are pernicious aspects to it: the tacit pressure to pander, to people please, to impress either the teacher or the people you are sharing a room with. This is inevitable, I don’t know a way to work around this: the group gaze of a workshop only heightens this pressure. You just have to stick with it long enough that the participants learn to workshop the manuscript, not the author.”
You also have to learn where your peers are coming from so that you don’t get wounded. People have preferences and biases: if you’re in a workshop with the same people long enough, you’ll start to understand why they say the things they do. Maybe that one dude just doesn’t “do” science fiction; the teacher secretly yearns to write erotica; nothing resonates with that one student unless you’re writing about her.
Nevertheless, during your initial critiques, you are going to have a dozen people throwing feedback balls at you and you only have so many hands. First-time workshoppers have a tendency to incorporate all the recommendations they were given into their revision, resulting in what Julia calls a “Frankenstein.” This happened to me: after workshopping an unruly piece during a summer conference, I spent four dismal months revising a draft honoring each of my classmate’s opinions: This one will make Sonia happy because no one’s using foreign words; this one will please Jeremy because the narrator’s motivations are clearer. I ended up with nineteen drafts of that short story, each one of them further from the kernel of magic I’d had in the first. It took me a year to let the useful feedback rise to the top of my brain (and to let go of everything else) so that I could actually think, with agency, through what I needed to do to make the story stronger in a way that preserved its weirdness. That story, “Notes from Mexico,” won an award in a chapbook contest, and it’s closer to the original first draft than not.
This is not to say that I think that I, or you, or any writer, should be above constructive criticism, or that other writers (and readers) don’t have the ability to help us with our work. (They do. I would be incomprehensible without my editors.) What I want to emphasize is that workshops can’t actually help your writing until you understand how to preserve your special sauce. Protecting what is odd and tender about your voice is not you saying that you write better than anyone else, so screw all of their opinions . . . it’s about knowing where your creative boundaries are and getting to the point where you can distinguish useful feedback from biased criticism. The former will actually serve your manuscript. The latter usually comes from a writer who prefers you write like them.
This level of awareness takes time to come by, and in order to get there, you’re going to have to ruin a few pieces by incorporating bad advice. Once you know how to sieve good advice from the extraneous, you can workshop to the high heavens, with your armor intact.
Find positive in the negative. Even in the comments of [name redacted] That Person You Can’t Stand
There are going to be asshats in your workshop, and if you can’t find a way to transform their tomfoolery into something positive, animus will poison your writing time. “Even with the reader who doesn’t like your work, who doesn’t read it correctly, who 100 percent isn’t your ideal reader and is giving you the kind of feedback you absolutely don’t want,” says Catapult’s writing programs assistant, Stella Cabot Wilson, “even this person’s feedback might still be helpful in some way—either as something to strike against, or for giving you a new idea or opening up how you think about your work.”
Also remember that the workshop is a crash course in what it feels like to have other people read and publicly comment on your private writing. If you can maintain your dignity and confidence when a windbag calls your content “navel-gazing,” you’ll be better prepared for the faceless online commenter who gives your debut two stars because he doesn’t like the shirt you’re wearing in your author photograph.
If there’s someone in workshop that you just can’t make the positivity leap with, use your interactions with them as a character study: at least you’ll have material to draw from when it comes time to write a jerk.
It is a truth known but little spoken that the secret to great writing is revision. After putting countless failed manuscripts out to pasture, I’ve come to see writing as the pleasurable—even hedonistic—part of the writing process, and revision as the work.
In revision, you improve the places in your manuscript that can be deepened, tightened, or clarified, and you cut . . . a lot. In Stephen King’s craft book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he suggests that a good second draft is the first draft minus 10 percent. In the movie Neruda, the actor playing the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda says, “To write well, delete.” Did Pablo Neruda actually say this? Let’s pretend he did!
Like a lot of baby writers, I started out attached to every word I wrote. My sentences defined me! Each one advanced not just the narrative of my story, but my personal one as well. I valued baroqueness over efficiency, circuitous reasoning over candidness, the em dash over the period. My writing was overlong and hyperactive, in need of scissors and sedation, both.
