The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (38 page)

It’s particularly important that you tell your student you want him to come to you if he’s experiencing productivity problems or if he has a personal problem that is interfering with his ability to work. Many students believe it’s inappropriate or even ill advised to discuss such problems with their advisor, so they retreat into shame, isolation, and underproductivity that only worsens over time. You don’t have to get involved in your student’s personal problems, and probably shouldn’t, but you can provide understanding and referrals.

If a student who is falling behind doesn’t approach you for help, you should intervene promptly.

Finally, delegate responsibly. Delegation shouldn’t be about dumping your unwanted tasks onto your students, but about working collaboratively with them on projects that support not just your team and/or department but their own growth as scholars. Delegate only to the extent that it doesn’t compromise a student’s own work—which means, delegating only very lightly until you and he figure out a good balance.

As any good manager knows, effective delegation itself takes a lot of time. If you give your student a meeting to organize and it takes him ten hours to do it, expect to spend two or three hours supervising. That’s still a wonderful net yield of seven hours.

MFA programs promise training and mentoring that will improve your writing, but often don’t deliver. Tim Tomlinson, in the introduction to
The Portable MFA in Creative Writing
, writes, “Many people find it hard to believe that I passed through two years of an MFA program, four separate workshops, and received not so much as a comma back on a manuscript. But it’s true, and my case was not exceptional.”

I can believe it, because I’ve heard many stories of absent MFA teachers and neglected MFA students. One MFA graduate told me in a typical comment that “Though the faculty were great, most were over-committed writer-teachers and only quasi-present. My peer group did most of the teaching.” She attended one of the most highly regarded programs, by the way.

And when teachers aren’t absent, they’re often inept or negligent. Tomlinson offers ten types of ineptness, including teachers who believe writing can’t be taught (“enables lazy teaching”), those with a “Moses Complex” (“Anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow definition [of good writing] is treated as an abomination.”), and those who fail to “establish any critical vocabulary with which to assess manuscripts” (“...the critiques are almost guaranteed to be either dull or chaotic or both.”). Teachers with these failings will inevitably leave a trail of damaged and discouraged—not to mention, financially cheated—students.

Gross negligence and ineptness are far from the worst you hear about MFA programs, however. In my classes and elsewhere, I regularly hear about teachers who were hostile or belittling, who encouraged vicious criticism within groups, who marginalized students because of who they were or what they wanted to write, or who committed sexual discrimination, harassment, or exploitation. (See the section on teacher malpractice in Section 2.8.)

And then there’s the hero worship and favoritism, which are present in many educational settings but often taken to an extreme in MFA programs. Favoritism is not just demoralizing (and, sometimes, devastating) for the students who aren’t favorites, but often a mixed blessing for those who are. Here’s Jane Smiley, from her essay “Iowa City, 1974,” in
Mentors, Muses & Monsters
(Elizabeth Benedict, ed.):

... [T]here was a story going around that one of the instructors had taken a particular shine to the work of one of our fellow students. He expressed his admiration for her potential by devoting himself to trashing her work. He would have her into his office, and then subject her to brutal line-by-line criticism, making her defend every word, every phrase. He “held her to a very high standard” and only praised her when she met it. ...Thank God, I thought, that I was not this teacher’s pet.

I’ve already mentioned the unhealthy mentor-protégé relationship at the center of Tom Grimes’ memoir
Mentor
(Section 3.9). Here’s Grimes on what it was like to be the favorite of Frank Conroy, director of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop:

Frank had guided, defended, praised, and, in a way, isolated me from my classmates. With the exception of Charlie, I existed apart from everyone. I had Frank’s approval, friendship, and affection. When it came to most of the other students, he barely knew their names. And I imagined my classmates thinking,
Tom Grimes was published by Frank Conroy’s publisher. He didn’t write a good book; he received an undeserved gift.

All this brings us to one of the root problems with graduate writing programs: that most of the teachers teach primarily to make money—which means, inevitably, that many will have little or no aptitude for teaching, or interest in it, or even respect for it. Grimes quotes Conroy about accepting the Iowa directorship: “Forty, broke, unemployed and in debt, I accepted an offer to come to Iowa ... more from a sense of desperation than any deep conviction that I’d know what to do when faced with a roomful of young writers.”

And so these broke and desperate, but not necessarily skilled or committed, teachers wing it, which means that even when their intentions are good they can leave a trail of woe.

Finally, to top it all off, MFA faculties are also notoriously unhelpful with, and often openly disdainful of, problems with procrastination and blocks. So good luck handling any disempowerment you may be experiencing—and that the program itself might be causing.

What about the supposed career advantages an MFA confers? Mostly illusory. First of all, even if MFAs did confer a huge advantage on graduates, there simply aren’t that many opportunities for writers or writing teachers to start with. Here’s Jane Smiley, again: “Every so often, a tall, big-shouldered editorial power would swoop into Iowa City and ... court one or two [students], then return to New York.” That’s one or two students out of dozens. And Tom Grimes, discussing a reunion with three other Iowa graduates, “We represented a typical workshop graduating class: three out of four hadn’t survived as writers.”

To survive as a writer, you need to make the leap from the literary magazines to writing that pays real money—usually books, screenplays, and feature magazine articles. Unfortunately, that’s the point where the value of an MFA shrinks to near zero. Despite pervasive propaganda to the contrary, many agents and editors, when being candid, will admit that an MFA degree confers at best a slight edge.

