DEAR WRITER: ON WRITING WHILE WORKING

My fiancé, an Army sergeant and former police officer, wants one of those $2,000 massage chairs from Brookstone. I’ve yet to walk past the storefront at the mall without losing him to one of the chunky, buzzing machines. He says if he had something like it at home, he’d get more done, as if his body—and his mind, just as tense from work and thoughts of it—were massaged into compliance. “Sure, I’ll load the dishwasher, just give me a few minutes in The Chair.”

No matter our job, we all know the feeling of physical and mental strain—the feeling of oversaturation, or total depletion, which, for me, turns what could be a couple of hours of writing and/or revision into a couple of hours of Netflix and ice cream. “You’re just not in the right state of mind right now to be creating—try tomorrow.” For those of you with children, second jobs, and/or multiple extracurricular positions, duties, hobbies, etc., you may scoff at the essays and articles that attempt to answer the question “How do you write and work?” Despite what you may think, if you want to be a writer, you have the time to find (key word: “find,” because it may not be an easy task).

All I can really offer is some of what I’ve done in the past year as a writer and Visiting Instructor who committed to teaching twelve courses (an overload both semesters, plus two courses over the summer), yet did more writing than I ever had previously. Perhaps it’s the poet in me, but I’ve tried to choreograph a few analogies (perhaps a writer’s habit, or the crutch of an introverted poet) to explain how I balanced work and writing. Friends and peers seem to like the following most:

The tightrope walker crosses the gap between two tall buildings, slowly but surely. He’s holding a long pole for balance, which begins to tilt with his body as both are nudged by gusts of wind. He regains his balance (aligns his center of gravity) by tilting the pole, and thus his weight, into the wind. Without doing so, he knows he’ll fall.

As I balanced my way through a very full teaching schedule, writing became my counterweight to the winds of paper grading, email-answering, citizenship applications and processing, family matters, and job hunts (I was, earlier this summer, ending my Visiting Instructorship), and general mental gust of stress and exhaustion, I’d never felt more compelled to spend my free time clacking away on my laptop. Many days, I didn’t feel like it. Many days, I questioned my writing ‘ability.’ Many days, I imagine writers abandon their laptops/notebooks in claim of experiencing ‘writer’s block.’ But, let me tell you, there’s no such thing as writer’s block.

Whatever you’re trying to work on, and struggling to the point at which you’re only winding yourself up, minimize the tab/turn the page and work on something else. Revisit that poem you wrote last year. Free write what could be the heart of a new personal essay. Make a list of craft essay ideas (aka. permit yourself the writing time to lists or outlines, and not clean paragraphs of prose or profound poetic lines). Eventually, in doing so, you’ll ‘retrain’ your mind as I have done this past year, to let myself create and work on multiple things at once. Isn’t that, in a sense, the artist at his freest? The child squirting ketchup on his toast? Hey, let him try it. If that’s what he wants, look at him go—no resistance, no self-imprisoning to how he may think he ‘should be eating…’

Even though university faculty often receive forgiving schedules, we know our free days are often spent working to some degree, or at least living with work on the mind. While some formidable writers have suggested simpler methods of encouraging themselves away from these mental work ties and into a creative/uninhibited state, like getting drunk or high, I’ve heard few success stories. I have, though, heard many writer friends succeed by making “appointments” for themselves to write (ex. “At 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, I have an appointment with Microsoft Word. I’m going to turn off my cell phone, deactivate the wifi, give the dog a new chew toy, and assign the children to the basement with a VHS tape of The Lion King and the remainders of last year’s mega bag of Halloween candy”). This method, at least, forces you to examine your schedule and note one—but ideally a few—promising block of free time you may have in the week. Be sure to treat it like an appointment—you must ‘go,’ and if you don’t, a fee will incur (calling yourself up to say, “Hey, I’m so sorry, I’ve made time tomorrow—see you then,” is a wonderful response to dipping out on a schedule write-time. If you’re not committed enough to sticking with an idea like this, then you don’t get to complain about not having the time or energy to write. Stop making excuses for yourself. Your passion, talent, and artistic integrity don’t deserve to be overshadowed by your laziness or mediocre/poor treatment of your time.