If I’m proud of anything in my writing process, it’s that I have become a Herculean deleter, callous and unfeeling, my only queen the work. On a Thursday many years ago, three days before my agent was going to send my first novel out on submission, she called to tell me how excited she was about it, how absolutely positive she was that this was going to be my debut book, and that P.S., it needed to be twenty thousand words shorter by Monday morning. Twenty thousand words less!! I didn’t waste time fighting her on this or asking why. I reread the manuscript (quickly) and answered those questions for myself. Then I went for a run with angry music on. And spent the weekend deleting, down to the exact number, twenty thousand words.
The difference between a published writer and an unpublished one might be their ability to revise. Even if an agent or an editor sees promise in a manuscript, they might pass because they don’t have the stamina for the amount of revision the work needs. If you can train yourself to revise well, you’re pushing your manuscript thirty steps closer to a publication yes.
At the beginning of the revision process, you might be so close to the material that you can’t see your project’s flaws. Happily, there are a lot of talented professionals who can. Online writing programs across the country have manuscript consultants for hire, and many of these offer intensive revision workshops such as the Novel Incubator program at GrubStreet, the Novel Year program at The Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C., the Novel in a Year: Revise and Launch Class at StoryStudio Chicago, the twelve-week Novel Generator Program at Catapult, or the Writing by Writers Manuscript Boot Camp in Lake Tahoe, just to name a few.
If you want to improve the way that you revise, you should use a manuscript consultant as a bellwether, not a crutch. Don’t just read their notes, decode what they are saying for your writing as a whole. Identify any negative patterns that crop up in your writing and keep a list of what they are so that you can start to edit them out yourself. Learn your narrative weaknesses and devise a shorthand for dealing with them. If you’re terrible at landscape descriptions, for example, rather than spending a dark day trying to ace a paragraph about Bolivian salt flats, why not put a line in parentheses about what you want to go there and highlight it in yellow, then come back to it on a day where you have the energy to write a challenging paragraph.
Revision is about editing out the parts of a narrative that take you away from the story’s truth. Belabored points, repetitions, opaqueness, narrative indulgences, all these are examples of nonessentials that can slow a story down, but it’s equally important to learn how to identify subject matter that can belittle or offend.
Writing is about storytelling, and every time we come to the page, we’re taking a certain risk with the stories that we share. Maybe we’re using valuable free time for an uncompensated activity that doesn’t make sense to the people that we love. Maybe we’re telling a true story whose publication might damage relationships we value. Or maybe we’re venturing into territory that we haven’t lived firsthand. If you’re writing from a viewpoint that is vastly different from your own, delving into a culture that isn’t native to you, writing about a historical experience you didn’t live through, or venturing out of your comfort zone in other important ways, your manuscript might benefit from a sensitivity reader who will vet your work for stereotypes, internalized bias, negatively charged language, sexism, and other content that readers could find offensive.
We Need Diverse Books is a great resource for writers and readers questioning the representation of diverse experiences and characters in children’s literature, and until recently, Writing in the Margins maintained a database of sensitivity readers that was pulled down after the writer (and site administrator), Justina Ireland, saw many of their readers being mistreated or not being paid for the work that they took on. In an article on Medium about her decision to stop maintaining the database, Justina writes, “I still believe that Sensitivity Reading can be a valuable tool for those authors who have done the due diligence and have worked hard to analyze their own place within systems of oppression. But for those who see diversity as a way to make a quick buck, it is one more tool to keep the voices of centered identities the loudest in publishing.” The writer and advocate Jennifer N. Baker runs a podcast called Minorities in Publishing in which she discusses the lack of diversity in literature with book publishing professionals. It’s an indispensable resource both for people writing outside of their own identities and for emerging writers from marginalized communities seeking industry advice.
The Children’s Book Council also has a helpful list of resources for people interested in representing (or reading about) experiences outside their own backgrounds, and an Internet search will bring you the writers and editors offering sensitivity-reading services online.