What about teaching? An article entitled “What Becomes of an MFA?” by Daniel Grant in the February 26, 1999,
Chronicle of Higher Education
1
cited a University of Florida at Gainesville survey of its MFA graduates that found that:

Roughly 60 percent were teaching on the college level (although more than half of them were adjunct faculty), 10 percent were working in publishing or actual writing (technical writing, for the most part), another 10 percent were employed in fields unrelated to writing, and the remaining 20 percent were pursuing another degree.

So, fewer than 30% of graduates got a permanent teaching gig—and it’s safe to assume that many of those were part-time. It’s probably also safe to assume that many of the approximately 5% who wound up doing technical writing initially had another career in mind, since technical writing is not what people enroll in an MFA program to learn.

Finally, it’s also safe to assume that the percentage of successful careers among the 40% who didn’t respond to the survey is even lower than among those who did. (Kudos to the University of Florida at Gainesville for at least surveying its students and publicizing the results—most schools don’t.)

Tomlinson, in
The Portable MFA in Creative Writing
, says literary agent Noah Lukeman always answers those who ask him what he thinks of MFA programs thusly:

Take the $35,000-$50,000 you’re going to spend on the degree, buy yourself a good laptop and printer and a bundle of paper, and go off to a cabin and write. At the end of two years, the worst that can happen is you have nothing. Less than nothing is what you’ll almost certainly have at the end of your MFA program, because, besides nothing, you’ll also have a mountain of debt.

Some will probably claim that I—and Tomlinson, Lukeman, and Anis Shivani, author of an essay entitled, “The Creative Writing/MFA System is a Closed, Undemocratic Medieval Guild System That Represses Good Writing”
2
—are biased against MFA programs, writing programs, or even literature in general. What I really have a bias against is obfuscation in the service of exploitation, the kind of thing that confuses smart and dedicated people into thinking that teachers who are only “quasi-present” are “great.”

1
An admittedly old study, but I haven’t found a more recent one: Daniel Grant, “What Becomes of an M.F.A.?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 1999 (chronicle.com/article/What-Becomes-of-an-MFA-/45719/).

2
Anis Shivani, “The Creative Writing/MFA System is a Closed, Undemocratic Medieval Guild System That Represses Good Writing,”
Boulevard
, Fall 2010, (www.boulevardmagazine.org/shivani2.pdf).

The abovementioned career-related concerns wouldn’t matter so much were not MFA programs so hellishly expensive. (Although the concerns about neglectful, inept, and abusive teaching absolutely still would matter.) Most cost $35,000 or more.

I’m not disputing a program’s right, or even need, to charge high prices. I’m not even arguing that those prices are high relative to the services provided (assuming they are, in fact, provided). I simply want to call attention to the effect these prices have on students from non-wealthy families. (Their effect on contemporary literature I’ll leave to others to discuss.) In her essay “My Misspent Youth,”
1
Meghan Daum describes how she wound up nearly $70,000 in debt largely due to her MFA:

Even as I stayed at Columbia for three years and borrowed more than $60,000 to get my degree, I was told repeatedly, by fellow students, faculty, administrators, and professional writers whose careers I wished to emulate, not to think about the loans. Student loans, after all, were low interest, long term, and far more benign than credit-card debt. Not thinking about them was a skill I quickly developed.

Telling a young writer not to worry about debt is irresponsible in the extreme, especially given how badly the profession pays. It’s particularly galling that many of those advising her not only profited directly from her indebtedness via tuition payments but had what most MFA students are destined never to achieve: a full-time, writing-related job with a decent salary.

Daum’s essay is part of a growing genre I call “debt lit,” in which highly educated people tell how they got into huge debt, often via student loans, and often for postgraduate creative or liberal arts degrees. Another example is Beth Boyle Machlan’s essay “How Scratch-Off Lottery Tickets Have (Not Yet) Changed My Life”:
2

All I know is that in spite of her upscale upbringing and four degrees from name-brand schools, the Irish girl is back in a Brooklyn basement, overeducated and utterly screwed. It’s possible to romanticize poverty. It is not possible to romanticize debt. If they could foreclose on my education like a house or a car, I’d happily pack it up, pull out my memories of each and every course—“Tudor and Stuart England,” “East Asian Art”—and leave them stacked neatly at the curb. (“Take my Ph.D.—please! ”) Hell, I’d even downgrade, trade in my ivy and the New England Liberal Arts degree for any of your better state schools. But I can’t, and so I’m fucked.

In partial defense of the MFA and graduate programs, their conveniently irresponsible attitude toward their students’ indebtedness merely mirrors that of higher education as a whole. Thankfully, that attitude is finally being questioned. In a watershed article in the May 28, 2010,
New York Times
, “Placing the Blame when a Student Lands in Debt,”
3
financial columnist Ron Lieber wrote about Cortney Munna, a 26-year-old woman from a middle-class family who graduated from New York University with a liberal arts degree and more than $100,000 in student loan debt. “So why didn’t N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she’d passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?” Lieber asks. The N.Y.U. spokesperson’s answer—that it should be the family’s decision whether to get into debt—is disingenuous, since no one’s asking N.Y.U. to make the decision but simply to advise.

In the original article Munna states, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back.” In a follow-up piece she repudiated that statement, but said, “In retrospect, it’s absolutely clear to me that I should have thought more about the cost of the education versus career prospects.”

The bottom line is that you can get most or all of the important things an MFA program provides outside an MFA program, and far more cheaply
and
reliably. You can take high quality classes at a community writing program. You can pay a teacher or editor (who might actually
teach
at an MFA program) for individual help. You can immerse yourself full-time in a creative community via conferences and retreats. You can even get quality time with celebrity writers, editors, and agents via contests, conferences, and auctions, or plain old networking (Section 3.9).