Last week, Galleycat offered a list of things to do instead of getting an MFA.
They were very sensible and proper and, well, dull.
So I’d like to add a few of my own.
You got to see the world. You have to experience what it’s like to have $1.20 in Rio after being ripped off by two thugs with guns in a taxi cab and attempt to find your way back to your hostel without crying or being assaulted by the prostitutes who feel you’re ignoring them. You have to WOOF it on organic farms in central America, sleeping in cabins where rats leave droppings in your bed every night which seems terrible until you move cabins and find more than seventeen spiders the size of your palm around your room.
Stay up all night writing until your eyes feel cataracted with exhaustion and the tips of your fingers have guitar-thick callouses and your brain throbs with that mid-morning pain. And do this semi-frequently. You have to feel like the words are seething in a bolus in your chest, and unless you type them out they’re going to gnaw through your rib cage and sprout in a hydra over your heart, writhing and screeching.
Join a book club. Reader, you might think that this is not at all parallel to the two previous points. You would think that it’s tame. But you would be wrong. The right book club will electrify your reading. It will make your literary community mushroom into the type of atomic cloud that will have you gaping over excellent writers for years. It will make you convinced in your heart of hearts that if five guys in their early 30s can spend 4 hours (yes, that’s right four hours) talking and debating and bleeding over a book like “The Emperor’s Children” by Claire Messud in a Italian restaurant in Pasadena, that writing still has meaning and still matters and you have to devote your every bloody second to it.
You should be a tiger online. Yes, I know, Galleycat said to take online writing courses and to join online writing courses. This is not enough. You need to tear it up on the message boards. You need to make your voice heard. You need to get feedback at Zoetrope Virtual Studio and get knee-deep at Fictionaut. (Nota Bene: I did not say tiger blood. I did not. I said tiger.)
Ignore all this advice. More importantly, ignore all the advice on Galleycat. Be an iconoclast. Be the new Beat. Figure out your own way of doing it. All that matters is that you write. The way you find community, the way you consume books — these are methods, not results. You make the results happen. If it is in you, you will find a way.
One thought on “MFA Alternatives”
Great post. This is basically how I’ve approached my life. I was an incessant world traveler/expat before I had two children. I wrote for a bunch of magazines and made my living as a journalist. But the MFA is what allows you to get the teaching gigs… If you don’t want to write for mags anymore, and you haven’t published a novel yet, what do you do?