Am I wasting my time and money in this MFA program?
A simple Internet search will prove that there’s a lot of hand-wringing over the value of a Master of Fine Arts degree. I personally didn’t get one, but most of my colleagues did, or are in the process of earning one now. In addition to the trove of online articles devoted to an MFA’s pros and cons, there’s also the informative book, MFA vs NYC, edited by Chad Harbach (a writer and one of the founders of n + 1), which is a great resource for those questioning life with (or without) an MFA.
In my own non-MFA-having opinion, whether you go for this advanced degree or not should depend on your budget and your long-term career goals. Can you afford not only to attend an MFA program, but to go without income while you’re studying? If you intend to teach, can you survive on an adjunct’s salary for several years? (Really? Are you sure?) If you already know that you want to teach in some capacity, it’s wise to pursue an MFA because most academic employers will require that you have one. If you want an MFA because of the prestige attached to it and the certainty that this particular degree will land you a book deal, let’s have a come-to-Jesus talk.
“I really do try to disabuse my students of the notion that the MFA is this magic bullet,” says author Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, who teaches at both the graduate and undergrad level, although he doesn’t have an MFA himself. “It’s not the MFA that’s going to get your book published or bring you teaching opportunities, it’s also the publications. You have to write, hustle, submit, network, go to readings, make contacts, be a nice person who people want to help. In a way, you’re always going to have your own self-directed MFA.”
Although Saïd isn’t self-conscious about not having an advanced degree, it does trouble him how often he is asked by his own students—MFA candidates—whether they’re wasting their time with one. Usually, Saïd responds that an MFA is useful, but it’s not a one-way ticket to anything: not only does it not guarantee a book deal, it doesn’t even mean you’ll write a book.
“There’s this idea that people have that they’re going to write a book during their MFA program,” Saïd says. “But you’re probably not going to write a book in two years. At some point, you’re going to have to have a day job. You’re going to have to learn how to carve out time to write,” a skill that Saïd feels should be discussed and privileged over the inspiration model of writing, which he once subscribed to himself.
“I had no discipline,” Saïd remembers of his years as a young writer. “I didn’t know that you needed some kind of schedule. No one ever said to me, it’s not about inspiration; you have to sit down. You have to write. I spent a long time just walking around thinking, Well! I’m uninspired.”
At the end of the day, Saïd believes a solid work ethic is the thing that will allow you to write a book and/or acquire teaching experience, not an MFA. This is something that the writer Cara Blue Adams agrees with, a self-described “cautious” person who “always has a backup plan behind the backup plan.”
Although Cara does have an MFA (from the University of Arizona), after college she worked at a law firm, an experience she credits with helping her understand that she could—nay, deserved—to earn a healthy wage. “I considered adjuncting at various points,” says Cara, “but then I looked at what it paid.” Cara optioned to pursue a career as an editor instead, accepting a position at The Southern Review, where she worked for five years. This decision was deliberate; Cara felt certain it would serve her to be skilled across multiple disciplines, instead of just an MFA graduate who wanted to write a book. “Even during my MFA program, I tried to do as much as I could to gain professional skills in a range of areas,” Cara explains. “I was thinking of my career more holistically: How could I be part of the creative and intellectual community without necessarily teaching? I edited the literary magazine, I ran a reading series, I started a professional development series.”
Cara was publishing short stories during all of this, and by the time she joined The Southern Review, agents were knocking at her inbox. But she managed the unthinkable: she didn’t sign with an agent right away.
For starters, Cara didn’t have a complete manuscript yet, but she also felt nourished by her job at the magazine. “One thing an editorial position afforded me was the luxury to not have a hard deadline and to be able to write the book that I wanted to write,” she says.
In short, an MFA—even at the most prestigious program—is a privilege you must rise to meet. It isn’t going to do the work for you, it isn’t going to write the book for you, it isn’t even going to make the contacts you’ll need professionally unless you organize yourself into becoming the empathetic, curious, and supportive literary citizen that people want to see succeed.
