We all like to get together, that vanilla phrase that covers every encounter. Families get together. Friends get together. When they are lucky, authors get together, too. The complain about the injustices and the swap stories about the life preservers they’ve found. They even read each others’ books, honestly and quickly enough to help an author make the book better.
Lincoln Michel is a novelist with a edgy book, The Body Scout, all about a future where pro athletes have artificial limbs and more wired into their bodies. Michel also writes a bang-up Substack column that is free, and has years of blogging before that. Michel shared his take on what good an MFA can do for an author.
The one thing you can count on from MFA degrees is community, he says. He also warns us about borrowing tuition money for any arts degree. That tuition makes an automatic community for those who weathered the workshop critiques and writing over a two or three-year course of study.
Michel has an MFA, which amounted to his summary that “I wrote a lot, read authors I hadn’t heard of, and made lifelong friends, some of whom I still trade work with.”
He goes on to say that you don’t have to get an MFA if you don’t want to. “Many writers in all genres are published without an MFA degree. Similarly, countless degree holders never publish a book. Getting or not getting an MFA is not going to determine your publishing career.”
What will make a delicious difference to every writer is having a community. That can take many forms. For more than a decade I ran weekly workshops in the evenings, nights when writers created together. Lately I have a glass of wine every few weeks with two trusted allies, all of us working on making shapely fiction.
You need a community and can testify to the joys of one. I’d like to hear stories of writing relationships that feed your creativity and confidence. There will be some stories about the honest talk concerning your latest draft. Relationships are lots of things, and the moments when they’re honest can count for something too — if the truth is shared with a serving of respect.
Mostly, in a life where we make things up or try to explain them in nonfiction, we need to know somebody wants to hear what we’ve got to say. Whenever you’re running dry, or despairing over the outcome of creativity, a community lifts you up. Gabriella Pereira graduated from her MFA program and wrote DIY MFA, a guidebook to getting the same kind of goodness as that $25,000 graduate degree.
From time to time I open up a Finishing School group to build community. We meet over a six-week period, weekly, and plenty of the time is talking about how we’re producing and what might help. The practice rose up from the Amherst Writers & Artists training I completed. Cary Tennis put a name on it and a structure in his great Finishing School book.
You can find a few authors on your own who like a beverage and some snacks, then lead your group with plans for meetings. It’s not important how you gather, but that you make community to get help in creating anything. That’s the bullseye for the joy.
