Flash Fiction / Pittsburgh / Blogging

It is my opinion that graduate programs do not teach you to write. You are the only person who can teach you to write. What I do believe a good Master of Fine Arts program can do and do well is to provide a writer with a routine of study that can push a writer closer to publishability.

The workshop is how many MFA programs work. The professor acts as a facilitator and your classmates critique your story. To me this was always like the blind leading the blind. Many years ago I was a student nurse (LPN) and I can not imagine our instructor allowing the class to critique the on floor performance of one of my classmates (what the hell did any of us know about nursing; that's what we were there for: to learn about nursing). Of course in an MFA program if you mess up you end up with a bad story and as a student nurse if you mess up you end up with a dead patient (this really can't happen because you are too closely supervised) so maybe the comparison is not a fair one but you see my point. If we're all learning how to write how can we critique a classmate's story? Many times I thought the critiques were irrelevant.

By starting my graduate schooling after over thirty years of real life experience, all of them struggling to master the short story, I came to graduate school well grounded in life and art. And I would sit in class and listen as a story was deconstructed and put back together and see that the writer had no idea what to believe.

I would cringe when advice was given as to how to re-write a story to make it better. You cannot re-write another writer's story. All anyone can ever do is to say whether or not a story is well written and that has to do with mechanics (grammar, tension, clarity, characterization and so on). I always felt that a critique that went beyond mechanics was invalid. A writer makes so many decisions, some the writer is not even consciously aware of, in composing a story that another person or group of people can never, never approach where the writer was mentally during the composition stage.

The University of Pittsburgh accepted about 75% of my credits from an Associate of Arts degree I got in 1973 so that I entered Pitt in 2000 as a second semester 52-year-old sophomore. I brought with me the manuscript of The Pittsburgh Stories which I had been writing and re-writing for 10 years. One of the first things several professors told me was to start writing new stories and to stop trying to write like Hemingway and Raymond Carver. (Let me add now that my mentor, graduate school workshop professor and Director of the Writing Department, Chuck Kinder and one of my undergraduate professors, Lewis "Buddy" Nordan were not among these naysayers).

Luckily for me I totally ignored the advice to write something new for two reasons: I was convinced that the "material" in the stories was good material and I was not trying to write like Hemingway or Carver; I was trying to figure out how these two writing heroes of mine did what they did so that I could apply their "techniques" to my own "material." Their techniques were the perfect expression of the kind of world my characters lived in. It was my vision of humankind at war with the self and the outer world.

If I had been a much younger writer I could easily still be in the writing wilderness. The thing is younger writers do need greater guidance; but if you can come to an MFA program grounded by a few years of life experience living on your own and several years struggling to master your craft you will then know when to accept advice that is right for you and when to ignore advice that will do you more harm than good.

So if you have a chance to go to an MFA program go by all means and take advantage of every opportunity such an education has to offer for they are many. But don't say I didn't warn you.