If you feel confident enough in your savings (or someone else’s savings) to see yourself through the limited job market that greets most MFA graduates, you’re a lucky person. Take that acceptance letter, and go. But if you can’t afford a life off salary while you’re in grad school, if you would need a loan to attend, and/or you’re not in a position to be accepted to a fully funded program, it’s not super wise to pursue an MFA. Or at least, not a traditional one. Or at least, not right now.
It’s worth noting here that teaching experience is crucial to your success on the academic market, so if you do apply to MFA programs, consider those that give equal teaching experience to their students. First-year candidates in such programs will generally find themselves at the head of a freshman composition or creative writing class, while second- and third-year students can tackle subjects further afield such as literary journalism, travel writing, or experimental nonfiction. Some programs will even give their first-year grad students a crash course in assignment and syllabus creation to ready them for the challenges of teaching and time management. Regardless of the size of the class you’re leading—or the topic—these early teaching gigs are worth their time and effort. With each semester, you’ll be acquiring the confidence you need to craft syllabi and lectures when the stakes are higher (i.e., when you’re doing a demo class in front of an academic selection committee during a campus visit). After all, you want to know you can bike before the training wheels come off!
Is there a world in which I can teach without an MFA?
You can debate the pros and cons of MFA programs until the cows come home, but unless you’re exceptional enough to prove the exception, you’re going to need one if you want an academic teaching job. The good news is that for most creative-writing positions, you can stop at the MFA. “Most programs won’t require that you have a PhD in order to get a tenure-track creative writing job,” says this book’s editor, Julie Buntin, who has been through the academic-market maze herself. “But some that are housed in English departments or that have a theory or comp component to the teaching load might. Pay close attention to the job listing!”
The list of writers who have managed to get teaching jobs without an MFA degree is short on names, but they all have sterling CVs. The aforementioned author Saïd Sayrafiezadeh—who teaches at Hunter College, Columbia University, and NYU—doesn’t have an MFA (or a BA for that matter), but he was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, publishes on the regular in The New Yorker, has received a Whiting Award as well as a fiction fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. Author Kathleen Alcott—who has taught at Bennington College, the Center for Fiction, and Columbia University—didn’t attend an MFA program either, but she has three acclaimed books (one of which was a Kirkus Prize nominee), a short story that made the short list for the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award, and bylines in household-name outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian.
On the other side of the exceptional, Cara Blue Adams—another writer we just met—has an MFA and a tenure-track teaching job, but she doesn’t have a book. What she does have, however, is a deeply thoughtful background in both publishing and editing, with awards and fellowships to boot. “People tell me they loved my first book,” says Cara, who has published, among other places, in the Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, and The Sun. “They also say they had a great time at my wedding, although neither of these events have happened yet.”
In summation, you can get a teaching position without an MFA degree behind you, and you can move up the tenure track without a published book, but you can’t do any of these things if you’re not busting your butt to create great work on the side. This is easier said than done, of course, and you can’t just “decide” to be extraordinary, but what you can do—if you want to circumvent the traditional path to professordom—is acknowledge that you are going to have to work incredibly hard to do so. And then do it: work harder than hard.
Creating (and maintaining) a literary community without an MFA
There are a lot of reasons writers don’t attend an MFA program: they’re categorically opposed to them; they can’t afford them (financially and/or emotionally); they don’t know that they exist.
I was in this latter case. I lived in France for most of my twenties, and by the time I moved back to America and woke up to the fact that most authors had MFA programs in their bios, I felt too old, too married, and too financially unstable to pursue an MFA.
I was, however, longing for a literary community, and it wasn’t initially clear how I could find one outside of an MFA program. I was living in a really rural part of Massachusetts with very few people—much less writing people—around. A serendipitous part-time job offer in New York City gave me the chance to try to find my kinfolk. In order to get as much out of my time in a metropolis as possible, I decided to attend a reading series for each of the four nights that I would be in New York, and to introduce myself—in person—to one stranger at each reading. I did this for four months straight, and although the positive outcomes I experienced were aided by my extraversion, I’m nevertheless convinced that there are solid, actionable, and affordable things you can do to build a literary community without an MFA. Some of these suggestions are free, others require an investment. For the paid options (attending summer conferences or an online writing class), remember to save receipts for tax time so you can deduct these costs as a business expense.
