I did a lot of emotional preparing for my life after the MFA.
Semi-dramatically, I grieved it long before I left, spending my final thesis year savoring the joys of being a full-time student of craft. Writing from a foldable camp chair in the doorway crack of a Boca studio apartment where I’d cooked three meals a day on a hot plate burner. Biking to and from FAU’s palm-waving campus in the scorching midday heat, blasting my eardrums raw with The New Pornographers, another story blooming from that place stories come from: the ingredients of unstructured time, pauses, sunlight, love of complicated people, past tragedies large and small, dreams you can no longer deny.
My cohort happened to take wing of grad school the moment the COVID-19 lockdown went into place. With graduation, the magic of those three years quickly became something very different.
What’s different now, then:
● I use bullet-lists. I write and edit for a content marketing company, and boy, bullets do come in handy.
● Editing the internet has made me a better editor of my own writing. When you’re constantly editing, no matter what it’s for, you learn how to quickly spot the bullshit—that is, the words that don’t really mean what you need them to mean.
● In this zooming comet of a 9-5 that I’m riding, I do still write stories, but with far less frequency and far more selectively. I began many stories this year, but finished only two.
● I write from a different perspective: Truly, a more fully adult one. After the pandemic, a heavier realism rips strikethroughs through the former zaniness of my prose.
In short: I utterly appreciate just how much time and focus and not focusing and emotional energy and life conditions and loving support and friendship is required to make the gift of writing happen, and to do it well. Creating those conditions after the MFA takes effort and can feel painstakingly hard to balance amidst the need to make money, but harder things have been done (maybe).
Tips about life after the MFA are many, but maybe you haven’t heard these as often, or you could stand to hear them again and again, so I will add a few more bullets to this pile:
● Stay close to your writing friends. Cheer for them even when you don’t know your own way forward.
● Try very short workshop formats. When the great Ms. Emily Donovan from our class of 2020 suggested doing a one-page workshop—writing and workshopping only one page
of writing each week—it was a stroke of genius that kept our literary community flame alive.
● Be alert to all the evolving signals of what motivates you, and new cues about where and how you write best. Maybe you need to read a little in the morning before the workday starts, then get out a paragraph on lunch, and read more at night; maybe you need to set up a few three day weekends where you finish drafts to conclusion.
● If you need to take a break from writing, be nice to yourself. Take a vacation into real life.
● Listen to your mentors. Mine told me to apply to a fellowship that I’d never heard of, and I had zero expectations that I would be accepted, and I did and it was wonderful.
● Send out work even when you’re really not sure what’ll happen. You can get fellowships, land publications. Even when you think you’ve got the mag’s style pegged, the editors are always changing.
And most of all—as is often mentioned in the program at FAU—create and be true to your own standard of what it means to be successful.
This I believe with all my heart: the writing life is long, and writers will always be writers, and writers become better and more interesting with time. We can trust ourselves to sit down again as the new forms of interesting come along.
Cherri finished her MFA in Fiction in 2020. She’s been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Shirley Magazine, and Foglifter, and she was a 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow. Since graduating from FAU, she’s chosen to remain a Floridian, begin propagating succulents, and she is still revising the final draft of her first short story collection. https://www.cherribuijk.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment