Preparing a Thesis: Leveling Up in the MFA

Welcome to an MFA in Creative Writing! PRESS START!

Hello and welcome to the exciting world of creative writing! But first, do you write FICTION, NONFICTION, or POETRY?

You’ve chosen FICTION.

You are a fresh-faced FICTION WRITER starting out in the MFA program. Your current weapons set includes: MAGIC PEN OF IMAGINATION, KEURIG OF ENDURANCE, and A MODERATE AMOUNT OF SELF-DELUSION. You set out into the writerly wilderness on your quest to graduate!

(We’ll fast-forward through the all requisite grinding, leveling up and acquiring party-members. During this period you learn such skills as WORKSHOPPING, TAKING CRITIQUES and STAYING UP ALL NIGHT IN A SUGAR-FUELED CREATIVE FERVOR)

You have reached Level Year 3 of the MFA, your current party members include A COMMUNITY OF WRITING PEERS and A THESIS COMMITTEE. Your current weapons set includes: BLANKET OF PEER SUPPORT, DROPBOX OF NOTES, and A GENERAL IDEA OF YOUR THESIS PROJECT. Your final boss will be THESIS, but before you take on this massive and many-limbed foe, you must defeat these mini-bosses:

1.      THE PROPOSAL: To defeat this monster, you need to decide if you will be writing a NOVEL or a COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES. While the obvious strategy seems to be quick-thinking, do not be rash! If you strike at THE PROPOSAL too soon, you could end up with an unwieldy project that you hate, which only makes THESIS harder to beat. Take your time to think about your strengths and decide what will best play to them.

2.      WRITING THE ACTUAL PROJECT: To take this boss down, not going to lie, will take a lot of time. Sometimes you will get frustrated, you will lose what feels like weeks or months of progress and have to go back to the start. You will get lost in mazes, go in circles and shut the game down and bang your head against a wall. But this is where your weapons and party-members become most useful. Hot Tip: Use THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER’S special ability: CONSOLE AND ADVISE, and if that does not work, have COMMUNITY OF PEERS cast NETFLIX AND CHEAP WINE.

3.      REVISION: The toughest of the mini-bosses, you must go back over your old progress with your most recently-acquired weapons and abilities and fix past mistakes. It can feel like an endless grind, but with each new draft, your skill level goes up. Trade in that KEURIG OF ENDURANCE for AN ESPRESSO PUMP THAT SHOOTS DIRECTLY INTO YOUR FACE.

You enter the final dungeon, your COMMITTEE MEMBERS have turned against you (not really, but it can sometimes feel that way), and it is time for the final boss: THESIS…DEFENSE?! Wow, what a shocking twist! Yes, throughout all the writing, and re-writing and questing you’ve come to actually care about THESIS, nay even become fiercely protective of it! You use all of your weapons and skill to defend THESIS with all of your might and defeat the final boss (which really wasn’t a boss at all…how deep. This is an artsy videogame). Your THESIS COMMITTEE approves of your strength in battle and you beat the game! Go you!

You unlock MFA DEGREE and can use it to download the DLC expansion pack: Navigating Life after Graduate School.

Megan Hesse is still basking in the achievement of an MFA in Fiction when not struggling at videogames.

Writing is Like Riding a Bike. And Also Lying. (But Not Lying About Riding a Bike)

            So, I took up bike riding not too long ago as a way to trick my body into thinking its having fun while getting exercise so I can stop wheezing like Darth Vader every time I go up a staircase. There’s a nice little bike trail by my house and while occasionally I’ll pass other people on bikes and do that “Hi, I am on a bike and you are on a bike too, we are on bikes” head nod thing, mostly I’m by myself with nothing but the sound of cars passing nearby and Various Outdoor Creatures. So I’m usually all alone when I get to my favorite part, this overpass tunnel that the bike path cuts through. On one side is a canal (though me and my romantic notions would refer to it as a river, but more on that later), and after a heavy rain the water encroaches onto the path, reaching for the tips of my sneakers as the pedals cycle downwards. On the other side are uneven stacks of rocky concrete chunks piled against the overpass wall. It’s cool and dark and the acoustics turn the rumble of cars passing overhead into an encompassing roar that’s part wave and part runaway train. It’s downhill either side of it and so I’m always speeding through in a moment that stretches out in time with the wall of noise, with the lapping of the water. A moment of unreality, darkness and sound. As soon as I get my bike out for a ride, I’m already thinking about the tunnel.

            But it’s also a lie.

            Not literally, you can come to my house (no you can’t), find the bike path and follow it and see the tunnel for yourself, it’s definitely a thing that exists. But you’d be disappointed. It is after all, just an overpass with a canal on one side. Even walking, you’re barely in it for more than thirty seconds. It’s also smack in the middle of Boca Raton, which is like trying to put the portal to Narnia in an Office Depot, (unlike Bed, Bath Beyond, which I’m pretty sure actually has the portal to Narnia in it).

            But a sad overpass does not make for an interesting story, and that’s where the lying comes in and the title of this thing starts to make a little more sense. Because the essential job of the writer, the fiction writer at least, is to lie. Even in the most real of realist pieces that are the written equivalent of those hyperrealist paintings that look like photographs, there’s some lying involved because who would want to read a story where things are presented exactly as they are?

(Boring people, maybe?)

Because you have to sell it, you have to make it interesting, worth someone sitting down and reading all the way through and if the story you tell is, “I like bike riding and sometimes I bike under an overpass and there’s a canal,” there’s nothing there. It’s perfectly accurate but also perfectly dull and uninteresting. So you have to lie. And not in the sense where the tunnel is now lengthened by ten, the water flowing thick and black and as you pedal you hear the faint, disembodied sounds of a child crying. Because that’s just ridiculous. But all it takes is a small change, a touch of the eerie, a splash of difference that can elevate it from the mundane to the intriguing and make it something that someone wants to read. Because everyone can go and see an overpass but not everyone has felt the cool air caressing their arms and legs and hot, red face as their ears ring with endlessly repeating echoes that all vanish as soon at the tires of the bike touch sunlight.

The overpass tunnel is my favorite part of the bike trail because of its potential. All it takes are few changes here and there, a few choice tweaks, and it can become something more than the truth could ever make it. Because when you build something up, craft it to be more than it is, when you lie, that’s when you get something worth talking about, that’s when you start to approach a greater truth.

Or at least, an interesting story.

Megan Hesse is a second year MFA student, with a BA in Literature and a PhD in Making Questionable Decisions. If you happen to see her riding her bike, try not to laugh too hard.

On Procrastination (And also Candy Crush)

            That’s an all right title, right? It sounds like some kind of Strunck and White type thing. I wanted to go with something more creative but then my phone buzzed and there was a Facebook update about Candy Crush and I got distracted and then everything got a bit too meta for my liking.

            But procrastination! For any MFA, and probably any Grad student, or student, or person, the word creates an aura of shuddery horror and looping spirals of shame. Or maybe it only does that to me. My name is Megan Hesse and I am a procrastinator. Sometimes it’s not such a bad thing. Instead of grading papers I got inspired and wrote three chapters of a story. Instead of writing more of that story I cleaned the house and took out the garbage which, after procrastinating on that for a good week or two, was piled ever so slightly past my head. I’m procrastinating right now - I have responses and readings due and I might not even do them after I finish this. I’ll probably play Candy Crush. And here’s the really insidious part: sometimes I’ll hit a level on Candy Crush that is so awful, so purely blackly evil (like the ones with the time bombs) that I will procrastinate on playing it because I know I’m still stuck on that level. So I have to find a new game to play until I get around to Candy Crush because come on, it’s not like I’m just going to go write that next chapter.

            I try though, I really do. But the focus never lasts. I’d like to blame society or technology or a documented condition like ADHD but I have no excuse. I’m just a weak-willed individual with too much entertainment at my fingertips. I’ll move to different rooms of the house, ones without TV, but my phone is still with me because how can I leave my phone in another room? What if there’s an emergency? What if someone needs me to fulfill a random, time consuming task that isn’t staring blankly at my computer willing words to happen and I’m not there to answer it?