Attend too many reading series
You know the musical expression “playing by ear”? At reading series, you can train your ear to help your writing. Take it from someone who survived a writer’s twenty-two-minute “autofiction” revelation about a particular type of oral servicing he once received on a couch: once you hear someone bomb in front of a microphone, you will do anything—everything—to avoid terrible writing. In-jokes, tangents, potentially offensive content, narrative indulgences—attend a lot of reading series and you will be only too happy to remove these malignancies from your work.
Volunteer as a reader for a literary magazine
Being a reader for literary magazines allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are writing—and not writing—about, and it can be very useful for your creative writing process to be a gatekeeper for a while. Understanding what makes you want to accept or reject a story will inevitably inform the choices you’re making in your own work. Are you trying too hard to be funny? Do you go on tangents? Do your characters do nothing but stare out the window drinking tea? There is just as much to be learned from reading flawed writing as there is from reading polished work, plus you’ll come away with a new respect for the form rejection letter after you’ve been exposed to a bog of misspelled, uniquely formatted submissions from misanthropes and misogynists who are only too proud to tell you that they couldn’t be bothered with your submission guidelines because this attached thirty-five-thousand-word novella about a man without a girlfriend absolutely needs to be in your poetry journal. NOW.
Attend a summer writing program
The cons of these are that they can be prohibitively expensive (it’s nearly four grand to attend the ten-day Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference without a scholarship), competitive to get into, and alcohol fuels a great deal of the socializing, but the pros are that you can get nearly a semester’s worth of contacts and inspiration in as little as a week. Poets & Writers has a solid database of writing conferences that you can navigate by event type, location, even financial aid deadlines.
Although there isn’t a writing conference where alcohol is specifically prohibited (yet), the writer Vonetta Young said that the VONA conference (for writers of color) doesn’t provide any conference-sponsored alcohol, and writers Caitlin Horrocks and Tara Lindis-Corbell both said the same thing of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Librarian and inn manager Jesica Sweedler DeHart says that food takes center stage at the Orcas Island Literary Festival where most of the events are hosted by a tea or coffee company.
If you need extra support around alcohol, look for programs that have recovery meetings that are relatively easy to get to and attend. “Going somewhere with a strong recovery presence,” suggests the writer Hallie Goodman, “can help you connect with other writers who are feeling a little alienlike as they see all of their peers get sloshed.”
Take an online writing class
Since the advent of digital technology, there might not be a better boon for writers than the online writing class. Though the classes are online, the students and the teachers are real people, busy ones like you. And with the rising popularity of online writing classes, the standards set for teachers are very (very!) high: as I write, the likes of Arif Anwar, Yahdon Israel, and Leigh Stein are all teaching online, and the talent in the student pool is equally impressive.
Even if you’re not meeting in person, online classes offer emerging writers important social benefits: you might make a friend you can go on to workshop with privately; if you have a positive relationship with your teacher, you can ask them for a recommendation letter at some point in the future. Learning to take—and give—feedback from your peers will also help you gain the technical skills you’ll need to be more self-reliant when you are revising your own work.
In addition to expanding your personal writing network, online classes can bolster your creativity and imagination, too. Would you try a screenwriting class in an MFA program if you were accepted there for poetry? Maybe not. But with their affordability, convenience, and lower-stakes environment for experimentation, you can try out translation, travel writing, memoir, erotica, and many other genres you might not have had the time—or even the permission—to try in an MFA.
Join (or start) a writing group
If you haven’t had any success finding an existing writing group through the common channels (your local library, bookstore, or good old word of mouth), it might be time to start one of your own. You can post flyers in actual brick-and-mortar places, or use social-gathering sites like Meetup to gauge interest in your group. Remember that your group doesn’t have to be stylistically homogenous; it will serve you as a writer if your comembers have varied life experiences and are working in different genres than you.
