Last week I started this series with these (Astute! Insightful! Rollicking! Or something) thoughts:

Writing is tricky. It’s hard. On occasion, dental work, cleaning litter boxes, and gynecological exams are preferable to sitting down and finishing that article or other project. That’s why writing is the craft that occupies fifteen shelves of resource books at your bookstore. It’s intimidating trying to figure out if these tomes are worth their cash money. What’s really worth your time and money? That’s where the QRW comes in. For an honest peek into what books really help freelancers, writers and other creatives, we examine how useful and entertaining they are, as well as specific lessons that can be learned and put to use.

Big task, but lots o’ fun. It’s about time my bursting bookshelves get put to a purpose. Today we look at a title that made my brokeass jump for joy: The Portable MFA in Creative Writing.

The Gist

MFA workshops are, ahem, curious things. They can work, and they should, but from the accounts we’ve gathered over the years, many don’t. When I was in an MFA program – one of the most respected, highly touted, expensive, and therefore, one of the most flawed – structure was a dirty word and craft was something for carpenters…The education I received for over $30,000 can be condensed to eight easy-to-forget points, and I offer them all for the price of this book.

I would stay in school indefinitely if I was rich. I’d go back and get my MFA, PhD, maybe even throw in an RN and MEd and every other acronym I could collect. But that’s not the way things are. So I was pretty effing jazzed about this book, which promised the lessons learned from the New York Writers Workshop and its collective of impressive names.

This book is refreshing in its tone and approach, cutting past the bullshit and the automatic adulation for MFAs. The writers lament the pretension, the god-complex teachers, the canon bias, and the overall psychosocial damage a MFA program can inflict. On the other hand, the writers acknowledge that there are things to learn about writing creatively that these programs can give. They also provide students the gift of time, community, connections, and the doors that open with the degree itself. It’s a tradeoff, but one that becomes a little more fair with this kind of text.

The writers of the book are learned but not intimidating, personal and interesting but not blowhards. Spending time with the book feels like talking and listening to a mentor who tells it like it is.

The book is organized into key areas, for writers of fiction, personal essays/memoirs, magazine articles, poetry, and plays. My focus was Fiction. I wrote a novel, and my only formal training was what I gleaned from voracious reading and my coursework in literature analysis. So my techniques and tactics were fairly ad hoc. Reading the section on fiction helped hone some of my gut instincts and provide ideas for future writing steps.

Lessons Learned:

• Page 21: Strategies for Opening a Story. We all know the first pages of a novel or the first paragraphs of a story are critical for capturing readers and potential agents/publishers. Reading this section reinforced a lot of what I loved about my favorite books and their beginnings, and provided some ideas for editing my current novel and starting my new one.
• Page 43: Making Your Characters Believable. We know what we like about good, real characters, but achieving that is tricky. A great quote here: “Beginning writers often think that characters are what the narrator tells us about them…and what they say about themselves…Characters are the choices they make and the actions they take.”
• Page 56: Description. What a delicate art. Some very tangible and doable recommendations here to render a place and person effectively, and bring readers into the narrative.
• Page 66: Revision in Four Parts. By far the hardest part of my novel writing experience is the revision. The unending, unrelenting, unfathomable art of revision. The authors here make it simple and achievable.

Bottom Line:
Writing or have written a novel? I found this book tremendously helpful for perspective as well as tactics. I plan to next dive into the sections on personal essays and magazine articles, and hope to find the same usefulness.

To Learn More:
Order The Portable MFA
Visit the New York Writers Workshop

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