Buck up, writer. Buck up, teacher, student, human. You are capable of more. Sit with yourself, think deeply about what’s holding you back.

Answer: It’s you. It’s always been you. Find a greater balance. Take another step forward.

Jamie is the author of hiku [pull] (Porkbelly Press, 2016). Winner of an AWP Intro Journals Project award for poetry and four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been published with Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Passages North, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and DIAGRAM, among other journals. Jamie received his MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University, where he was a Lawrence A. Sanders poet fellow and currently teaches as an Instructor. Born in England, and former resident of New Zealand, Jamie is a first-generation Asian-American (officially--he passed his naturalization test and interview this summer!) currently living in West Palm Beach with his partner, John, and their greyhound, Jack. Twitter: @jamesahwhite

How to MFA Thesis, with Jamie and Nico

            A Haiku for a Thesis

      Each page come spring

      becomes a pile of shit

      after rereading

1. SQUAD GOALS: Picking Your Thesis Committee

So, thesis hours are approaching in a semester or two and it’s time to ask three faculty members to voluntarily commit their time and energy to reading, commenting on (hopefully), and approving (even more hopefully) your manuscript. First things first, you ought to already have some sort of relationship with each faculty member you have in mind (ie. you’ve taken a class with them, remember which New Yorker cartoon they have taped to their office door, and picked up at least two of their dog’s turds).

·         For MFAs, it’s likely you’ll have three writing professors in mind. For example, fiction MFAs may have taken workshops from Prof. Schwartz, Prof. Furman, and Prof. Bucak, while nonfiction and poetry students may be more familiar with Dr. Schmitt, Dr. McKay, and Prof. Mitchell. Some MFAs choose to ask a literature or composition professor (ex. Dr. Berlatsky or Dr. Bradford) to be a part of their committee to seek a balance of perspectives, or perhaps because the student has not taken workshops from three different writing professors. Either way, that option is most definitely available to you.

Nico and I both selected the same committee members: Dr. McKay, Dr. Schmitt, and Prof. Mitchell. We chose them because we had worked with all three of them in multiple classes, and felt like they each could offer unique, valuable, and insightful feedback (and, for Jamie, because they are poets). In thinking beyond the thesis, Becka, Kate, and Susan (breaking out the first names, because we’re, like, tight now) knew both of us well enough to write us recommendation letters (if they were willing to do so, and if we ever needed one), and even agreed to get coffee with us and suggest post-graduation opportunities. But, ultimately, we both saw these women as women who gave, and would continue to give, a damn about our work and futures as broke  grumpy active writers.

·         Etiquette-wise, be sure to request an appointment with each of your prospective committee members and ask them in person to be a part of your MFA journey. Don’t assume they’ll say yes. It’s like proposing to someone. There’s always a chance you’ll hear “Ew. No.”

2. I CAN’T EVEN: How to Figure Out WTF You’re Doing

Though it’s a good idea to know what you want your thesis to be (ie. a novel about a piano-playing dog, a collection of short stories about florists with allergies, a memoir about getting bullied in middle school for having a speech impediment), avoid stifling/cornering yourself.

·         Before your thesis hours formally begin, it’s a good idea to already be writing, knowing that you have plenty of time to be writing anything in any genre, about whatever you’d like. (Pro Tip: Don’t take a class during your final semester. And if you’re being told to take one even though you don’t need one, don’t say Nico and Jamie told you not to take it, because though we’ll have graduated, there’s no escaping the reach of FAU.)

·         Prioritize: Reading and improving your writing practice (and by ‘practice,’ we mean give more care to writing, reading, and/or revising on a regular basis). (Pro Tip: Don’t complain about not having any time to write. You do. Just stop going out to drink and/or watching Netflix. Like, seriously. None of your Facebook friends are buying it—they see your pictures.)

