If You Persistently Fulminate Against MFA Programs, There Is A Good Chance You Are Insane
Brett Puryear Makes the Case for Literary Craft
Dear Republic,
Brett Puryear takes the other side of the coin in our MFA exchange. Without taking away from anything in Autumn Widdoes’ horror story, Brett had a positive experience: built a community, improved his writing, and, it seems, caught a lot of trout. The best argument that not all is rotten in MFA-land: that Brett’s piece is very well-written.
-ROL
IF YOU PERSISTENTLY FULMINATE AGAINST MFA PROGRAMS, THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE YOU ARE INSANE
I held my MFA thesis reading at a roomy, warehouse-style coffee shop in Missoula, Montana, in the spring of 2015, standing at a podium double-fisting Rainier tallboys. I told the crowd, “I’m gonna take a drink every time there’s a line break in this story.” It was a good vibe, shitty art hanging on the walls. I’d cooked a truly huge pot of chicken and andouille sausage gumbo, enough to feed the fifty-some-odd people there.
This was two years after moving from my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, driving West to Montana to become, I guess, a “master of fine arts” — a master of whatever — although Montana was really on my to-apply list because of the trout fishing. I wound up getting more out of it than that.
The weekend before, at my buddy Brendan’s reading, I gave him an intro, praising his style and cracking wise about the Ray Carver mode, the MFA mode, saying my friend wasn’t about all that. I wanted the profs in the crowd to bristle at this. I felt like an outsider. I’d grown up in a red state, with non-academic parents, had barely graduated high school, spent a couple years stoned at a community college before I snaked my way into the local public U. I wouldn’t have gone to an MFA if I hadn’t been offered a full ride off my writing sample (my college GPA was okay, my GRE scores abysmal).
Being one of the Chosen Few with a tuition waiver and teaching stipend didn’t make me feel like an imposter. I knew this was what I wanted to do, knew I wanted to write and how I wanted to write, and already had an idea of what people mean by an “MFA short story.” I made a point of not applying to Iowa, and planned to never write a pale imitation of Carver.
But I loved Raymond Carver. I still love Raymond Carver. And I loved my peers, some of whom moved to Montana from New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago or Portland. Kids who’d grown up around books. I didn’t grow up in that culture. For me, the MFA was the only way out, the only way in.
The fallacy with MFA disdain is so simple it’s almost not worth writing about. It’s just another hilarious generalization, akin to notions that all short stories since 1900 are boring (said no one who’s ever read “Indian Camp,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Testimony of Pilot,” “Feathers” or “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”). Reading folks talk about the MFA as some globally soul-sucking plastic pursuit is — well, I was going to say confusing, but it’s not. I get it. I went into the MFA locked and loaded against any Iowa-fication of my fiction, leading me to this suspicion: a lot of MFA-haters might be good candidates for admission to MFA programs.
My writing wasn’t sanitized, pre-packaged for mainstream consumption. I just learned techniques and values that simply made my non-pre-packaged material better. I had a professor (David Gates, who wrote the novel Jernigan, which everyone should read) who marked up my stories, line by line, with astonishing precision. He’d learned to edit from Gary Fisketjon, who’d worked with Cormac McCarthy and Bret Easton Ellis. When I applied the edits, I was amazed to watch these sentences get better. I edit myself now. Watching a sentence level-up in real time is a thrill tantamount to blasting raw ideas onto the page. As advised, I’m especially hard on my adverbs.
There’s your pre-packaging. Just one way in which your creative freedom is stifled, a product of a systematic, state-issued conveyor belt of bourgeoise schlock, a thing worth screaming about on the internet. Unfortunately, if you believe this, then you might also believe that “Kurt said angrily” is as strong as “Kurt said, trembling, red in the face,” and that’s just too bad.
Obviously you don’t need to get an MFA to avoid shit like adverbs, passive voice, redundancies, POV problems, et cetera. I learned to avoid them in undergrad. Why? Because I had good teachers (and also read Stephen King’s On Writing). My MFA was just a more intense, two-year extension of that.
