#gotta get my manuscript in for my cohort first

[nanamispto]

Feeling. The urge to write chsyk.

#you can tell my partner and I are long distance rn bc the yearning has reappeared #gotta get my manuscript in for my cohort first

[frontporchlit]

Novel or Stories? by Luke Helm

My wife and I moved across the country and out of two full-time jobs for me to pursue my MFA. Upon my arrival, I noticed that every time I met someone from the program, the same question surfaced—and I’ve gotta say, I loved it. I had grown accustomed to raised eyebrows and smirks when I let slip that I was a writer, so in those early months, I loved the question simply for its assumption: novel or short stories? Obviously, we were writing—the question was what. The sense of community, of belonging, was built in.

I, from the outset, was Team Novel. My writing life started in service to a large project, and I entered the MFA with the single-minded purpose of getting through my first book. While this put me in the minority in our cohort, it was not until later in my first year that my commitment to Team Novel began to worry me.

I began to worry as we learned lessons about points of view, points of telling, verb tenses, narrative stances, and the like, and as my classmates churned out stories that utilized these tools in ways unavailable to me in my one long-form pursuit. I worried as my classmates experimented with short stories of vastly different themes and lengths and styles, and I looked through my pages knowing that there was no quicker way to kill a novel than to wrestle it into a second-person point of view just for kicks.

As someone unfamiliar even with an undergrad English department, I spent the first year of my MFA assuming that my story-writing classmates had known a secret I didn’t (as it turned out, they knew plenty I didn’t; it just wasn’t secrets about whether writing novels or short stories was a better use of an MFA). On the bad days of novel writing, I was certain I was squandering my opportunity to develop as a writer and would spend the rest of my days bemoaning my MFA decisions.

This isn’t to say that the lessons of my early MFA classes were unhelpful to me as a novelist—they clarified and sharpened choices I needed to make or had already made. One workshop clarified the need to maintain both short and long lines of tension in each of my chapters. Another made clear that narrative distance, overdone, quickly flattens prose. But even given these valuable lessons, there was no denying that my choice to work solely on a novel curtailed the opportunities to experiment and play with variables.

Fast forward a year. We are now wrapping up semester four of six and preparing to start work on our theses, due now in a little under a year. Reflecting now on my decision to stay resolutely on Team Novel, my early fears have largely faded. Would I have done it any differently if given the opportunity? Not a chance. I know I’ve missed out on some opportunities to play with levers and dials and buttons in the storyteller’s repertoire, but I know, too, that I’ve got a stack of pages waiting for me as I turn my attention to assembling a “publishable manuscript.” Coming into the program, I was intent on getting my first novel written, and I am now well positioned to do just that.

Perhaps in another year I will realize that I was wrong, that I should’ve been writing stories all along. But from what I’ve gathered so far, and from what I’ve heard from the students who have already walked the long road of the thesis, the best thing you can do is to work as diligently as possible on whatever you believe in the most. I hope they’re right.

#luke helm #original blog post #novel writing #short story #novel vs story #mfa program #mfa life #thesis #transition #mfa community #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog