Grad School: Passion, Terror and Failure

Contributor: Speak Coffee

I refer back to Poets & Writer’s magazine entirely too much, but it’s what I read and what I respect. It arrived in my mailbox on Tuesday and there was this article blasting workshops, or more precisely there was an article blasting workshop instructors that aren’t bastards. The theory being that a bastard running your workshop makes you work harder. You’ll either quit or grow up. The growing up will, of course, make you this though, crafty, hooks ‘em right off the bat, tough writer dude. It might also have something to do with the author of the article thinking himself a bastard to his writing students. He’s helping start a program at Butler if you’re interested in the bastard’s boot camp approach.

It goes on talking up and then talking down the MFA as a place for writing or not writing. And about the illusion workshop creates that someone will want to read your work. Workshop students are, after all, graded on participation not just their writing. And in the real world no one wants to read your writing. You have to make them want to read it.

To succeed in writing you need (according to this joe) to experience passion, failure and terror with your writing. That “talent” isn’t near enough. He’d rather you have “passion.”

For all the time he spends harping on how others don't define "talent" I'm not sure if he ever defines "passion." But I rather think it breaks down into desire and persistence. Aren't I persisting? Isn't my mad dash application push to all your lovely programs which I left law school in hopes of throwing myself into wholehearted proof of my mad desire and persistence?

I know people who, at this point, would want to call it quits. They would make proclamations like “I don’t have to prove myself to anyone,” and other phrases that would get them exactly no where. Okay, so this is the game I have to play. I’m putting on my tough face. This is my tough face: grr. Did ya like that? Because I could do it again. Grrr.

Why am I doing all this? Why am I subjecting myself to the cost and time of grad school? The low income level and high stress. Not to mention the waiting game and the rejection letters. (Got two on Thursday. Some--okay, lots of--rejection is to be expected on the MFA circuit.) Why do all of this? Because more than I want to work a crappy office job that will suck up a majority of my non-sleeping life while writing novels that may or may not make it, I want to spend my life writing and being part of the process of making. I can do that by teaching workshop. People will pay me to be part of the making. And that excites me beyond all other notions.

Yes, I enjoy writing. I enjoy the creation. The development. The pride in finished work. I enjoy moving people, touching them with something I have written. But more than other people liking it and finding value in it, I enjoy the making. I enjoy being inside my own head, pulling out all these stories and sewing them together. I am happy at my keyboard plodding away.

Besides, I’d make a pretty sweet professor. Hartley said so and I believe her.