I think of MFA programs as a greenhouse: windows all around so that everything is visible, beautiful plants both medicinal and poisonous learning to grow, and a hot, closed-in enviornment wherein feelings and vulnerabilities hang in the air inescapably. This last point is not a complaint. It’s a particular form of intensity that I’ve never experienced heretofore, and it’s my life now. It’s been my life, but, going by the lie that is the linear calendar, it’s been my life for less than four full months.
I contest that. There is no way that the people I see every day now were unknown to me a year ago. There is no way that the ecstasies and frustrations related to everything I do for work/funding were not part of my consciousness a year ago. There is simply no way that a whole fucking world can come into being Big Bang style in such a short time. Wouldn’t it break the glass in the greenhouse? Oh, right: that glass is shattered regularly — by lightening and kicked up stones — and we have to clean up our own shards individually to rebuild a more spacious greenhouse together.
There are MFA programs in New York and Austin and Syracuse and Baltimore and San Francisco and other cities. But a lot of them are in the middle of nowhere like this one. Which means there aren’t a lot of opportunities to interact with people who don’t live in your greenhouse. You’ve got the cardinals and the thrushes and the possums and the butterflies. They’re outside our MFA-specific human dramas, presumably. Honestly, though? The longer I’m here, the more convinced I’ve become that even those butterflies have their views on what we write and how to make it better, and the possums have opinions about whose burgeoning thesis ideas make for a necessary book.
This is how I’ve been warped by the greenhouse, no matter that I’ve chased the heat. I vasillate between the half-nihilistic assertion that absolutely nothing we write matters, nothing, and the stubborn conclusion that of course it does, that no it won’t save lives and it won’t stop war but it will give us reason to go and reason to be and that matters. I’ve been working on a novel on and off for four years and — freshly out of short story ideas for my Advanced Fiction Workshop last week — I revised the first 15 pages and presented them.
The novel is about lesbian werewolves and I never assumed it was MFA material, but here we are in 2023. Hearing my comrades-in-arts discuss these characters as though they do, in fact, matter, has me unprecedentedly convinced that they do. I was also flattered by the collective assumption that the reason why the main character’s love interest was so sanguine about the revelation that our narrator is a werewolf is because this is a world full of werewolves and shapeshifters. Actually, I corrected later, that was just underdeveloped dialogue. (Dialogue has become something of a Thing I’m Notably Good At, according to the feedback I get, but whew you wouldn’t know that from those early opening pages.) Turns out I was running from my narrator’s pain, fear, and internal conflict, which, as in real life, is necessary for a meaningful story.
Four years and six drafts into this project, the most revolutionary feedback I got was from our prof who said:
“Start entirely over. That way you won’t feel hemmed in by what you’ve already written. You’ll probably use parts of what you’ve got, but think of your current drafts as a pile of notes.”
Here’s the thing about that critique: It did not feel me with dread, rage, or despair. A year ago it would have. I was attached to being Almost Done, to the idea of the next stage. Now? I just want to make these characters matter. I can’t do that with my current draft, when I’ve been callously avoiding my narrator’s pain. I can’t do that with anything I wrote in fits-and-starts. The other day I found the notebook where, sometime last summer, inspired by a n exchange between two teenagers on their way to see The Rise of Gru, I wrote the fist scene I had written in a long, long time. In fact, I was so convinced I would lose my inspiration that I didn’t want to risk going home to get a notebook and a pen. I went inside (I was sitting on a bench outside the Stonestown Galleria), bought a note book and a pen, and came back out and wrote the scene.
It’s been less than a year and a half since I was that person writing in that notebook. Since my relationship to this novel was tenuous, resting almost entirely on the encouragement of others. If it’s mine now, really mine now, then I have to start over. That makes sense.
I wouldn’t call it daunting, not anymore. But it’s still scary. Which is ultimately why I’m breaking from regularly scheduled topics to get — even in the most ethreal way — your support.
Oh that hits home. The agent who sold my YA novel told me while I was gnawing it to pieces revising that if you come to a section that you try to skip over with summary so you don’t have to put your character through that, that probably means it’s the heart of the book and you had better deal with it.
My experience has been that if I don’t want to put my protagonist through something it’s mainly because I don’t want to put me through it. That was certainly true that time.