Attend AWP
It’s not cheap to get to and it usually takes place in the godforsaken month of February, but AWP (which stands for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs [which should actually be abbreviated as AWWP, but . . . artistic license?]) is an annual conference attended by thousands and thousands of publishing professionals and writers. A conference as large as this one can feel panic-attack-level overwhelming at times, but there’s no better one-stop shopping for all your career needs. At the many parties and off-site readings offered throughout the five-day conference, you can hear new work and socialize with like-minded artists; at the book fair, you can spend hours talking with conference and writing-program managers about the different opportunities they offer; you can network for job opportunities in academia and publishing; you can browse everything from quirky chapbooks to doorstopper bestsellers, and enjoy conversations with the editors, publicists, and interns who brought those books to life. If you’re feeling up for it, you can even pitch projects to an editor, and you can flick something grody at the editor from [name of literary magazine redacted] who has rejected every piece you’ve ever sent.
A word to the wise: AWP lists discount codes on its website for hotel and airline fare. Make sure to use these discounts when you book!
Join a book club if you’re not already in one
Learning to read other people’s work, to question it, and to praise it in a clear and concise manner are skills essential to any writer, as is the proper handling of oneself around copious amounts of white wine.
Read
Duh, right? Not so fast. If you want to be an active member of the literary community, you have to read beyond the kind of work you normally gravitate toward, in both genre and style. Every fall there are lists about the top ten or twenty books out that year: earmark BuzzFeed’s most-anticipated novels, read the National Book Award poetry finalists, set yourself a goal. Subscribe to literary magazines (and read them), and visit the areas of your local library that you usually avoid. Challenge yourself to leave well-thought-out reviews of these books on social-cataloging sites like Goodreads, so that you learn to speak respectfully about other people’s work. In an MFA program, you would be thoughtfully critiquing other people’s writing on the regular, so don’t slack on this skill set.
A quick tip about book reviews, especially online: Do not leave negative reviews of authors whom you might one day want to beseech or befriend. Early in your career, you might not know who these people are yet, so book-review with caution. As a general rule of thumb, if you have negative thoughts about somebody’s creative output, it’s best to let them die a silent death inside your mind.
Volunteer at a literary festival
If you can’t be invited by them, join ’em. Literary festivals are always in need of volunteers, and they’re one of the best ways to stay connected to the writing world. If you offer up your services, make sure to choose a committee that actually suits your career interests: event planning will give you an idea of how panels are organized (with a sneak peak at the kind of topics you can one day hope to talk about yourself), public relations will give you experience writing press releases and interfacing with the media, and hospitality can put you in the same orbit as the authors you admire.
If your volunteer time is limited, festivals, arts organizations, and literary magazines always need extra help during their end-of-the-year fund-raisers.
If you do all these things, or even half of them, while also keeping up a regular writing practice, you’re going to find your book people, and they’re going to find you. If you still find yourself yearning for a more codified community after all these efforts, start researching part-time and/or low-residency MFA programs. More affordable, less competitive, and more flexible with scheduling than their full-time counterparts, part-time MFA programs will only need you on campus two to three times a week (usually at times that are convenient for nine-to-fivers), and low-res programs offer long-distance education with site-specific meetups one or two times a year.
I cannot tell you how many times I have written a book-length manuscript only to realize that it would perform better as a personal essay or op-ed, and that the novel I actually needed to write was hiding within a sentence on page seventy-three. I’m not exaggerating: I write a book to find a book all the freaking time, and this process is infuriating, and not a little heartbreaking, but it does—eventually—guide me to the thing I’m meant to write.
In case you share my predilection to need to write (and write) your way to the true story, I’ve come up with a checklist to help you figure out if you are running the wrong race.
Is this book actually a personal essay, and I just don’t know it yet?
