14 things about the MFA

After doing more musing on what I've gotten out of the first year of an MFA program, I've come up with a list of 14 generalities that I think reflect the experience (or at least my experience) pretty accurately.

1. Everyone who goes gets something out of it, but everyone gets something different. No two MFA experiences are the same.

2. At some point in the first year, you will doubt many things: your ability, your commitment, your talent, your discipline, even why you write at all. You believe no one in the outside world cares about what you're doing.

3. You will be more moody than you've ever been in your life. Probably more self-absorbed too. I remember thinking, Geez, maybe I should get a cat, just so I have someone to take care of besides myself.

4. You will probably find only one or two other writers whose writing you would actually go out and buy to read.

5. You will encounter some incredibly arrogant pricks. (Male and female, though usually male.)

6. You will, from time-to-time, believe that your writing is way better than almost everyone else in your class.

7. You will, from time-to-time, (usually after workshop), believe that your writing is so atrocious that even the girl who writes really sentimental fiction that you can't stand writes better than you.

8. You begin to wonder what literary fiction really means, and who reads it?

9. If you're lucky, you get all the writing-for-other-people out of the way in the first year, and start writing for yourself again. Also, you stop believing by the second semester that your professor knows everything there is to know about what makes writing good.

10. You will learn to distill the gems from the bullshit.

11. You will be humbled, and you will admire everyone who tries to do this forever after. Writing is one of the hardest things in the world to do well. I often tell my mom that being a surgeon would be much easier than being a writer, and I truly believe that. She's starting to, too.

12. You will learn a vocabulary for dealing with your weaknesses. You will be able to express what's wrong with your writing and thus understand what to do with your writing in revision.

13. You will become a better reader. You will see more of the construction of writing than you ever have before. This has the double-edged effect of making you appreciate really great fiction more keenly, while also making you stick your tongue out at stuff that hasn't been composed with great care and effort. You can become a bit of a snob in this way.

14. You will worry that you have nothing to say. If you're lucky, you will realize that the way you see the world can be interesting to everyone, and that your experience of the world is valid, and that you have the right to write.

Johnny Won't Read

Or at least that's what this recent study has found.

I just don't know what to make of this, especially as a person who wants nothing more than for books to remain central in the public's life. Hey, I like entertainment as much as the next person, but why don't people think of books as a primary form of entertainment anymore?

Is it because books are hard to read? I don't really think so--people of all classes and education levels read less, according to the aforementioned study. I grant that some books are harder to read than others--I had to keep a dictionary handy as I read Nabokov's "Lolita"--but now I know what an 'alembic' is, a word I'd never, ever encountered before, and a word that served the author and narrator brilliantly. I learned something. Hey, learning stuff is fun, isn't it?

Or maybe it isn't, though I'm not sure why that should be either. What would life be like if you simply didn't learn things anymore? And not things like Britney Spears's fiancee's name (which I'm ashamed to admit has seeped into my memory)--but real things, like how something works, or a new, useful word, or how cheese is made. Stuff that has nothing to do with learning something trivial about other people. In other words, stuff that helps you learn something, ultimately, about yourself and your own capabilities.

Is it, then, because books are read in solitude? I know myself how hard it can be to read something and then have no one to talk about it with, which I guess is one of the reasons Oprah started her book club--people like to talk about their experience with art, generally speaking. So, this could be a possibility--it's hard to get people you like to read the same books as you at the same time. Still, I don't *need* to discuss books with people who have read them--I can get a lot from reading a book by myself. Of course, there's also the social aspect that's missing: Watching movies and television can be done in a group, though I often feel isolated, especially when I leave a theater and turn to someone only to discover that they have had a totally different experience than I have. Really, we experience all entertainment/art alone.

What I think is the real reason for the decline is the *time* it takes to read a book. Even a relatively slim book of 200 or so pages can take a good couple of weeks to read, if you're only reading before you go to bed, or at some other equally small sliver you carve out of your day. Now, I don't have kids or pets, so I won't pretend to know what it's like for parents or pet owners, but I think that this lack of time is largely an issue of perception rather than reality. It is so easy to turn on a television and seek diversion, and it seems arduous to have to read--the passive vs. active. And yet, truly useless television--my watching of the Food Network, for example, just for the hell of it--makes time disappear so that it's as if I fell asleep and woke up a few hours later. It slips away just that easily. But when I read a book, time slows down, becomes luxurious, even three dimensional. And I don't finish reading feeling as though I've lost time, but rather that I've gained it. It's as if the more television we watch, the more we feel that it's all we have time for.

So what, you ask?

I know there are already campaigns for turning off the television (and now it's the Internet, too, though there is reading going on there, though not all of it active or alimentary), but instead, I propose that you bring a book with you to the couch as part of your normal routine, and when you just feel that hint of guilt for doing nothing but watching TV, pick up the book, and read what you can during a commercial break. If you feel like continuing, great. If not, that's ok, too. Maybe you can read a little more during the next break. Chances are, if you've got a good book in front of you, you'll be more captivated and energized by the story in the book than in whatever decorating show or news program you're watching.

If you try this, I'd like to hear how it goes. Not long ago, I had a discussion with an English teacher who believes that books are irrelevant in our visual culture. Being visually literate is important, but I just can't believe that books, these things that have served us so beautifully for over 500 years (not to mention written language itself) can ever be truly out of date or irrelevant. I believe in the power of a good story, a well-expressed idea. I believe that books can exalt our fragmented thoughts and transform them into something sublime.

P.S.
Here's an interesting book-tracking site I found today. It encourages you to take your books and make them "free." Bookcrossing.com