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MFA + DIY: An Entrepreneurial Take on the MFA Debate

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Please welcome Gabriela Pereira, author of DIY MFA: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community, to Writer Unboxed today! Gabriela is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who wants to challenge the status quo of higher education. As the founder of DIYMFA.com, her mission is to empower writers, artists and other creatives to take an entrepreneurial approach to their professional growth. Gabriela earned her MFA in creative writing from The New School and teaches at national conferences, regional workshops, and online. She is also the host of DIY MFA Radio, a popular podcast where she interviews bestselling authors and publishing industry experts.

Today, she revives the MFA debate here at WU. In her words:

For the past eight years, I’ve dedicated my life to studying how writing is taught and learned. While I do believe the traditional MFA or typical workshop model we find at most writing schools can work for some writers, these pedagogical approaches are not universally effective. I believe that when writers take an entrepreneurial approach to their professional growth and education, they set themselves up for learning that gets results and helps them reach their goals.

You can learn more about Gabriela and DIY MFA on her website, and by following her on Facebook and Twitter.

MFA + DIY: An Entrepreneurial Take on the MFA Debate

It’s back-to-school season, and like every year, thousands of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed writers are flocking to academic campuses around the world, searching for that golden ticket that will turn them into authors. This ticket, of course, is the Master of Fine Arts (or MFA) and it is perhaps the most over-priced and un-useful degree in all of academia. I should know: I have one.

When I graduated with my MFA, I didn’t feel as though I learned anything in that academic environment that I wouldn’t have been able to learn in another context. My concerns with the traditional MFA are not just ideological or economic, but also pedagogical. There’s a lot of debate around the advantages and disadvantages of the MFA, but rarely does anyone talk about curriculum.

Over the past eight years that I’ve spent developing writing curricula, I’ve discovered a linchpin, a core factor that can make (or break) a writer’s ability to learn and improve her craft. This is the entrepreneurial mindset, and it means adopting processes and systems from fields outside of writing (like tech startups) and using them to improve your craft. To learn more about how to take an entrepreneurial approach to your writing, you can download a free DIY MFA Starter Kit, but here are three techniques you can apply to your writing right away.

1. Use Iteration to Improve Your Writing Process. Most MFA programs focus on the workshop model: You write something, get feedback from your peers and an instructor, and then you fix it. The problem with this approach is that it assumes you have no problem getting words on the page. The workshop model might help you improve the words once you’ve written them, but it does nothing to help you with the first draft (other than that terror of missing a deadline).

This is where an iterative approach can help writers become more productive. Just as tech startups might beta-test a piece of software, then adjust it as they get feedback from users, so too can writers test and improve their writing process. Next time you sit down to write, treat it as a mini-experiment. Keep track of how long you write, and how many words you produce. Many writers already track their word counts, especially if they are participating in NaNoWriMo or working toward a deadline.

Instead of just logging your output, make note of other environmental variables as well. Were you writing at home at your desk or on-the-go? Was it in the morning, afternoon, or late at night? Was the environment quiet or noisy? As with any experiment, you will want to adjust one input variable at a time, so you’ll know which part of your process is having what effect on your output, and you will need to collect enough data so you can see a pattern emerge. I find that testing one input variable over 10-15 writing sessions is usually enough.

If you’re serious about making a career from your writing, you need to work on both the quality of what you write, and the quality of your writing process, so you can produce those words faster and more efficiently over time.

2. Read in a Way that Fuels Your Writing. Authors and writing instructors often say that to write well you must also read. But how do you do that without taking time away from your writing? This is where reading with purpose comes in. While I think there’s a time and place for reading for pleasure (it’s called vacation), I am also a pragmatist and firmly believe that you must read in a way that fuels your writing. This begins by choosing the right books.

There are four types of books you must read regularly: competitive books (i.e. comps), contextual books, contemporary books, and the classics. I recommend reading a minimum of three or four books in each category per year.

Competitive and contextual books relate directly to your own work-in-progress (WIP). The competitive books are ones that most directly “compete” with your current project. Knowing these comps is important both as you write your book and when you pitch agents or build your platform later on. Contextual books include anything that informs or lends context to your project. These could be books you read for research, but they could also be books with similar themes to your own.