·         Do not be afraid that reading others’ works will cause you to copy theirs (that’s weird, and you know you don’t actually believe that. Imitate? Perhaps. Just don’t plagiarize. Or steal plot ideas. Don’t be dumb, essentially).

o   Jamie: I began thesis hours with about half of my thesis manuscript complete (including many pages of poetry that did not end up being a part of my thesis).

o   Nico: I began thesis hours with only about 45 pages done. But I had probably 15-20 pages of free writes I had done over the summer with Jamie that ultimately I ended up using (at least part of) in my final manuscript.

·         Remember: your thesis is not a portfolio of everything you’ve written during your time at FAU, it’s a focused product. It’s a cohesive Project Runway collection. It’s a herb garden, a flower bed, or a tree farm, not all three. We’re not saying don’t experiment or play with a variety of forms, we’re just saying that a reader ought to be able to read your manuscript and recognize a clear consistency of voice, aka. everything should keep in register.

3. BROS BEFORE PROSE (Or Poetry)

It’s a good idea that, during this time, you secure a battle buddy. Or bosom buddy. Battle buddy just sounds more fitting. Your battle buddy will be your encouragement, disciplinarian, and shoulder to cry on. In the early stages of thesis writing, he/she will be your café beloved. You can meet to be a sounding board for each other, give each other writing prompts fitting for your respective thesis concepts, offer each other regular feedback and advice, and hold each other accountable for meeting any deadlines both self-given or school- or thesis chair-related. (Pro Tip: The Glades Rd. Starbucks doesn’t have a free table. It just doesn’t. Don’t even try going there to work. Try the Starbucks on Federal, near the Chipotle and Pei Wei.)

·         Choose your battle buddy wisely. You want to surround yourself with students who are as dedicated, efficient, and/or crabby as you are.

o   Jamie: You want someone to thank in your acknowledgements page for ‘sticking by you’ and ‘chauffeuring you to school and back’ (maybe that one is specific to me).

o   Nico: I originally was going to say you want someone who is as motivated and organized as you are, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do think is important is that your Battle Buddy is a good reader for YOU. Someone who understands your ideas and intentions, and knows your strengths and weaknesses and how to suggest revisions accordingly.

·         If your thesis chair is willing to meet with you and read a draft or two during your first semester of thesis hours, we highly recommend you plan on doing so. It’s unlikely your chair has the time to be able to read four one-hundred-page drafts before they receive your final draft a month before your defense date, but there’s no harm in asking if they’d be open to reading new sections, chapters, pages, etc. during your thesis hours. In fact, they may expect you to do so in order to have a clear idea of where you are, work-wise, emotionally, mentally, in your manuscript-writing process.

·         Don’t rely on your Chair to keep you in check, though. (Pro Tip: There’s also no such thing as “writer’s block.” If you’re not hungry for cereal, then eat an apple. Leave personal essays alone for a day and write a poem. Write a series of haikus. Write an email in iambic pentameter to your parents asking for a small loan. Write.)

·         Give your Chair a timeline you’re hoping to stick to in regards to how much work you’d like to have done by each date, and when you’re going to plan on giving them work for review/feedback (again, if they’re open to doing so).

o   Jamie: I met with Dr. McKay approximately once a month. Because my manuscript was a collection of poems, it was probably a little easier for her to take home and review more regularly than Dr. Schmitt, who chaired Nico’s 150+ memoir manuscript (which ended up being 200+ pages in its form (or, for you Pokémon fans, its final evolution)).

4. THE FINAL COUNTDOWN: The Defense

In the beginning of your final semester, Kelly will send an email out about scheduling your defense. Do this as early as possible (Becka will appreciate it) and it will also give you a clear timeline (so you can set up a New Years Eve style countdown clock) of how many days you have left to write, edit, etc.

·         Aim to finish your manuscript before the semester of your defense. Doing so will offer you enough time to make final revisions before you distribute your manuscript to your committee (and time to concentrate on the thesis essay).

