I do recognise that “MFA discourse” is a thing. It’s just not a thing that seems relevant to me.
I finished my studies (in subjects far removed from creative writing) many years ago – the first in my family to go to university, graduating with a little pride and a lot of debt – and the prospect of going back to university to study anything else now is about as tangible as the prospect of me winning the Super Bowl or performing Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House or any of those other unlikely things that people daydream about in the shower or while hiding from their children.
I accept that the question of how writers learn to write is an interesting one, in an abstract sense, especially if it leads to a conformity of style, but then I’ve never found a shortage of great books to read, historic or contemporary. Quite the opposite. Reports of the many deaths of literature always seem greatly exaggerated.
Not to mention that many of my favourite writers – Bohumil Hrabal, say, or Fernando Pessoa or Penelope Fitzgerald or Franz Kafka – apparently became brilliant writers because of their non-traditional routes into publishing, not in spite of them.
So the dominance of US-based MFA courses and their methods sounds like a reasonable concern, but I just don’t feel it the way others do.1
All of which is a long way of saying I don’t usually read “MFA discourse”, but for some reason I did read this piece by Erik Hoel recently:
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-the-mfa-swallowed-literature
It got a lot of flak online, which isn’t my concern for the reasons given above, but one section really did jump out at me:
Workshop-trained writers are often, not always, but often, intrinsically defensive. This single fact explains almost all defining features of contemporary literature. What you’re looking at on the shelf are not so much books as battlements.
Consider the minimalism of many current novels, their brevity—all to shrink the attack surface. Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching. This defensiveness extends even to the ontology of their fictional worlds. A lot of today’s literary fiction could be set on some twin earth where everything about history, science, philosophy, the universe, even what humans evolved to look like, could all be totally different. Yet the novel is so situated in the writer’s low-attack-surface manifest image of the world that the reader would never know. Unnamed narrators and characters are given only descriptors like “my divorced friend” or “L came over,” making everything surface.
Erik Hoel, How the MFA swallowed literature
The argument goes that workshop-drilled authors are not writing to impress others, as you might perhaps assume, but writing to minimise the weak spots by which their writing can be attacked.
Like the baby Achilles being dipped in the River Styx, the writer who eschews flowery language/grand themes/elaborate metaphors is reducing the possible criticisms of their work to the tiniest surface possible.
It’s a compelling argument.
Because I’ve read some brilliant books in recent years. Books where every single sentence is like a perfectly smooth pearl that’s been recovered from the bottom of the ocean. Books where pages pass through your fingers like silk. Books where ominous feelings, or deeper meanings, always seem to be just around the next corner. But many of these are also books that just… end.
They are books where hinting at meaning is preferable to actual meaning. Books where the main character’s inner turmoil is depicted in intriguing habits and awkward conversations and – 200 pages later – we’re still revisiting the same intriguing habits and awkward conversations, which are just a little less interesting than before. Books that seem to be adjacent to contemporary society, not actually engaged in questions of inequality or injustice, not in any meaningful way. Books as smooth as dolphins.
It’s certainly not every contemporary work. It’s not, say, Luster by Raven Leilani, or Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, or Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, or The Vegetarian by Han Kang, or Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. All of those are beautifully crafted, but also full of mess and meaning and each builds towards a climax which seems to deliver something important in that most powerful way – the sucker punch that you never saw coming, even as you were secretly longing for it all along.
But it is a significant number of books, enough books for me to have noticed it as a trend. The beautifully-crafted but, ultimately, hollow read. And now someone has given me a reasonable explanation for why it happens, I suspect I’ll notice it even more too.
Selfishly, it’s also spelled out something for my own writing. Something which I think I had accepted long ago, but had never articulated in any way and without ever thinking about it consciously. Namely, that my own writing will never be “minimal attack surface”. I’ve tried writing that sleeker stuff. The pared-back prose. I can’t really do it. I can’t keep it up for long enough.
I like books that tell as well as show. I like books that digress. I like books that aim to reveal something about the world we live in. I like books that make you feel angry about things. I like books that bite off more than they can chew. I like books that try to do something really, really ambitious and fail. I like books with too many characters. I like books that aren’t afraid of planting themselves firmly in history or geography or art. I like books with similes that make you gasp one minute and wince the next. I like books that can happily contain the philosophical and the scatalogical and the metaphysical all within the same pages.
And those are the books I want to write.
Imperfect books that leave behind a bruise. Not the beautiful pearls that slip down so easily and are forgotten a week later.
A ARBOR, NOVEMBER 2021
1) There is an important question about gate-keeping too of course. It’s not just about learning to be a writer, it’s about who decides what gets published, what gets marketed, what gets reviewed, what gets awarded. Which is particularly significant in terms of diversity and I don’t want to minimise that particular concern even if it wasn’t really the thrust of the original piece.
But again – speaking entirely personally – I’ve always been inspired by the Pessoa tradition (or Henry Darger or Vivian Maier) of doing the work regardless of whether anyone else cares for it much. I’ll happily self-publish my own work, even if self-publishing means printing it off on the work printer after everyone’s gone home and leaving it in a shoebox for horrified grandchildren to discover long after I’m dead.