learning

That MFA Article and Your Writing Life

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This is yet another blog about the MFA article that has caused great debate in the writing community. It popped up all over Facebook with people both for and against it. Chuck Wendig posted an entertaining and somewhat scathing critique on his own blog. People were all over the place, raging or praising.

I thought about leaving it alone. What else could I add? But divisive topics tend to produce ravenous support or condemnation. Instead, I offer indifference. I don’t mean that I don’t care. It’s just that neither side affects me. Let’s review:

1. Writer’s are born with talent.

As with anything, that is true. None of us start at the same baseline. Some people just run faster, but the idea that talent trumps all is an unfortunate and inaccurate statement. It steals credit from those who have succeeded by making it seem that they were gifted their skill by a simple combination of genetics and fate. It doesn’t work that way. Michael Phelps has a talent for swimming. He has the perfect physicality for it. He also spent eight hours a day in the pool training for the Olympics. Phelps wasn’t handed gold medals because of his talent. He earned them through hard work. All of your favorite writers have to work very hard to produce books. It requires hour upon hour of writing and revision, no matter how talented you are. I’ve known some very talented writers who could use less talent and more actual putting words on paper. But it doesn’t matter. My talent is my talent. I can’t control it. I just do the best I can with what I have.

2. If you didn’t decide to take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you’re probably not going to make it.

What is writing? It’s storytelling on a basic level. I didn’t start writing prose until I was in college, unless you count a couple of things here and there, including some ill-advised Fern Gully fan-fiction. I drew comic books. I told stories in a visual form. As with every other kid, I fantasized a lot, creating scenarios in my head. Isn’t that essentially writing? Books are a medium of storytelling on its most basic level. But that doesn’t matter, either. I can’t go back in time and tell twelve year-old Jack,  hunched over a drafting table and drawing superheroes, that he should try some prose. The past is what it is. I can’t control it. I just do the best I can with the past I have.

3. If you complain about not having time to write, please do us both a favor and drop out.

People complain all the time. It doesn’t mean they don’t do it anyway. I complain about dishes, laundry, traffic, and having to put on pants.  I still do all of those things. As long as you are getting work done, who cares if you complain about it? Whether they complain or not doesn’t affect me, and quite honestly should not affect their teacher. If they are producing, great. If they aren’t, you are their teacher. Flunk them. Do you honestly think that there aren’t kids in the math department complaining that they don’t have time to do equations? Complain about writing time all you want. As long as you produce a good book, no one will care.

4. If you aren’t a serious reader, don’t expect anyone to read what you write.

I absolutely believe that reading helps your writing. You should read a lot. You should read across genres. I consider reading time to be writing time, because they are so closely-related. The post then goes on to further qualify that by saying you need read great works of literature. I love those books, but they aren’t for everyone. Further, no one cares what you read if you write a good book. They aren’t going to rush off to check out your Goodreads account before they read your novel. Besides, once again we are talking about something I can’t control. I write the story. I send out the story. I promote the story. I don’t control whether people actually read it or not. Will reading making you a better writer? I think so. But your reader doesn’t know whether you just read The Great Gatsby or 50 Shades of Grey. If your book sucks, no one is going care that you’ve read Moby Dick.

5. No one cares about your problems if you’re a shitty writer.

I’m not even going to touch this one. Who says this about their students?

6. You don’t need my help to get published.

Any writer who says they haven’t learned something from another writer is lying to you. You don’t need an MFA to get published. I don’t have one. What I do have is a very large collection of writing books. I’ve read literally hundreds of essays. I’ve been in workshops, critique groups, and every other type of writer’s group that exists. I’ve learned from them. They have made me a better writer. If you can’t teach your students to be better writers, then you are a shitty teacher. Beyond that, the comment places the focus on another thing that writers don’t directly control. You don’t decide if you get published. Neither does your teacher. Publishers decide if you get published. Write the best book you can, and then let it go.

7. It’s not important that people think you’re smart.

I agree, but what is this blogger’s obsession with other people’s perception? People only care if your book is good or if it sucks. I can’t control what people think, only what I put out there for them to read.

8. It’s important to woodshed.

But…but I thought you said I was talented! I’ve written a lot of things that never saw the light of day. I didn’t even finish some of them. I’ve got an entire folder full of beginnings that sucked. But the idea of not sharing your work with anyone doesn’t help, at all. I’m not saying you should upload your garbage first drafts to Amazon, but you will learn much more slowly in a vacuum than you will by sharing. Despite what this article said, you CAN learn writing from other people. You learned basic sentence structure. You learn punctuation. You learn to avoid passive voice. You learn to avoid overuse of adverbs. You learn to show not tell. Could you learn all of these things on your own? Sure. You could also learn that we drive on the right side of the road by using the left lane until you hit someone head on. The alternative is someone could just tell you “We drive on the right side here.” In an entire article of things a writer has no direct control over, the blogger pushes them away from the one thing they can control. Share your work. Get feedback, and make it better.