·         Get the requirements for your thesis essay from your chair. Each professor may (and often do) have different requirements for the thesis essay and will give you a handy one-sheet of what they want you to focus on. This essay will be distributed along with your manuscript prior to your defense.

·         Be early to your defense. It’s not a bad idea to dress semi-formal—it is, after all, the day you’ll be told whether or not you’re going to graduate.

·         Don’t be afraid to ask your committee questions. Something we didn’t expect was the focus on thesis-specific questions over post-graduation or program-related questions (like “So, where do you see yourself in five years?” and “What have you learned from your time in the program?”).

·         The defense itself will last approximately forty-five to sixty minutes. Your chair will slap your ass at the end and present you with a brownie, complete with lit candle. Not really. Becka McKay will wish you a good life and then remind you of an event next week that she needs you to attend.

5. THE KAFKAESQUE NIGHTMARE OF RED TAPE THAT WILL LEAVE YOU FEELING LIKE A SHELL OF YOUR FORMER SELF AND YOUR NEW HATRED FOR THE SADISTIC FUCKS WHO CREATED MICROSOFT WORD: Post-defense Formatting and Busy Work

Following your defense, you will have a couple of weeks to make any “creative” edits (read: actual writing to make the project more complete), but do know that those edits are optional. Sure, your manuscript will be uploaded to the FAU library, and, sure, there’s a chance some stranger will come across it and judge your lackluster fifth chapter, but don’t sweat the optional stuff. You’ll be too stressed meeting other mandatory deadlines.

·         The deadlines will come in an email from Kelly. (Pro Tip: Read Kelly’s emails carefully. Though she’s a patient and wonderful human being, she’s not sending you thesis-related directions for no reason, or going to invite you to her office to repeat everything in her emails over tea.) For us, we had about a month in between the defense and the final deadline to hand in our thesis to the Graduate College, and that felt too brief.

·         There are Graduate College-affiliated house elves that you can pay to take care of your thesis form process for you, and, after going through the process ourselves, Nico and I wish we had paid someone to go through everything we did (not more than $100 though).

·         If you don’t pay someone, and decide (like we did) that you are more than capable of using the formatting features in Microsoft word…well here’s how that went:

o   You will learn about margins, gutters, section breaks, continuous section breaks, ancient Greek section breaks, interpretive dance section breaks, et al.

o   You will send what you think is a perfectly formatted document to the Grad College and be told it’s wrong.

o   You will fix it, know it’s perfect and be told the GTA printer fucked up the margins and you should go print it somewhere else because that printer hates you as much as you hate having to grade papers this weekend.

·         But formatting isn’t the end:

o   You will learn about bond paper—colors, weights, watermarks, provenances (Pro Tip: Order on Amazon. Keep the box to put your final manuscript it.)

o   You will have to journey to far off lands to procure a very specific black, felt tip pen that will travel with your thesis across campus to be used by everyone who must sign your signature page while collecting millions of bacteria.

o   You will have to make two trips to Dr. Berlatsky’s office to ask for your pen back because he forgot to put it back in the box. He knows what he’s doing.

o   You will learn from this mistake when you go to the Dean’s office and look for the pen before you leave and ask her assistant politely for your pen back.

·         It’s a process that seems more difficult than it really is based on just how many requirements are going to slap you across the face via emails from the Graduate College, English Department, Library, your mom, etc. Keep yourself knowledgeable of future deadlines and you’ll be fine.

Thesis FAQs As Answered By Nico and Jamie

in Mean Girls Quotes

1. What do you do if you’re on a writing streak but are supposed to attend a campus event?

      “I can’t go out. *cough cough*. I’m sick.”

2. How am I going to handle leaving the program when all is said and done?

      “See? That's the thing with you [MFAs]. You think everybody is in love with you when    actually, everybody hates you!”

3. I know my chair said it has to be at least 100 pages, but is there a page limit on thesis manuscripts?

      “The limit does not exist”

       

4. My Battle Buddy has a mental breakdown in Starbucks because he realizes that the idea for his thesis is bad and the 50 poems he wrote are now useless, what should I say?  

