SOON, issue 4: How to Detox From Your MFA
Or, four steps to re-center your own voice in a mind crowded by years of feedback.
Welcome to Something Out of Nothing, a newsletter about meaning—making it, finding it, offering it. I talk about the writing life, teaching, thrifting, books, travel, obsessions and idle interests, and much more.
Is an MFA worth it? This issue of SOON is not about that. Instead, this issue is for the folks who *still* struggle with leaning into their own voice after years of receiving feedback—in workshop classes, writing groups, at conferences and retreats, and yes, in their MFA. Below is a short list of things I’ve done/continue to do to foster a personal practice that acknowledges all that I’ve learned but now prioritizes a desire to write on my own terms.
How to Detox From Your MFA, or four steps to re-center your own voice in a mind crowded by years of feedback
FIRST: Stop workshopping and keep writing.
You’ve just spent years listening to other people talk about your writing—what they think works or resonates or seems believable, what they think your work means. It’s so easy to find yourself writing toward other peoples’ opinions. Stop workshopping. For at least a year, though two years was the sweet spot for me. After two years, I attended one of the big writing conferences, and the workshop experience there was wonderfully welcoming and open, and it was also a validating check-in with myself that I still didn’t care for workshopping, regardless of the thoughtful approach and smart words of my peers in the room.
Stop workshopping. Keep writing. It’s a simple instruction, it’s also a leap. The fewer voices you invite in, the clearer your own will become.
NEXT: Okay, you’re no longer workshopping—now what?
Loosen your grip on what you’ve been taught makes for “good” writing, and instead practice only writing toward your own interests. At all costs. Forget the workshop directives from peers and instructors alike, those old voices that once seemed so important or necessary or, just, loud. Instead, turn toward yourself and follow the thread of what compels you as you write. Make it a devoted practice. It will take some time but here’s what will happen in the long run: you will begin to develop, strengthen, and prioritize your storytelling instincts around your work.
You’ll learn to pay attention to the original energy of your ideas, be it subject, style, form, voice, or a hundred other things that make you you on the page. This will lead to stories rooted in the confidence of deeper experimentation and play. And that will in turn lead to deeper intentionality in your craft as you revise and rewrite, because you’ll have developed the muscle of instinct (aka: confidence) around your choices.
THEN: Without workshop, what does community look like?
This is a question I’ve been actively exploring in my own life, and I don’t pretend to have it figured out. For a while now, one approach I’ve taken is to schedule meet-ups at a coffee shop, park, library, or over Zoom: writing separately but together. I’ve done month-long sprints where a group of us track our word counts on a shared spreadsheet. These ideas are about communing through accountability. It’s motivating, certainly, but our experiences are still largely siloed from each other.
I want to explore how community can be about sharing process and taking joy in the exposure to different kinds of art-making. What have you struggled with lately in your work? How did you find a way around a creative setback? What’s the strongest work you’ve done so far, do you think? Show me. Tell me. These are the kinds of questions and answers I want to hear and discuss, the type of exchange I want to carry with me as instructive. You don’t have to be a “fan” of someone’s work in order to respect their dedication to art-making, or take creative guidance from their personal practice, or consider yourselves peers in community. Without the limiting dynamic of workshop, the circle of community can become so much more open and interdisciplinary.
AND FINALLY: Get a hobby.
Being a writer or artist can sometimes turn single-minded. We get stuck in filtering our experiences through self-aware observation. Or we believe all non-bill-paying time—and/or the time outside of family, relationships, or household—must be about writing, otherwise that time is being wasted. But single-mindedness can add unnecessary pressure to our art-making, and it can drive us deeper into rote thought processes. This is where hobbies come in.
Get a bicycle. Try camping. Knitting. Collage. Move your body. It’s summer—when’s the last time you went swimming? Pick up a cookbook at the thrift store and make some attempts. Be a hometown tourist and visit the sites. The point is, break out of the routine of *only* writing. Allow your brain to experience a benign unknown: try something low-stakes that might not work out, that requires a little consideration and maybe a little study, trial and error, but see the attempt through. The quality is not the point. Get a hobby.
Candice Daphne McDowell over on Quiet Reflections just talked beautifully about picking up crocheting and the way hobbies “enrich our lives and give us the ability to go to the quiet places in our minds.” And as I mentioned last issue, I recently started hand-stitching pillows and the physical act of it—very different from hunching over a screen or notebook—has been so satisfying to me. It’s creative and low-key and restorative after all the mental work that writing demands. What I mean is, hobbies can be productive rest. We can be so insistent about identifying as writers in everything we do—but hobbies can gently nudge you into the world in a different way. This is not all that different from the idea of visiting museums as cross-training, which I talked about in the very first issue of SOON.
To recap the four steps:
FIRST: Quit workshopping and keep writing.
NEXT: Write only toward your own interests. Become absolutely devoted to the practice of it.
THEN: Foster community around the idea of sharing personal process, craft struggles, and the realities of art-making across mediums. Be open to experimentation in order to move beyond the workshop dynamic. Seek an interdisciplinary community.
AND FINALLY: Get a hobby. Give your brain a rest. Indulge yourself with the joy of low-stakes learning.
*Addendum*: I should say, this list only exists because I was so committed to learning from as many instructors as I could, in many different settings, over many, many years, long before I ever applied for my MFA program. Personally, I could not have gotten to this place, mentally or in my work, without the journey of those classrooms.
So, if you’re a newer writer, I am not saying you should not workshop or take classes. In fact, my biggest advice to my writing students is always: Take classes with as many different writers as you can, because the way people teach is often directly related to the things they’re obsessed with as writers. Therefore, lots of teachers makes for lots of variety in ideas about writing.
But if you have, like me, been through a decade or more of operating within the feedback dynamic, then you’re probably ready to step outside and listen to yourself. I’ll meet you there. We can talk about what makes the work difficult and transporting, what we’re proud of, and what we’re reaching for.
Nicely thought out!