            It’s an uphill battle. Why just today I was in my living room, stolid and determined and with a new app that knows when I’m doing work and smiles a happy face and keeps time and when I click away to the internet turns red and frowns with disappointment like I just told it I was quitting school and joining a drum circle. According to said app I was productive for approximately fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds and then hey, I wonder what’s on TV at eleven in the morning on a Wednesday. Golden Girls! And I’ve seen this one!

            “Thank you for being a friend, travel down the road and back again! Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidaaaant!”

            Oh those girls. I wish I could say I would be Blanche because she’s the one who gets all the geriatric booty. But in truth I’d probably be Dorothy. I wonder if there’s an online quiz to find out which Golden Girl you’re most like. Oh who am I kidding, of course there is. Still, may as well look to make sure.

            Oh man there’s this video, look at this video. This guy reviews videogames after eating a jalapeno pepper. Look at him suffer! I’ll just watch, maybe, one more. Or ten.

            And now it’s three in the morning and my app is so red and so angry I get worried that apps can internally hemorrhage themselves. And then I wonder if Cutthroat Kitchen is on. That Alton Brown is so sassy.

            In short, I have a problem. I know that this is a problem I should probably fix soon, and I assure you that I am totally going to get around to it. After I beat this level on Candy Crush. And take this quiz…Ah, what the hell, it says I’m Dorothy’s mom?

Megan Hesse is currently in her second year as a graduate student in the FAU MFA program. She enjoys fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight. She is the one named Sailor Moon.

 

Escape Goating: Megan Hesse's First Semester as an MFA Student and GTA

Escape Goat. That was the moment I felt like a real, exasperated teacher, when I was reading a student’s paper and found the words “escape goat.” Presumably they meant “scapegoat,” except that they weren’t using that term right either. Grading papers has been a surreal experience for me. After all, it was only a little over a year ago that I was an undergraduate, and even right now I am still a student myself. So to be in the position of teacher is very strange. And then suddenly, escape goat.

I was terrified of starting the MFA program at FAU for a number of reasons that didn’t involve teaching. I had no idea what the community or the courses would be like. Even though my goal was always to be a creative writer, my undergraduate degree was in Literature and I’d never been among a community of writers. Instead of using guilt to harass my friends and family to read my work, I would finally have a group of people going through the same struggles and triumphs as me to turn to. But there were fears there too: everyone would be smarter, better, more talented than me; a chosen circle I had no hope of ever breaking into. Or classes would be too difficult, professors would look down on me in disgust, and I’d be doomed to be shunned for being mediocre.

My brain gets a little carried away sometimes.

But that’s not what happened. The MFA writing community at FAU contains some of the most helpful, welcoming people I’ve ever met and/or harassed. In just one semester I’ve learned a ridiculous amount from them and the professors, and I cannot wait to learn more. To finally be among other writers gives me an admittedly sentimental feeling of coming home that I would of course never publicly admit to having.

Oops. Don’t tell anyone.

My other fear though, was of time. How would I ever hope to balance teaching more than forty students with my own coursework and possibly have time for creative work besides? It was daunting, to say the least. After I finished undergrad, I took a year off and got a job tutoring high school kids for the SAT. The idea was to make money, and now that school was finished, have all the time in the world to write. Except I didn’t. What I did do was join a gym, watch a truly horrifying amount of Pawn Stars, and explore the uncharted edges of the internet. I finally had time, and I found myself doing absolutely nothing with it. Meanwhile, despite the forty-odd students and the coursework, I have written more in this one semester than I did in my entire year off. Somehow, though it’s meant many late nights and some frantic scribbling, I’ve found the time. I’ve started to grow and learn about myself as a writer in this program, and for me that’s pretty exciting, and well worth the occasional escape goat.

Megan Hesse graduated from the Honors College of FAU in 2011 with a BA in English Literature and is currently enrolled in the FAU MFA Graduate program. By day she attempts to publish stories and make a name for herself as a writer and by night she fights for justice as Batman.