Why do writing teachers teach these things, when creative writing theoretically (adverb) cannot be taught? Because they’re useful tools for any writer who cares about rigor and craftsmanship at the level of the sentence.
I’m not defending MFAs so much as I’m defending literary craft. What’s lame about a crowd bemoaning the “MFA style” is that this commentary seems to arrive as a packaged deal (just as pre-packaged as the above-mentioned pre-packaging) with other too-cool sentiments and mind-blowing generalizations and pseudo-intellectual jargon — so self-satisfied and bloated it’s emptied of all meaning, like a hot air balloon, nothing in there but heat. The fire makes it fun to read, but that’s all. I’m not surprised that any writer who a) thinks everyone who’s ever attended an MFA is a drone, b) has a disdain for the concept of a writer-editor relationship, c) believes the publishing industry is an utter abomination and is entirely broken and corrupt, d) thinks publishing professionals are evil, and e) values unbridled prose-disasters over the hard work of sound narrative architecture, feels a little scorned that they haven’t placed a poem or story in a literary journal. Rant all you’d like, but that rant could use a little polish.
Getting published is extremely difficult because writing and rewriting is extremely difficult. That’s one reason why MFAs exist: you might actually need a couple years of immersion and mentorship just to get ten percent better. A powerful imagination and some raw talent does a hell of a lot of good, and I agree that an “over-workshopped” story is the result of a writer editing and revising the thing to death, killing your darlings like a Jason Voorhees roaming the dark halls between paragraphs, rendering a completely bloodless bloodbath. But there’s a happy medium here, and a disgust towards the value of craft (it is a dirty word), editing, and revision might result in a lot of good stories that could’ve been great. Not that there’s any guarantee — good, great, extraordinary — that any story’ll get published.
After grad school, I spent many months writing and revising a 4,000-word story, getting it exactly how I saw it in my mind. It was rejected about sixty times. This was in the late 2010s. It just got picked up by an indie, eight years after I finished it. Seems like justification enough to self-publish the thing, because eight years just doesn’t seem fair. But here’s an important point, one every young writer who’s frustrated ought to know: if you really want to be a writer, with publications or an audience, you are playing a long game, with no guarantees. It’s always been this way, with a few exceptions (Hemingway publishing The Sun Also Rises at twenty-six, and whoever the fuck Honor Levy is). I listened to a fun podcast recently with Andrew Boryga in which one of the hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, described his experience in an MFA program: no one expected fame, everybody was there because they wanted to write. Best case scenario, they get published and land a gig teaching writing. Doesn’t sound like such a bad life.
Some of the burgeoning stars of the Substack literati are rising to the top because they’re practiced writers who compose with extreme care, executing pieces of clarity and precision. I’m thinking of writers I’ve observed with a lot of authority in this space who are getting novels published and being written about in The New Yorker. They get likes and follows and sales because they’ve been in the game a long time, have worked with editors, have literary craft already baked into them via years of trial and error. Some of them might’ve attended MFA programs.
Have I covered my bases with clarity? Let me recap, or just cap: most good writing takes tons of practice; young prodigies in this discipline are very rare; you ought to expect to start publishing more widely in your thirties or forties so long as you stay clear of the myriad biases against literary merit. And you might want to stop harping on Dostoyevsky and Melville and Middlemarch, romancing literature from over a hundred years ago (it’s not coming back). Meanwhile, there’s much to be mined from late twentieth and early twenty-first century authors. Denis Johnson (among so many others) had an MFA from Iowa. Low- and middle-brow art, TV, cinema, music and crime fiction also ought to be employed. High snobbery and internet forum anguish, and a throwback allegiance to the classics, might have the opposite of their intended effect.
Amongst the crusaders of the literary renaissance, I’m seeing a lot of folks too dedicated to the highbrow, too devastated over the low. To make art in the twenty-first century, you’ll have to embrace both. I love Chopin’s sonatas but I also love Brooks & Dunn. Mainstream dweebs don’t get this either, which is why it’s so difficult to find working class fiction. Crusaders want to dial the clock back to Keats, when the 1980s and ‘90s would do just fine. The inventive dark humor of Barry Hannah and Joy Williams and the mud-spattered F-150 fiction of Larry Brown has fallen out of fashion. But, contrary to the rantings of a lot of the Screamers and Crusaders, present-day fiction is not all bad. The modern reappraisal of genre fiction and its integration into capital L literature has had exciting effects on the contemporary literary landscape, because writers are using television and film — Game of Thrones and Severance and A24 horror — as inspiration, too, in our genre-fied streaming era. How is any of this related? Writers who embrace contemporary culture rather than espouse a vicious hatred over it might find the best footing over the coming years.
What does any of this have to with an MFA? It’s part of contemporary literary culture. And you’re not going to burn it down. It will burn itself down if it sucks as badly as you think it does (and maybe it does, I graduated in 2015). And Substackers will likely create new versions of the workshop model (beyond the comments section of a serialized novel).
Should you get an MFA? Depends. Reading widely is the best teacher of all, and many brilliant writers get away with doing just that.
If you want to hone your skills but feel limited by what you can glean from your own reading, the MFA might be a good idea. Just don’t go if you aren’t funded. No one should get into debt for a fine arts degree unless mommy and daddy got the dough (mine did not). Either way, you might learn useful techniques you never would’ve thought of before. You might move to an exciting new town. You might meet some of your future best friends. You might learn that not all folks who enter a writing program are the same, and that their stories aren’t all the same, and that making generalized claims about these people and their writing is kind of stupid. Making blanket statements about MFA programs, American short fiction, realist fiction, genre fiction, fiction edited by Gordon Lish, the publishing industry, et cetera et cetera, doesn’t make you look like a rebel. It makes you look like someone whose thinking on the subject of writing is amateurish at best. And amateurs tend to have a really, really hard time getting published.
My opinions on MFAs and sentence-craft are based off two things: my own experience, and what’s worked for me in my own writing. Simple as that. A lot of people here seem really nice, talented, and passionate about literature. And I’m just one of them (the talented thing up in the air). There are a select few who make a hobby out of getting extremely aggressive (The Screamers) when any opinion differs from their own, or disrupts their aesthetic code of honor. A relatively benign note here and there can trigger a hilarious outburst. You know who you are. I like this place because it’s not Twitter circa 2017. Yet.
And before a Screamer drives to Montana and slashes my tires, I’m obligated to point this out: obviously the problem with my stance, up to here, is that a lot of bad fucking writers get into MFA programs and a lot of bad fucking writing gets published, often by Big Five houses. Confusing and true! And a lot of great writing appears on Substack! I get that. It’s exciting as hell. Some of the best nonfiction writing I’ve encountered in recent times appears in this ecosystem. Legacy outlets like The New Yorker are starting to get the hint, while noting that the best fiction being produced today is as rarely found on this platform as it is in bookstores — and that’s simply because great fiction is just kind of rare altogether.
What’s likely to happen in the nearer future is legacy mags farming out work to high-caliber Substackers to preserve their own relevance. Why would someone like, say,
, whose pieces on William Vollmann and Cormac McCarthy are rife with astonishing journalistic rigor, not wind up being courted by the likes of Vanity Fair à la (speaking of Cormac)? My guess is literary agents will wind up doing the same. In addition to this, new publications will continue to emerge via the platform.When I joined Substack in February, The Metropolitan Review had just started, and I read
’s review of a Booker Prize-nominated novel called Headshot, ostensibly a boxing novel. I felt like I’d found the right internet hangout, the right lunch table. Mr. Perez points out that the author of Headshot “understands words like ‘backstory’ and ‘craft’ and ‘character motivation’ but the book is bereft of any deep insight or magic,” but then goes on to point out deep and embarrassing flaws in the author’s craft:… the fight scenes, at best, are slightly above competence level, and at worst, utterly lacking in style and vigor. Here’s how a typical exchange is captured between boxers: “Then Iggy swings hard and lands several point-earning hits.” That’s the extent of the boxing language and lingo … Here’s another scene: “Izzy advances forward, cornering Iggy into the rope of the ring ….” Not to belabor the point, but why not write “into the ropes?” Why is “of the ring” necessary? Where else would she be cornering her opponent? The rope of a cinder block? The rope of a dog? The rope of a stoplight? This might seem pedantic, but this is less a boxing-writing issue than it is a simple prose problem. At times, the writing in Headshot is so bad that the book comes off as unedited …
This is wickedly (adverb) funny, but it also gets at why the thing doesn’t work. It’s the sentences. It’s a “prose problem.” Some might think panning a book based on its particulars is unfair at best, but I disagree, namely when these particular offenses are repeated.
