On Not Giving Up

Two or three years ago, I wrote a story for the women’s magazine market that I just couldn’t sell. I thought it was pretty good, but the editors didn’t agree with me. So I stopped trying to sell it. I thought I’d wasted enough time on it.

Then a few months ago, while sorting through some old files, I stumbled across it again. When I reread it, I still thought it was pretty good. So I entered it in a short story competition. The story didn’t win first prize, but it did come second. The prize money was not much less than I would have earned from selling it and because the tax man classes writing competitions as ‘lotteries’ (he has a point!) winnings are therefore tax free. Result! The organisers have just published an anthology, Out of Season, which includes my prizewinning story.

The lesson, as always in all things relating to writing, is not to give up. It reminded me of something I once read about Raymond Carver. If you look at Carver’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll read that he became interested in writing when he moved to California as a married man. That’s not entirely correct. According to Carol Sklenicka’s excellent biography, Carver had been interested in writing since he was a kid. He was always telling stories to his younger brother and when his father bought him a shotgun for his 13th birthday, Carver began writing down his hunting experiences as short stories. All he got was rejection slips. He was told by one editor that people didn’t want to read about hunting trips.

He was told to find something else to write about.

When he was 17, Carver enrolled in a creative writing correspondence course. The first lesson was ‘Essential Elements of a Short Story and How to Develop Them’. It seems he didn’t complete the course. Three years later, hoping it would help him get a better job to support his new family (he was married and a father of two by the time he was 20), Carver enrolled at the Chico State College. In the second year he took an elective course, Creative Writing. The course director was Dr John Gardner. It was in 1960, under Gardner’s tutelage, that Carver wrote what was to become his first published story, ‘Furious Seasons’.

It includes a large section based on his teenage hunting experiences.

Which goes to show that, to misquote Aesop, no act of writing, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Creative Writing MAs and MFAs

The last edition of the Paris Review has been lying unread on my desk for a couple of months and yesterday I decided to finally find the time to read it. I was particularly interested in the interview with Jonathan Franzen, especially after my post yesterday about the creative writing MA I’m taking. Franzen says he very nearly took a creative writing MFA himself but didn’t in the end, mainly due to financial considerations.

However, he and his then-wife had their ‘own little round-the-clock MFA programme’ (she was a writer, too). Franzen’s personal MFA programme lasted six years, three times longer than the usual programme. During this time, as well as writing, he says he read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Plus, he didn’t have to deal with ‘all the stupid responses to writing that workshops generate’.

I can certainly relate to that sentiment. There was a classic example of it at in my MA workshop last week. One of my fellow students had submitted a short story that was pretty much perfect – well-rounded characters, interesting story, great pace, an inevitable-yet-surprising ending – and yet because we had 40 minutes set aside to discuss it people began to get picky over minor plot points in the story and by the end of the session they were suggesting some major rewrites.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have brought such a polished piece of work to the workshop, but I do think the whole episode is indicative of what can be a downside of the dreaded workshop. Billy Collins got it spot-on, I think. It may even be indicative of the MA as a whole.

Jonathan Franzen says that, in retrospect, he is now glad he didn’t take the MFA programme he was offered. It might have smoothed out of his work some of the kinks that were better not smoothed out. He says: ‘As a journalist, I’m always trying to become more professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain an amateur.’

I haven’t posted for a while…

…I’ve been writing a novel. I’ve also been taking a creative writing MA. I decided to take the course because I wanted to move away from what began to seem to be the almost magnetic pull of genre fiction. Although my limited success as a writer has usually involved crime stories I really wanted to write a serious novel. I’d always been told you should ‘write what you read’, and I read mostly literary fiction. I thought taking the MA would help. But the magnetic pull back to crime fiction is still there. What has surprised me most though is that, although our reading list contains absolutely no genre fiction, some of the tutors insisted on pushing me back towards a life of crime. After all, it’s the sort of novel that sells.

But is it the purpose of a creative writing MA to concern themselves with markets? I’m not sure. I decided to take the MA because I wanted to focus on the art and craft of fiction rather than on the business of it. I also had half an eye on the American trend in which the route to publication is now typically via a university MFA programme. It’s a growing trend here in the UK, too. And therein lies the problem, it seems to me. Some universities here don’t appear to be sure of what their version of the MFA is intended to achieve.

Work in Progress

There’s something peculiar about the business of writing, about the way the need to write is so overwhelming and yet is sometimes so difficult to execute. I’m feeling overwhelmed at the moment – too many unfinished Works in Progress on the go at once. I can’t seem to focus – my concentration flits from project to project. The Belfast Boy, my novel that was ‘accepted’ by a small press publisher three years ago but was never published, needs to be revised and updated. Kickback, the novel I wrote last year and that The Secretary reckons needs a lot of work on its plot, is nagging at me to be rewritten. And I have any number of short stories in need of a sharper ending, waiting to be sharpened. You would think, wouldn’t you, that a reasonably successful short story writer (who is also a – so far – unsuccessful novelist) would concentrate on finishing a few more short stories. But instead I’m bogged down in another new novel.

Why? You might well ask.

It’s a mystery.