Aside from reading books that are relevant to your current project, I also think it’s important to read a few recent releases and some classics. For these two categories, I recommend focusing on books in the genre of your WIP, so that you still build your reading around your current project. Keep in mind also that “classic” doesn’t necessarily mean “old,” and you can view a relatively recent book as a classic if it has shed new light on that genre.

3. Build Your Community and Assemble Your Circle of Trust. If you take an entrepreneurial or DIY approach you can assemble a circle of trust for yourself. Your support network needs to provide four things, and rarely will you find all of these in one person. The four components of a writer’s circle of trust are critique, accountability, support, and advice.

Critique is what people think of when they talk about having a network for their writing careers, but the other facets are equally important. Of course, your critique partners may also provide accountability and support, but that may not be true for all writers. Often your circle of trust may have many people filling different roles.

That iterative approach that you can use in your writing also applies to the reading and community pieces. Every few months step back and look at your reading and community. Ask yourself three important questions:

  • What’s working, and how can I do more of that?
  • What’s not working but can be improved? (And how do I improve it?)
  • What should I stop doing altogether?

The beauty of a writer’s education is that it never comes to a close. We can keep learning and improving until our very last breath. As Eric Hoffer once said: “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

What steps have you taken to improve your process and your craft? If you’ve taken a single step toward your own personal MFA, what is it? We’d love to hear from you in comments.

Comments

  1. It was great to see you at Thrillerfest, Gabriela. I loved our chat at the Craftfest luncheon. You’ve bought your idea a long way.

    I especially like your advice to read with purpose. I do, though I call it reading analytically. If a novel pleases me, I slow down and re-read the passages that work particularly well. I figure out how. Those understandings become tools of the craft.

    Methodology matters. Critique tells you how what you’ve written strikes others. What it doesn’t reveal is how to cause a story seed to grow; that is, how to take a news scrap, a what-if, a personal experience, or any other starting point and elaborate from it plot potential, character struggles, larger meaning and all the many things that make up a novel.

    Anyone can accomplish that, as we see from the many successful writers who do not have MFA’s. (There are many who do, too, of course.) What’s important to get is confidence. Every writer ultimately must own their authority. Every new novel requires both humility and hubris.

    Saying *can do* is what you do so well, Gabriela. I greatly appreciate your methods but just as much your message: Successful writing is not only for the elite, the moneyed, or the academy.

    Writing belongs to us all and its methods are as accessible as books on library shelves. All writers ultimately invent themselves. Heart coupled with smarts is the way. Great post.

    • Wow! Thank you so much for these kind words. It means a lot coming from you. It was so great seeing you at ThrillerFest as well!

      I think you hit the nail right on the head with the idea of getting confidence. Many writers who get MFA’s (myself included, I’m afraid) go into it for the wrong reason: because they want some external validation and the MFA seems like the path of least resistance. My primary goal first and foremost has always been to encourage writers to “validate themselves.” From that confidence comes the ability to trust their instincts and like you said “own their authority.”

  2. Thanks for a truly thought-provoking post. Rather than wait for ‘feedback’ in the conventional sense, this process generates a cyclical self-created, self-imposed learning system to constantly improve our writing. It’s also written in dead clear prose. Well done, Gabriella.

    • Thank you, Tom! The cyclical iteration piece has been a game-changer for me and I don’t just use it for writing. I use it in my business and even in my parenting. In fact, you could say that parenting is in itself one big iterative process. :)

  3. Thank you for the suggestions, here, Gabriela. Inspiring! I don’t have an MFA but have friends who do. Honestly, they are struggling for book sales and balancing their writing demands like the rest of us. One friend told me that his MFA does get him more attention at the gate with editors and agents, mostly because it’s a testament that you are a serious and trained writer. But in the end, it’s the writing that has to soar, not the resume. Your advice ‘a writer’s education is that it never comes to a close’ is wonderful.

    • Thanks so much, Paula!

      I’m sure there might be a slight boost that an MFA will give in terms of dealing with gatekeepers, but I definitely agree with you that the writing is the most important thing in the end.

      What I often wonder about is the cost-benefit. Does that slight boost in terms of moving up just a little in the slush pile really justify the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition? And also will other options—like attending a conference, taking a workshop, being part of a writing association or community—give writers a similar boost but at a more reasonable cost?