      "Do you wanna go to Taco Bell?”

5. It’s Saturday night and I’ve been locked in my apartment for a month writing. My thesis draft is due on Monday but I just got a notification on Tinder asking me to go out tonight, what do I do?

      “At your age, you're going to have a lot of urges. You're going to want to take off your     clothes, and touch each other. But if you do touch each other, you *will* get chlamydia...   and die.”

6. My thesis chair just told me she wants a draft of my essay NEXT WEEK, what do I do?

      “She’s a life ruiner. She ruins lives.”

7. Help, everyone is annoying and I just want to be left alone but I don’t want to upset anyone’s feelings.

      “Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries.”

8. What do I do if I see one of my professors working at the coffee shop where I’m writing?

       “I love seeing teachers outside of school. It's like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.”

9. I asked my boyfriend to read my thesis and he said it was too academic and boring, what do I do?

      “I know having a boyfriend might seem like the only thing important to you right now,     but you don't have to dumb yourself down in order for a guy to like you.”

10. What kind of response should I expect after my thesis committee deliberates and calls me back in the room?

      “I just wanted to say that you're all winners. And that I couldn't be happier the school       year is ending.”

Jamie's bio, as written by Nico: Poet and origami enthusiast James White was born a quarter of a century ago in Surrey, England. A quiet, yet precocious child, James learned at a very young age the value of saying a lot in very few words. When James isn't writing poems or teaching, you can find him at home spooning his dog and eating chocolate pie, or in the Decor section of Home Goods perusing items with birds on them. In addition to his not one, not two, but three Pushcart nominations, James has been published in more literary journals and reviews than we have time to mention in an introduction. He is currently working on an upcoming series of poems written on small squares of paper that he intends to fold into origami cranes and hang from a mobile.

Nico's bio, as written by Jamie: Nicole Cassanetti was born on the hood of a banana yellow 1983 Volkswagen Beetle during the Reagan era. Always a quiet creature, she quickly developed her affinity for smoking, napping, and paying for everything with loose change after realizing her dream of becoming a writer. Nico is well-versed in writing about her grandmother, kissing her vampiric boyfriend on shag rugs, and subsequently everything in between. Besides planning on making a career out of teaching creative writing, she claims to answer the call of North Carolina's Blue Ridge mountains, in which she'll take hikes with her stumpy corgi, kiss her now-much-hairier husband on grassy knolls, and call her old pal Jamie to chat about terrible student writing, crippling financial despair, and birds.

Why the MFA Program is Like Notting Hill

   When Julia Roberts walks into Hugh Grant’s travel bookshop in the movie Notting Hill, Grant immediately (though, yes, with hesitancy) recognizes who has entered his store. As Roberts traces the spines of books on Turkey and Istanbul, and Grant watches from behind the counter, it’s clear that both Roberts with her straight American teeth and Grant with his small British charm come to represent something of an irresistible exoticism to each other. Roberts is first seen adorned (and disguised) beneath a black beret, black jacket, and dark sunglasses. She/it appears a mystery, but fails to mask her well-known identity. Both she and Grant are alluring without having to be hypnotic. He is charming, funny, and handsome. She is strong, successful, and beautiful. To each other, they represent different but closely related fantasies. To me, they represent how I first envisioned an MFA program.

            During a recent date, I told an academic figure—one whose career is rooted more in administration than teaching—that the writer will always be considered romantic. Though perhaps not romantic in nature, the writer is situated in a dwindling genre of human being. The writer is the lead in a romance movie, thought of sitting by candlelight at his study desk writing about lost love, in Starbucks too busy typing on his Macbook to wipe the tears away from his five o’clock shadow, saturated in romantic ideas in pursuit of an idealized romantic absolution. He is, at the root of everything, invested both in a job that he has been told will probably not make him any money or bring about any fame, and a love interest whom he has been told simply isn’t good enough for him. Yet, he pursues them. He lives and breathes (wait for it) passion.