Anyway, odd that the writer’s agent didn’t catch “into the ropes of the ring” in the manuscript, odd that an editor didn’t catch it before moving forward with publication, appalling that the book was nominated for a major literary prize (since Perez’s piece came out, Headshot became a finalist for the Pulitzer).
As Rick Moody points out at the end of his introduction to Amy’s Hempel’s Collected Stories (mocked in the same ROL piece espousing a puzzling hatred of short stories), “It’s all about the sentences.”
Hate to break it to you, but it kind of is. And what this community might need is more writers who are well-equipped or brave enough to agitate for prose-quality in published fiction, as opposed to writers (some writers) who are participating in the deprecation of prose-quality — and calling it underground, cheapening any claims that this platform bears the keys to some literary renaissance. I mean, it certainly could, and maybe will. (The journal publishing my eight year-old story isn’t paying me, The Republic of Letters is. Eyebrows raised.) But if you want a new literary Wild West, the best shit — the most memorable — is still going to rise to the top, and it’s going to be from folks who’ve exercised some measure of mastership over the architecture of language and narrative. Same goes in mainstream spaces. There’s always been stuff that’s bad or just okay, and a smattering of great stuff. The great stuff gets remembered. We remember Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams fifteen years later. In fifteen more, we might not remember Headshot.
Underground writing doesn’t make for good writing. Good writing does. And good writing comes from those who attended MFA programs and those who did not. It appears on Substack and it appears in literary journals and on the shelves at your local bookstore if you look hard enough and, if you’re serious about this writing thing, you ought to be looking pretty hard.
Did we get off-topic here? The MFA thing might’ve been just some way to make another point, and if I’m not getting that one across then, well, maybe this piece could’ve used another draft.
I’ll wind back up to the top. It’s almost not worth writing about: the MFA-or-not-to-MFA thing is a non-issue. MFA if you need it, don’t if you don’t. But you might learn far more than avoiding adverbs at a writing program. More tools in your toolbox. (I have to add that there’s nothing more satisfying than a surprising, well-placed adverb.) Free and uninhibited creative expression is great, but there are tools to use to make it better. Writing well and re-writing is also about adding and deleting and moving shit around; this sentence or paragraph ought to go up here instead of here, this POV character can’t possibly be describing something in that room when she’s in this room; in this string of dialogue the characters keep addressing each other by name, even though they’re the only people in the room and it’s not a company Zoom conference; half of the final paragraph needs to be cut because this is the sentence we want to land on (because fiction writing is very similar to stand-up comedy — no one pays admission to see a comic on stage blabbing incoherently, and the jokes need to land.)
You might not need an MFA in your pursuit of mastery, but mastery ought to be the pursuit. By any means necessary. And your means just might be a campus a thousand miles from where you already live, in a new place amongst new people. New ideas. New buildings, bars, rivers, plains, mountains.
Along the road, experience comes into play. Holing up in your apartment reading posts online might just lead to more solipsistic autofiction or a bad version of the Big Dense Thinky Novel of Ideas. If that’s your thing, cool, but the lack I’ve observed in publishing recent years concerns not a dearth of immersive, introspective or “big” books, but stories, stories by writers who can describe the particulars of this world and the people in it, with verve and drama and danger and sentences cut by a jeweler.