      And since a writer’s education can last a lifetime, I’m now big fan of pacing myself so I can keep investing in my education for the long term.

  4. Gabriela, thank you for this helpful post. You’ve shown there’s more to writing than writing. For me, time is part of the process, which includes working through revisions, submitting my work, and waiting. The most surprising and humbling part of the writing process is all of the people involved in publishing process.

    • My pleasure, Heather. Also, I can totally relate to what you said. I remember the first time I got a glimpse of all the people involved in the publishing process how eye-opening (and also slightly terrifying) it was. Honestly, this is one of the reasons I find writing such a thrill… it’s never the same thing two days in a row. The waiting part has always been a bit of a challenge for me, though. Patience is not one of my finer qualities. ;-)

  5. Great post Gabriela. Learning to write is definitely something one can do on his own and my process is also to read and write with intention. I’ll take a class (in person, not online) every couple of years and I always make a quantum leap. But the bulk of education happens slowly in silence and a great deal of practice. Thank you for your words and vision.

    • Thanks, Vijaya! I totally agree with what you say about the slow incremental growth that happens in those quiet writing moments. It’s taken a while, but over the years I’ve learned to identify which skills require the quantum leap approach of taking a class, and which skills work best when I learn them by doing.

      Which skills fall into each category will differ from person to person, but for me the quantum leap skills are more technical things like trying to master specific writing techniques, or learning some aspect of tech or marketing (like a new social media strategy). But nothing beats the day-in-day-out of consistent doing.

  6. Gabriela,

    I really, really want to believe that an MFA isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. :) When I saw Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s book signing/interview with Susan Orlean, I asked why she’d gotten an MFA at 50ish. She said she didn’t have time to waste. My hunch is that the intensity of such a program is beneficial. Her bestseller, “The Nest” started as a short story and her instructor told her it was a novel.
    At that time, I looked into some of the largest advances given to books. An MFA was a common denominator.
    “The Nest” Sweeney had a Bennington Writing Seminars MFA

    “The Girls” Emma Cline’s MFA is from Columbia.

    “Bittersweet” Sephanie Danler’s MFA is from The New School.

    The list goes on.

    I don’t believe all MFA programs are the same. If someone gets into some of the top schools, that is probably very worthwhile. For those unable to pursue an MFA, is there a way to replicate the experience of having superior writing instruction over a period of years? Is it possible that such instruction is what really makes the difference? (Asking for a friend . . .)

    • Such great questions, here, Cathy. Certainly an MFA could serve as a “boot camp” of sorts, compressing years of independent learning into a few short semesters. My main concern has to do with the cost-benefit aspect: do the benefits really justify the investment? As with most hard questions, the answer is: it depends.

      I’m the first to admit that when I attended the MFA program at The New School, I was in a privileged position. My husband was working at a fancy law firm at the time, we had no kids, and we had built up a nice little nest egg that allowed me to take a few years off from work and “follow my bliss.” We also had the luxury of living in the greater NYC area with at least 8 MFA programs at my fingertips, meaning we wouldn’t have to move. At the time, it made total sense for me to go back to school because the cost was feasible and the benefits certain justified it.

      But now it’s a different story and going back to school would be inconceivable. We have two small children. Both hubby and I have a full-time day jobs, since I now run DIY MFA full-time. If I were considering MFA programs now, it would be a no-brainer. I wouldn’t do it, both because of the expense and the constraints on my time.

      In the end, it’s a question that all writers must answer for themselves. The MFA is very good at serving a specific group of writers very well. What I’ve observed, however is that this group is a fairly small slice of the publishing pie.

  7. As someone who has neither the time nor inclination to add another degree to my name, I appreciate your practical suggestions. Especially liked the idea of measuring my word output under different variables. I can start that one right now!

    Great post!

    • Haha! As a social scientist at heart, I can get super-nerdy about measuring my writing output in different conditions. At one point, I even tracked number of words, time spent writing, and words-per-hour so I could get a sense for when I produced the most, but when I did it most efficiently. Glad to hear you enjoyed the post.