            When the writer first learns that he can develop his craft within upper-level academia, strolling through the same land as doctors, engineers, and physicists, he latches onto the idea of closing in on the chase of literary success.  Dr. Poet. Master of Prosody. Lord of the Haiku. When Roberts locates herself in the same intimate, dusty world of Grant’s, she has become less of a fantasy and more of a realistic possibility. Grant quickly learns though, after experiencing more of Roberts within her hectic artistic and romantic environments, that the dream of their relationship will inevitably perish underneath their opposing lifestyles. It is, however, while Roberts witnesses the birthday celebration of Grant’s younger sister that she recognizes what she ultimately wants. Against all prohibiting factors, she wants to have, to be more like, and to be loved by Grant.

Not too long after I started the MFA program, I had a different experience. I wanted to remove myself from the twenty other writers who were sitting at the same dinner table and, like me, also questioning the point of acquiring an MFA degree. I looked around the table and interrogated my position. How was this environment going to benefit my writing and development of a writerly identity? I thought a significant, positive thing about enrolling in an MFA was being surrounded by other writers who are desperately and passionately in love with writing, but it seemed many others were also in need of validation that they were still in love with their art.

When Roberts’ boyfriend—a younger Alec Baldwin—travels to the city unannounced, the romance between Grant and Roberts suffers. The reality of Roberts’ American boyfriend interrupts the spontaneous, whimsical relationship at bloom between Roberts and Grant, and this causes us to question the line between fantasy and reality. I felt a similar damage when my writing—which was, for the most part is, and should always be given full attention during time enrolled in an MFA program—fell behind the overwhelming shadows of other “responsibilities.” Yes, many of these responsibilities were related to my development and refinement as a writer, but seemingly for the purpose of fear-driven career preparation and the satisfaction of credit requirements. It took a while, under the overwhelming anxiety of being told that there isn’t a market for poetry anymore beyond tabling at readings and conferences, and that I only have a 5% - 10% chance of landing a solid university teaching position unless I dedicate the next five to six years acquiring a PhD or (by the grace of God) getting a book or two published, to recognize my view of these “responsibilities” as opportunities.

 It has seemed recently as if Baldwin flew in and stood in the way of my romantic perception of what I wanted the MFA (and for that matter, my future) to be—the dedication of three years of my life to my craft. I came to feel that I had instead given up three years I could have more actively spent on my craft outside academia—beyond teaching composition courses, grading first-year papers, and taking theory courses I had little interest in—for a degree that would simply make me eligible for one of the few professions in which a poet is typically found: teaching. Alec, however, is only realistic. He illustrates that romance (and the MFA program) is more layered and complex than one may take it for. He helps us realize that every choice is an opportunity for something better, and that the MFA is going to be whatever one chooses to see it as. Three years of lying naked on a shag rug in front of a fireplace writing prose poems isn’t as romantic if this same hypothetical MFA student isn’t also teaching essay writing to hundreds of college freshmen, studying other forms of writing and communication, and involving himself in the editorial workings of a literary publication or governmental workings of a student organization. If he sees the MFA degree as three years of opportunities to fully dedicate himself to his writing, the writings of others, and the larger literary world, then he might better imagine the future for Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.

I find myself now, in the middle of my MFA career, on the cusp of my thesis—ready but not yet able to transfer my attention back to the romance of being a writer, back to seeing the MFA degree for its fullest potential. I feel as if I am standing, admittedly and confessingly hurting, in front of the once-incredibly idealized romantic notion I had of the MFA, hearing it ask me to love it again. And as it asks—hair flopped, eyes wide, ready to accept me back into its arms—how long I plan on staying, I keep finding myself repeating “indefinitely.”

James White is a second year student in the MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry program. He is excited to graduate from the program with a few manuscripts in tow, with which he will entice a handsome NY businessman-turned-lumberjack named Ethan during a writer's retreat in New Hampshire. James will read his poetry to Ethan as he chops firewood, and the two will die holding hands like the old married couple in Titanic.