What I’m observing here, being an MFA person as well as an enthusiastic Substack user, are two worlds, both of which have merits and flaws and cools and uncools. I read and write a great deal, I have many friends who are writers — many of whom went to MFA programs, many of whom are well-read and write with integrity and the aim of stylistic singularity — but I had never heard the phrase dimes square until I read a few pieces on this platform, and if I were to mention it to any writer friends I know I’d get nothing but blank stares (for a wholly online “scene,” the LitStack corner is predictably NYC-centric). Anyway, you have an ecosystem associated with MFAs and trad publishing aspirations, and then you have the scene-y new Wild West that would like to burn it all down and expand our notions of narrative (sounds great!), get us back to the Romantics and snuff out the gatekeepers (and somehow knows who the fuck Honor Levy is). Combining the two sets could have excellent results. Wild West ethos and an eye towards craft. Hell, that’s the combo that gave us a writer like Denis Johnson in the first place (if you don’t like Johnson, fine). Trust me, I get it. I used to hate the notion of craft. I railed against literary conformity. But I was just a kid then.
Before I wrap this thing up, let me introduce (belatedly) a gigantic caveat, which complicates any assertions I’ve made thus far: I attended my MFA over ten years ago, and have no idea what they’re like now. I started aggressively submitting stories and wrote my first novel in the 2010s (I could not get an agent), and have endured massive amounts of rejection and frustration, and have suffered very ungenerous (and that’s being generous) thoughts about the publishing industry along the way. But now my skin’s like iron, and I’ve proved to myself one key thing: I’m never going to stop. And I suggest you don’t either. Stop crying about MFAs and editors and the literary establishment and please allocate some of your time spent fashioning think-pieces and notes and write that goddamned book. Write your Big Bad Millennial Novel. Write the gall-blasting shit out of it.
Months after I moved to Montana I’d made good friends with a fiction writer from Texas named Hicks, a writer who’d attended my and my gal’s baby shower this year and whose wedding I’ll be attending in the summer. Then, in 2013 in the fall when the Aspen trees stripe the mountains gold, Hicks and I drove down Highway 12 into the Idaho woods and soaked in a natural hot springs and drank beer. We probably spent some time in those springs shitting on an MFA we’ve never regretted going to.
On our drive back that afternoon, we wound up the two-lane, threading a tight, steep green valley with no cell service. We rounded a curve and a police cruiser appeared, parked on the road shoulder with its lights strobing. I slowed the Jeep. Rounded the curve a little more.
There was a sporty motorcycle toppled on the road and some glass strewn across the highway and a body lay beneath a white sheet. No ambulance had arrived yet. We’d both had road sodas tucked between our legs, dark blood fanned out from the white sheet’s head. We passed the dead body. We didn’t say anything. We kicked up a little speed about a quarter mile later and a bald eagle soared overhead and we parked the car and got out and finished our beers.
It almost sounds like something you’d make up but it wasn’t. I don’t think either one of us has ever written about that. The scene might appear later in some draft of some story or novel — who knows. But one of us will likely steal this dead driver’s life away from his body, just so long as one of us gets good enough.
Brett Puryear grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and lives in Missoula, Montana, with his family. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, CutBank, Writer's Foundry Review, BULL, Fiddleblack and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana. He's currently shopping a Southern Gothic horror novel set in the east Tennessee mountains.
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My favorite Gates is Preston Falls. Gates at his darkest. Very cool to have been edited by him.
> I’m not defending MFAs so much as I’m defending literary craft.
I think that misses a lot of the point of the lion’s share of MFA criticism, which is not so much about fear of being edited or having their craft challenged (I can’t think of a considered take that does), and which I think a lot of folks actually hunger for (thus the MFA) but are instead saddled with nonliterary policing, clique-formation, and the rest—all the stuff in the way, and which often happens to enforce a resultingly safe style.
The closest common complaint to it is the more systemic one of the workshop itself, but that is mixed with all of the above, plus the idea that you’re specifically not being honed in your craft, but getting it unavoidably washed out by consensus.
Some people seem unbothered by it, but I don’t think, especially within a field that is pretty notoriously filled with sensitive folks, not being bothered is an argument.