Too cool for school, too old for goals
Two things felt absolutely necessary to me in my twenties. An MFA, and really ambitious goals. All my friends had these, or were working their way to them. And not just the writer friends. My boss had an MFA and he only wrote software.
I researched MFAs off and on for nearly five years, but never applied to any. I did join a Masters program, an M.A. in Liberal Studies, but dropped out after the first year. It just wasn’t doing it for me.
Maybe part of the problem was that mentally, after college I was done being in school. Especially being poor in school. Now, if I could just repay my student loans and go to fancy restaurants and have fun with my friends on the evenings and weekends and get an MFA, that could work. But that is not how reality works for most people. Maybe I thought I was too cool for school.
But as I look back at the sheer number of writing courses I’ve taken in my life, I’ve already done an MFA just in terms of cost. So it wasn’t about being lazy or not wanting to sacrifice for my art. The real issue was that I didn’t realize until really, really late (well into my thirties) that the point of an MFA is not really the coursework, but the cohort. The network of writers, agents and publishers you will meet, who will keep you going when times are hard and push you to grow and open doors for you when you’re ready.
These days, I watch MFA cohorts do certain things that are so key to a writer’s success, but that you wouldn’t even know you were missing if you didn’t have them. Of course there’s the introduction to the network, which is priceless in itself. But it’s the way these cohorts boost each others’ work on Twitter, review and preorder each others’ books, and really advertise each others’ successes that makes me realize what I truly missed out on.
Does this mean I’m going to get an MFA? Maybe next year. (This is what I’ve been saying for a decade).
But what about the ambitious goals? Surely those aren’t controversial. I did have an ambitious goal once, to get a book published. And then… I did it.
Except, that sentence was supposed to carry all the gravitas of the end of Jane Eyre, when she says, Reader, I married him. But as I was soon to find out, publishing is a wedding, not a marriage and while Jane Eyre’s marriage happens off the page, I really thought mine would be with the page.
So what happens after you achieve your goal? After the wedding? Of course, if I were using the tech industry’s playbook, my next goal would be obvious. 10x the previous achievement! Ten books!
Except that sounds exhausting, turning a hobby I love into a chore. Also, my hands would hurt.
I would love to be writing a book a year. Honestly, if we’re counting endless drafts, then I’m actually currently doing that already. But I’m trying to think less about what my next goal should be and more about how I want to evolve as a writer. Why do I still feel like an amateur, second-guessing my plot and ending? Why do I still need to revise every novel a million times before it remotely resembles the original vision?
I want to feel competent and confident in my craft, but that’s something that took me 15 years to feel at my paying job. So for those who ask me how long it took to write my first book, I could be flippant and say that I wrote the first draft in a month, but the truth is that it took me thirty years of my life to feel confident enough to get that far.
And maybe it’ll take another thirty before I feel any level of true mastery, with or without an MFA. And that’s okay. I’m still having fun.
Photo: Notes to myself while I was revising Driving by Starlight for the third time.