Writing is not a solitary endeavor, but it is an art form with a single product. A good book trumps everything. Write well, and none of the rest of it matters. Complain all you want. Read garbage paperbacks that you buy for five cents at garage sales. Don’t obsess over the time you should have spent on writing. For God’s sake, don’t worry about what other people will think about you. As long as you produce a good book, no one cares. Writing is a learned skill. If you want an MFA, go get one. It’s not the only path, but it is a viable one.

Every writer has their own skillset and their own experience level. Everyone takes their own path in this business. They all think their’s is the correct one. If Chuck’s way is compatible with yours great. If Boudinot’s way is compatible with yours, by all means, follow it. In writing, there is only what works and what doesn’t. That changes for everyone.

Never let education get in the way of your kid’s learning.

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The only thing interfering with my learning is my education. – Albert Einstein.

There is a fundamental different between teaching and learning that we seem to be missing in our society.  We have become statistic-driven.  Our children, both yours and mine, are statistics in the war of education.  Unfortunately, true learning has never been about education.  While education is meant to facilitate it, more than ever it is interfering with it.

Education should be about learning.  But it isn’t.  We have become a country that cares more about teaching than learning.  Tests are no longer an educational tool, but a means to gauge teacher performance.  The problem is that teacher performance, true educational performance, cannot be measured by testing a bunch of kids.

When I look back on the teachers I had in my life and those whom I valued most, it comes down to a simple trait, easily observable.  Those teachers who learned the most from, where the ones that taught me to learn, rather than just teaching me facts.

Facts are relatively pointless when it comes down to it.  I know that the sky is blue because that is what they tell me.  But, more interesting that that is the fact that the sky is blue because of the way the air molecules scatter light from the sun.  I know my shapes, yet more interesting is the way that certain shapes combined are more universally aesthetic than others.  Facts, while testable, are fairly useless.

Yet, as a result of the way our system is structured, we encourage teachers to teach to pass the tests, when our teachers should be teaching our children to love to learn.

Regurgitation of facts will get a student their diploma, maybe even a degree or two, but true love of learning lasts a person for their entire life.  Love of learning is what gets you up in the morning.  It gets you on the internet researching things you see on television.  It makes you want to learn to play harmonica, speak Italian, read books, and a million other things.

We have endangered that love on learning for the next generation because we have placed to hard an emphasis on teaching.  Rather than learning to learn, students have been taught how to know what the teacher wants to hear.

Unfortunately, what made or country great was not desire to tell people what they wanted to hear, but to go further.  We are a country built on the backs of pioneers who wanted to know more and wanted to do more.  They pushed their knowledge to the limits, always wondering what they could do next.

Where will that come from from this point on?  I wish I knew.

I have taken great pains with my on son to teach him about thing in which he is interested.  He loves dinosaurs, and so we read a lot of books about dinosaurs, we excavate model dinosaur skeletons, we talk about what different dinosaurs ate and how fossils are found.  It’s important to note that my son is four, so I keep all of this relatively simple.  All dinosaurs with plates on their backs are Stegosauruses, because that is what they are, but they are also “Spike-tails” because that is what they are on Land Before Time.

Recently, he found a book on anatomy that he loves because you take a body apart in layers.  We have spent a lot of time since then going over names of body parts, where they are inside him, and what they do, yet at the same time, we chuckle when he calls the lungs “people backpacks.”

My hope, more than anything else, is that my son will learn to love learning.  I want him to know that when he thinks something is interesting, there is nothing wrong with learning more.  I want him to take the things he loves and explore them, finding out what makes them tick.

Teachers will be telling him what facts to regurgitate for his entire life, but I hope when all of that is done, he still feels the need to go to the internet, go to the library, and more than anything else, never stop learning.

Along with that, will come an added bonus, for me, a fellow lover of knowledge.  I explore all of these interests with him.  His interest in dinosaurs meant I needed to learn more about dinosaurs.  His interest in anatomy means I will learn more about anatomy.  Whether it be astronomy, robots, or trains, I will happily learn along with him.

The old saying went that if you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime.  Our schools have gotten comfortable with giving our children nuggets of information, shoving factoids down their throats, then declaring them satisfied.  Don’t allow it.  Teach them to love learning, and give them a lifetime of knowledge.

P.S.  In an update from the NaNoWriMo front, the first draft of my novel was finished on the 16th.  Way ahead of schedule.  I am spending the rest of the month going back through and developing the setting a bit better.  I found it was like driving a hundred miles an hour through the countryside.  I got where I was going, but I never really got to stop and admire the scenery.  I look forward to the rest of the month and the rest of the first pass through, so I can see where it was I went without having to worry about getting there.

Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, and for the sake of humanity, keep learning.

-Jack