Every year, thousands and thousands of writers chase their dreams at creative writing MFA programs. Your humble narrator even spent a year and a half with the good people at NYU's journalism M.A. program. Speaking from experience, most of us are dirt poor--struggling to live with part-time jobs, unpaid internships, and freelance work.
Tom Kealey is The Economical MFA Superhero. He wrote the book on MFA analysis, and supports a large community of starving artists over at The MFA Blog. But don't take our word for it, listen to aspiring MFA applicant and Amazon book reviewer, Daniel Walsh:
"This book is an unprecedented resource. I'm not exactly flush with cash, but this book was easily worth the money I paid for it, and then some. Until now, my only resource for evaluating MFA programs was a 6-year-old U.S. News ranking. This book does what appears to be a far better job of evaluating, and I'm basing my list of schools largely upon its findings."
Following that sage advice, I picked Kealey for my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
The print market is floundering right now. What's your advice for the fledgling writer looking to make a career? How do you stay sane in this scary writer's market?
Tom Kealey:
It is a tough market. Publishers are sending out more books, but they’re choosing fewer authors and really pushing those. Novels are not as popular, and short stories collections are very difficult to get published. Poetry is always a tough discipline as far as publishing goes.
My story collection, The Coyote Thieves, has won awards and the like, but it’s not won the awards to get it published. Basically, I just keep pushing it out there to agents and publishers because I believe in it.
If I’m just talking about publishing, I’d advise the fledgling writer to look to nonfiction. There are many, many bigger avenues for those type of books. But hey, you write what you write. Hopefully you write it because you enjoy the actual experience of writing: tapping into your imagination, solving problems on the page, bringing your characters to life, and learning new things about yourself.
A real writer writes. A phony writer likes to have written. I was at a Billy Collins reading once, and a person asked him: “What’s your favorite poem of your own?” He thought about that and said: “The one I’m working on now.” I think that’s key. You have to like what you’re working on at the present time and really put all of your efforts into that.
Staying sane? I think a key aspect of this is your own identity as a writer. Michael Collier talks about this in The MFA Handbook:
“If you write software during the day, you have to think of yourself as a writer of poetry or fiction or nonfiction, not just at night, but all the time. Keep involved in your community of writers. Keep in contact with your classmates. Keep writing. This sense you have of yourself as a writer should override everything else. If you can’t convince yourself that you’re a writer, then you’re not going to get the work done.”
You have to look at yourself as a writer who happens to work as a high school biology teacher, and not as a high school biology teacher who happens to write. The distinction is very important. A lot of factors in our world work against being a writer, especially financial considerations. You have to hold on to your own identity and protect it.
And as a final note, I want to re-emphasize the community aspect that Michael is talking about. You’ve got to keep in contact with other writers. You do the actual writing on an island, but that doesn’t mean the writing process itself is done on an island.
Make friends with other writers and keep those relationships. Share you work with them and read their work. Go to readings. Seek out new books. Read. Read. Read.
My community includes Chellis Ying, David Roderick, Steve Elliott, Adam Johnson, and Bruce Snider. We talk about our own work, share it, and in general we simply talk about writing as if it’s an important thing. Because we believe that it is. And it helps the belief to be around other people who share that feeling.
» Five Easy Questions, Stephen Elliott, Part One from ThePublishingSpot
Visual by www.PDImages.com Stephen Elliott's website doesn't fool around with Flash animations or other gimmicks, it just features a single column of blistering text. His writing combines the prophetic voice of the best political writers with the... [Read More]
Tracked on: April 10, 2006 9:09 AM | Permalink to Trackback