Letter to an MFA Student - Part 1

As it's graduation time,  I'm  honored  and humbled to present to the publishing and writing community this important three part essay written by Joshua Henkin.

Henkin writes about issues and problems in the ways young writers are educated and prepared - or not educated and not prepared  - to be working writers  and to break into the world of publishing.

Only someone with Joshua's background could have written this essay. He has an MFA. His debut novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was a Los Angeles Times notable book of the year.  His new novel, Matrimony, will be published by Pantheon in October.  And he teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College.

Letter to a Young MFA by Joshua Henkin


   Like many fiction writers, I spend a lot of time in the classroom.  I received my MFA in the early 1990s, and since then I have been teaching in MFA programs, trying to help aspiring writers improve their craft.  What gives me pause, however, is the degree to which young writers view an MFA the way law students view law school:  as a professional degree, a way to advance their career.  Although many MFA graduates do get published, enrolling in an MFA program in order to get published strikes me as unwise.

    I’m not arguing that it’s simply a matter of being good and that publishing will take care of itself.  It’s just that the question of what gets published seems so arbitrary that the best thing I can do is focus on the writing and hope that sets my students on the right path.  What a New Yorker reader wants to read, what a Harper’s reader wants to read, shouldn’t be on the mind of a writer, certainly not as she sits down to write.

    But my students continue to worry about publishing, and though I can’t entirely blame them (what writer doesn’t worry about publishing?), there’s an irony to their concern.  The same students who want to publish their work are often curiously unconcerned with entertaining their readers, with doing what a friend of mine, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist, calls the writer’s principal obligation:  to get the reader to dance with you.  In short, they are reluctant to do—indeed, suspicious of doing—what is the cardinal requirement of every writer:  to tell the reader a story.

    This reluctance appears in various guises, but it comes down to the same thing:  a belief, sometimes articulated, sometimes not, that story-telling is what hack writers do—it’s the territory of Grisham and Crichton—and that to think about plot is beneath them, because they write literary fiction.  Meanwhile, the Grishams and Crichtons of the world are laughing all the way to the bank.  And since many of my students want to laugh to the bank themselves, it would behoove them to take seriously what writers of genre fiction know to take seriously:  the need to tell a story.

    With that in mind, I want to run through some of the most common ways MFA students avoid telling a story, as a window onto what can go wrong with MFA writing, and with literary fiction in general.  I say this as someone who writes literary fiction and whose own reading tastes weigh heavily toward literary fiction, but who nonetheless sees some problems.

Lack of Urgency

    Anyone who’s been to a Passover Seder is familiar with The Four Questions:  “Why is this night different from all others?”  From a liturgical standpoint, it’s what make’s Passover Passover.  It’s also, I would argue, what makes fiction fiction.  When a writer sits down to write, he must always ask himself:  What’s important about today?  Why have I chosen to tell my story now?  What, in short, is the occasion for the telling?  If the story can’t answer this question, then no matter how well written it is, it’s not a story; it’s a mere event or a character sketch.  But many practitioners of literary fiction don’t understand this.  They’ll release their characters into the world and think that if the writing is good enough, nothing else matters.

      Sometimes I’ll tell a student that what they’ve given me feels less like a story than a slice of life.  To which they’ll say, “But aren’t all stories slices of life?”  Well, they are, in that a writer is always choosing some things and leaving out others.  But a successful piece of fiction is very carefully sliced life.  It’s not someone haphazardly lowering a knife onto the pie and seeing what shape comes out.

The Passive Protagonist and the Problem of Watching

     I once had an undergraduate, a talented writer who wrote a story that could have been called “Stuff I Thought While I Was in my Car.”  Her protagonist drove somewhere, passed places she recognized, people she knew, and gave the reader her observations, often quite eloquent and insightful, about what she witnessed.  Line by line, the material was quite good, but in no meaningful way was it a story.  I think subconsciously my student was hoping that the forward movement of the car would substitute for a deeper narrative forward movement.  But it didn’t, and simply putting your character in a car will not make a story a story.

    Now, the case of my undergraduate is extreme, but it’s by no means unique.  Time and again, my graduate students write stories in which the main character simply observes what takes place around her.  On some level, this isn’t surprising.  We as a society spend a lot of time alone, and much of our contact with others is both inadvertent and anxiety-producing.  On the subway, we avert our glances when someone catches our eye; we avoid knocking into people on the street.  For our safety, and our sanity, we are conflict-averse, and writers may be temperamentally the most conflict-averse of all.  We do our jobs alone in front of a screen, often in our underwear; we are born—or at least trained—to observe.  But it’s bad for a writer to be conflict-averse, at least bad for him to be so on the page, because conflict is what makes for tension in stories, what pushes fiction forward and informs character.

      “What’s wrong with watching?” a student will ask me, and I will say, “Nothing, if you do it in moderation.”  Watching, after all, is part of the human experience.  But if it’s all your protagonist does, then your story is going to be inert.  That’s because watching is a passive process; it involves no action, no choice, and therefore it has no moral complexity.  In a good story, a character is forced to make choices.  And if you have trouble getting your characters to make choices, you need to put them in a situation where they have to choose.  What if you’re seated on a bus and a stranger puts his hand on your thigh?  You can scream; you can tell the person to remove his hand; you can, I suppose, encourage him; or you can do nothing at all.  But in this instance, even doing nothing is doing something; not choosing is its own sort of choice.  What I tell my students, then, is they have to make their characters do something.  They need to put people’s hands on their characters’ thighs.

The Victim Story

       Almost as common as the watching story is the story about a character who’s been victimized.  Bad things have been done to this person, and the story is a chronicle of how he’s been wronged, with an implicit plea that we feel bad for him.  And we very well might.  But this isn’t especially interesting because being victimized, unless it’s portrayed in a more complicated way, doesn’t involve choice, and choice, as I’ve been suggesting, is what gives stories tension and makes for complex characters.  Another way to look at it is that rendering your protagonist powerless is a mistake, because a character needs a certain amount of power in order to behave badly, and behaving badly—or at least the possibility of behaving badly—is what makes fiction interesting.  Charles Baxter says as much in his wonderful book of essays Burning Down the House.  Baxter, who teaches fiction writing himself, draws a distinction between “me” protagonists and “I” protagonists.  “Me” protagonists, he argues, are characters to whom things are done, whereas “I” protagonists actually do something.  In Baxter’s opinion, there are too many “me” protagonists out there, and I agree.

The Story Where the Author is Trying to Make a Point

      Years ago, a friend of mine wrote her undergraduate psychology thesis on the way adults groups objects versus the way children group objects.  Adults group the apple with the banana, whereas children group the monkey with the banana.  Children, in other words, are more natural story tellers than adults.  Part of teaching writing, then, is to get adults to think like children again.  This involves convincing them that they’re not writing principally about big ideas.  There’s room for ideas in fiction, certainly, but a writer’s job is to tell a story and the ideas come in only through the back door.  When my students tell me that they want to write about loneliness, or about the ravages of war, or about how much pain there is in the world, I tell them in that case they should be writing philosophy, or political science, or sociology.

       As long as they’re writing fiction, they need to eschew the abstract for the concrete.  It might be said that Lorrie Moore writes about lonely single women who use humor to cover up their pain, but you can be sure Moore didn’t think this way when she sat down to write “You’re Ugly, Too.”  She started with Zoë and gave her a sister, then took Zoë on a trip New York to attend her sister’s Halloween party where she meets an eligible single man wearing a bonehead.  That’s how a fiction writer needs to think—in terms of Halloween parties and men wearing boneheads, not in terms of ideas about loneliness.

CONTINUE READING PART TWO AND THREE BY CLICKING HERE Scroll down for part 2 and then up for part 3.

 

Comments

[Patrick Shawn Bagley]

I'm entering my final semester in an MFA program, and I have to say I agree with everything Joshua has said so far.

[T]

I almost didn't read this because of the title--I'm not an MFA student--but I'm so glad I did. I've never understood why and how literary writers decided that writing beautiful sentences is superior to telling a good story and telling it well. That thinking needs to change. Thank you for this!

[Jessica Keener]

Stupendous post, Joshua. The word "literary" has suffered these past years and for many of the reasons you pointed out. But I also get tired of people assuming bad things about literary fiction as if it's come to mean unreadable or unenjoyable. Literary fiction, to my mind, is stellar writing married to compelling storylines.

Jessica
Fiction editor, Agni magazine

[Y]

I'm trying to be the greatest writer who ever lived, and I'm principally against MFA programs. There's a certain offense to literature if you can take a couple semesters of a class and come out being a "Master of the Fine Arts." Precisely that implication is why your students are, I should say, not quite masters. It's an excuse for an honest effort.

The best learning environment, I'm convinced, would be a solitary confinement cell, where you never see sunlight outside your imagination. You're fed through a slot three times a day. You're given all the books and stationary you need. Under these conditions you could write the greatest masterpiece in history. There's no higher focus. I call it the incubative theory of creative development. I haven't written about it, so that idea is up for grabs. If you plan to use the method, just be aware,----it hurts at first. You'll find your creative understanding obliterates all your previous conceptions.... simply put, you can actually become a genius by doing it this way.

I maintain that all creativity can come from the imagination. You don't need experience. If you deprive yourself of experience, your imagination compensates, like sensory deprivation. Your MFA program assumes you're not creative to begin with. And if you're serious, you'll seek out understanding on your own. Everything you need, you can teach yourself.

[Karen]

*clapping*

There's nothing wrong with telling a story. It's wonderful to hear one of the MFA set say so. They can be so frustratingly pretentious about "commercial fiction."

There's nothing wrong with telling a story. There's nothing wrong with telling a story. Maybe we writers should get this tattooed on our foreheads.

[Sean Ferrell]

This is an excellent essay for writers of every genre, MFA or not.

[Leechy]

Who says a writer's job is to tell a story? Who decided this?

A writer's job is to write as she pleases and as she can. A reader can decide is he likes the product or not. But why should a reader or a mentor get to decide how a writer writes? That's a disgusting idea.

Henkin's argument applies to bestselling authors of fiction, hopeful or practising. But that's a different animal. We don't all aspire to being best-selling authors. To hear Henkin bemoan it, there is dire need for scads more Michael Chrichtons out there.

Please tell me you are not going to try to rebut this with "But Hemingway was readable, too."

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