So finish your degree and take care of your writing as you would take care of an animal or a child. Do not send it out into the world to do an adult's job. Just take care of it and, in its own way, it will take care of you.
I love Cary Tennis. His advice is always so gentle and illuminating. I want to marry him.
Here's what I wanted to tell the person who wrote in:
Go ahead and get that MFA. Masters' degrees can be surprisingly useful, and it often doesn't matter much what they're in. For example, if I had an MA in Underwater Basket Weaving, I could probably use that plus my credentials as a published writer to get a gig teaching creative writing as an adjunct at one of the many local colleges. Ed notes that I'd make more per hour washing dishes at one of the many local restaurants, but teaching writing would be more fun. I have another friend who set out to get a PhD in Anthropology, washed out of the program with an MA in a spell of severe depression, and then used the MA to get a job doing marketing analysis at the local paper. Whether you become a writer or not, you do need to earn a living, and it's rare that a degree doesn't come in handy. And you have a fellowship! You're not even paying for all of it! Finish the damn program, fraud or not!
Second, all writers -- or at least, every writer I have ever met -- has this weird experience where their estimation of their own ability falls precipitously even as their actual ability goes up. You start out (probably as a teenager) thinking you're brilliant while SUCKING COMPLETELY. And then your ability goes up as you begin to understand that you suck. (Plot those as lines on a graph. My friend Kelly (whose first novel came out last summer) believes that if those lines cross before you get published, you'll probably quit writing, but I think there are probably more variables than that.) Anyway, the fact that you think you suck and aren't getting better doesn't mean that you aren't sucking less all the time.
Third, grad school of any kind is likely to be the kind of miserable experience that will squash, at least temporarily, the love of whatever it was that drove you to grad school in the first place. Hopefully, you didn't start writing because you wanted to Be A Writer, you started writing because you wanted to write. Because you liked to write. Grad school isn't about love, it's about ... well, from what I can tell, it's about hazing. It's about creating a fairly arbitrary obstacle course for people who want entry to the Ivory Tower, and also about getting cheap labor in the form of TAs for the people already inside. And to some extent it's about imparting knowledge or training you in certain skills, but really, it's mostly hazing. Finish the hazing, take a breath, take a vacation (a honeymoon, maybe?) and then see if that love for writing returns to you.
And then, if you want to write, write.
If you don't want to write, do something else.
If you find that you want to write later, start writing again.
Fiction writing doesn't pay well enough to beat yourself up over this. If you don't enjoy the process, if you don't find yourself with stories that you want to tell, then find something you do enjoy and do that instead. Get a job that pays well and has benefits and doesn't suck out too much of your soul, pursue fun hobbies (knitting? oil painting? in-line skating?) during your free time.
And if your true love makes you choose between him and writing, he's not your true love, he's a soul-sucking demon in disguise. (Luckily, it sounds like he has no intention of doing that, but since you seem to be framing it as a choice, ART vs. MARRIAGE, I thought I'd throw that out there.)
Parts of the reply read like she's telling my own story. Like the part about starting out with a talent that's also a cloak, a way of staying aloof, and discovering through failures that writing (or whatever one's art might be) can be a way of saving one's self: reaching for what's soul-felt in our experience and discovering the humility to embrace what we might originally have scorned.
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Date: 2007-02-02 05:01 pm (UTC)I love Cary Tennis. His advice is always so gentle and illuminating. I want to marry him.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 05:13 pm (UTC)Go ahead and get that MFA. Masters' degrees can be surprisingly useful, and it often doesn't matter much what they're in. For example, if I had an MA in Underwater Basket Weaving, I could probably use that plus my credentials as a published writer to get a gig teaching creative writing as an adjunct at one of the many local colleges. Ed notes that I'd make more per hour washing dishes at one of the many local restaurants, but teaching writing would be more fun. I have another friend who set out to get a PhD in Anthropology, washed out of the program with an MA in a spell of severe depression, and then used the MA to get a job doing marketing analysis at the local paper. Whether you become a writer or not, you do need to earn a living, and it's rare that a degree doesn't come in handy. And you have a fellowship! You're not even paying for all of it! Finish the damn program, fraud or not!
Second, all writers -- or at least, every writer I have ever met -- has this weird experience where their estimation of their own ability falls precipitously even as their actual ability goes up. You start out (probably as a teenager) thinking you're brilliant while SUCKING COMPLETELY. And then your ability goes up as you begin to understand that you suck. (Plot those as lines on a graph. My friend Kelly (whose first novel came out last summer) believes that if those lines cross before you get published, you'll probably quit writing, but I think there are probably more variables than that.) Anyway, the fact that you think you suck and aren't getting better doesn't mean that you aren't sucking less all the time.
Third, grad school of any kind is likely to be the kind of miserable experience that will squash, at least temporarily, the love of whatever it was that drove you to grad school in the first place. Hopefully, you didn't start writing because you wanted to Be A Writer, you started writing because you wanted to write. Because you liked to write. Grad school isn't about love, it's about ... well, from what I can tell, it's about hazing. It's about creating a fairly arbitrary obstacle course for people who want entry to the Ivory Tower, and also about getting cheap labor in the form of TAs for the people already inside. And to some extent it's about imparting knowledge or training you in certain skills, but really, it's mostly hazing. Finish the hazing, take a breath, take a vacation (a honeymoon, maybe?) and then see if that love for writing returns to you.
And then, if you want to write, write.
If you don't want to write, do something else.
If you find that you want to write later, start writing again.
Fiction writing doesn't pay well enough to beat yourself up over this. If you don't enjoy the process, if you don't find yourself with stories that you want to tell, then find something you do enjoy and do that instead. Get a job that pays well and has benefits and doesn't suck out too much of your soul, pursue fun hobbies (knitting? oil painting? in-line skating?) during your free time.
And if your true love makes you choose between him and writing, he's not your true love, he's a soul-sucking demon in disguise. (Luckily, it sounds like he has no intention of doing that, but since you seem to be framing it as a choice, ART vs. MARRIAGE, I thought I'd throw that out there.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 01:21 am (UTC)Parts of the reply read like she's telling my own story. Like the part about starting out with a talent that's also a cloak, a way of staying aloof, and discovering through failures that writing (or whatever one's art might be) can be a way of saving one's self: reaching for what's soul-felt in our experience and discovering the humility to embrace what we might originally have scorned.