During the writing of my second novel, I suffered a second-term miscarriage that I wanted to make the topic of book three. There was a lot of mismanagement of my medical information in the wake of the pregnancy loss, and I suffered some bizarre physical repercussions that I’m still navigating today. Accordingly, I felt a deep need to write my way toward a better understanding of what had happened to me and to my body, and I wanted to explore why women’s bodies are so little understood and respected in the United States. These are huge topics, and I felt like the appropriate and most exciting place to explore them was in a novel.
So I wrote a manuscript in which a prematurely menopausal thirty-eight-year-old is navigating a world in which her partner has left her in the wake of their lost pregnancy. Infertile in a culture that values fertility, the protagonist feels discarded and unseen. I think these issues are important—this state of being is important—but what I ended up with was three hundred pages of a woman feeling things about events that had happened in the past, which is slow-going content for a narrative.
This novel wanted to be a personal essay from the get-go, but I had to write it as fiction—and watch it fail as fiction—to realize this was so. It was a difficult lesson, but an important one: just because something moves us does not mean that it has the engine to power an entire book.
Are you scared?
Of course you’re scared. You’re a writer! If you’re not terrified, I’d like to know what herbal supplements you’re on. But all too often, our fear keeps us from writing what we actually need to write. This is especially true for memoirists whose writing can estrange friends or relatives, or even put their careers at risk if they tell the truth.
Unfortunately, the truth is usually the best path to the story. There are two outcomes when you’re scared of what you’re writing: either you cave in to the fear and you write something superficial that probably won’t sell, or you write something brave and vital that might. Your writing can be private for as long as you need it to be. So why not write the thing you’re scared of? The worst-case scenario is also the best one: you write something so courageous that an editor wants to pay you to share it with the world. You don’t have to say yes.
Does the scope of your project align with the free time that you have?
Let’s say you are waking up at five thirty in the morning to adjunct at one college, skipping lunch to teach at another, and traveling to yet a third school to teach an evening class. As an adjunct, you don’t have an office, and your shared apartment makes it hard to write at home. Is this the time to be working on your great American novel? Well, sure. Is this the time to be working on your great American novel that features a main character who is a shipbuilder during the Great Depression who falls in love with a migrant farmworker, an epic you plan to write from five different characters’ points of view? That sounds like a project that needs a lot of research, and research is tough to do without a desk.
You’ll have a lot of story ideas over the course of your career; you don’t have to write them all, and you don’t have to write them in order. Maybe hold on to the Great American Doorstopper until you have some peace, quiet, and enough time to eat lunch.
Is there a market for your project?
Market trends illuminate what readers are hungry for, which topics are salable, what genres are popular. Knowing that market trends exist can be detrimental to your writing, and you should not account for them if you’re feeling good about your project. But it can be helpful to gauge the potential interest in your subject if you’re feeling uninspired by your work. If you’re killing yourself to write a book that is going to receive a hundred “We’ve published too many memoirs on this topic” notes from agents and editors, maybe it’s time to put that project down for a while to either find a new way into it, or to work on something else.
Again—you should only use market trends to provide you with an excuse to pause a project that you’re not getting any joy from. If you believe in your book’s angle even though everyone is saying that vampires/motherhood memoirs/reproductive dystopias are “done,” write on. Market trends make no room for exceptional exceptions. In other words, they’re often wrong.
Do you lack experience?
I don’t want to use the ageist card, because of course there are twenty-two-year-olds who can write convincingly from the point of a view of an eighty-year-old veteran who has a grandkid with leukemia, but there are also a lot of twenty-two-year-olds who should write delightful, weird, flawed stories about what it’s like to be twenty-two.
Obviously, you should write what your heart tells you to write. It is good to be ambitious, and it can be deeply satisfying to undertake projects that require a lot of research. But your writing career will hopefully be a long one, and as you age, you are going to learn so many beautiful and ghastly things about the world; don’t feel like you have to rush yourself to a mature voice and an “aching” point of view in order to be taken seriously by others—and yourself. This might feel revolutionary to consider, but you can have fun writing. Enjoying what you’re writing is usually proof that you are writing the right thing. (And on this note: if you’re “cheating” on your project with something on the sidelines, maybe that passion project should be the main event?)