  8. Gabriela,

    Thanks so much for this post. As a teacher, my first inclination when I started writing was to do what I know best, get another degree. I really like the points you’ve made here about the MFA and process of becoming a writer, and look forward to checking out your website.

    I’ve intuitively read with intention, just didn’t know it was called that. I’ve been dissatisfied with my WIP, and recently picking up Game of Thrones has showed me why. Loved this part of your post.

    My wife writes and publishes (DIY) FT, and I do it PT, so we are saturated in plotting together, and other writerly activities. I also have a biz degree, so the part of your discussion of thinking entrepreneurly really resonated. Thanks again for a thought-provoking read.

    • Hi Derek! So glad to hear that the post resonated with you! Also, I’m slightly jealous that you and your wife are both writers and can be immersed in storytelling side-by-side. :)

  9. Hi Gabriela:
    This was thought-provoking and offered me a new way to look at pushing my writing to another level in measurable ways. But I don’t agree with the general comments that MFAs are often not worth the money. I wrote my first two novels with on vacation as a full time teacher, in isolation. When I finished them, I wasn’t sure who to share them with, so my brother and a good friend who is a writer read them, giving me feedback for revision.

    I attended various writing conferences, but since I am relatively introverted and take time to make trusted friends, I didn’t come away with lots of writer friends to exchange work with. I started to see that the money I was putting toward conferences could go to a larger endeavor.

    A few years later I completed an MFA in writing for kids in a low-residency program. It was life changing. I do mean that. For the first time in my life, my friends were all people who loved what I loved, talked my language, dreamed like me and were on their way to various levels of success in the business. It was motivating and inspiring. Just being in that company, with its the expectations, and the optimism for the future were worth the money. Writing is isolating. Writing takes ENORMOUS self-motivation. And being in a workshop was much, much more than listening to feedback and doing revisions. It was looking closely at ALL the work, thinking of ways to appreciate it and improve it, whether it was mine or not. The wisdom of the teachers was fabulous (I still re-read notes on lectures, or listen again) and would have taken decades to garner on my own.

    Mostly, though, I have a large, trusted community of friends with whom to communicate about the life of the writer and all it entails, which lifts me every single day.

  10. Hi Linden,

    I completely understand your perspective and I think that for some writers a traditional MFA can be a game-changing milestone. It sounds like it had a great positive impact on your writing life and I’m so glad that path worked for you. Going into an MFA program for the community is hands-down one of the best reasons to do it.

    My main concern, however, is when writers approach a traditional MFA ill-informed as to the costs and benefits, and see it not for what it really is—an opportunity to build community and improve their their craft—but instead as a “magic bullet” solution. Unfortunately I’ve seen many writers ascribe to the latter belief, and I’m the first to admit that I went to an MFA program for all the wrong reasons myself. When I enrolled I thought I needed that external validation, that stamp of approval to lend my writing credibility. I also wanted a clear path to publication, to get on “the fast track” as it were. Knowing what I know now, I realize those were not good reasons to attend an MFA and my goal has become to help prospective students think through that decision and—if they choose to enter a program—do so with eyes open.

    I think there’s also a very big difference between low-residency and full-time programs. By their very nature, low-residency programs tend to attract writers who are self-starters and who embrace the idea of writing alongside already full and rich lives. Full-time programs, on the other hand, often teach writers to work in a petri dish-like environment, separate from the real world. When they graduate, many are unable to reconcile how to juggle their writing with everything else in their lives. I know this because I observed similar patterns in many fellow classmates.

    I believe the biggest danger, however, is when programs are set up such that writers have to choose between their life responsibilities and the MFA. Aside from the practical issues (i.e. that many writers simply can’t afford to choose the latter) this trade-off also means that many traditional MFA programs comprise a financially privileged and often not-very-diverse group. If writing education is available only to the privileged few, then what does that say about the voices represented in our culture? This isn’t true of every single program of course, and some schools are excellent at providing funding, but it does seem to be a widespread trend.

    It sounds like you made a very well-thought-out, deliberate decision and that in the end the traditional MFA was the right choice for you. I’m thrilled that you found a path helped you build a community of likeminded colleagues and get your stories out into the world. In the end the do-it-yourself approach is not anti-MFA by any means, but simply an alternative for those writers who might not fit that mold. Write on!

 

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