It’s a new year and a new semester, and with it a new edition of Tips From the MFA Pit. For those not familiar, I teach in an MFA program and what you’ll read here is actual sage advice gleaned from all my years of passing on…my sage advice. This it to a student taking a course in finding their process and individual aesthetic, which loosely interpreted, is finding your own voice and writing methods. The first assignment is an opening essay, to which I’d offered this…

In your opening essay, you stated that your “writing used to be as habitual as brushing my teeth.” This is so true of young writers, and they see it as practice that sets them apart from their peers, as something wonderous and inspirational and unique unto themselves. Sometimes this “calling” seems otherworldly to us, as we almost feel compelled to put down our thoughts into words. It’s exhilarating and we do it as often as we could, and it’s from there that we know—we just know—we were destined to be writers and write great things. The trick is, as we get older and are confronted with demands of adult life, is to keep that magic alive, as we are straddling two very different world.

 Part of that adult world is sending our work out for review, whether through the people we share it with, the classes we take, or through publication. What starts out primarily as something we do for ourselves morphs into messages we send out to the world, and from there we open ourselves up to scrutiny. This is never easy, as actually it’s quite a feat of bravery, to share this interior space with the world. But part of what makes writing so satisfying in the end is letting the outside into that interior world, and having them revel in it as much as you do is thrilling. But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. Sometimes the words don’t quite translate, sometimes the cerebral pictures we paint appear blurred. Of course, all writing is subjective, and everyone has their own opinions, but when too many of these opinions come out the same way, we’re forced to take another look. After all, we want to make sure our message is getting across, don’t we?

 That’s when we have to assure ourselves that it’s always about the work, it’s never about you. It’s hard, because that’s when that magical feeling we felt in your youth hits up against the hard reality of the reading world. Truth is we all need editors, no matter how successful we get, and there’s proof enough of that is some of the rambling texts of major authors with no-edit clauses in their contracts. From this point we may no longer see our writing as fun as it used to be. Suddenly it becomes work, and that’s when our writing process starts to alter.

This is the hardest part. This is when we may be afraid to face that blank page because we become afraid of the reaction our work will get. But to counter this, we have to split our writer self into the parts: the writer/creator, the editor, and the publicist. The writer/creator just writes, just pounds those words out onto the page, verbal vomit, so to speak, the world be damned. The editor takes those words and refines them, adds and detracts, hones and polished. Then the publicist gets it ready for the markets, eyes it not as a literary creation but a product. Later on, this last task is relegated to an agent, and it’s sometimes the cruelest task of all. But if your want to get our voice out in the world, it’s the most necessary. But it also can’t exist without the first two, the two which allow the third to exist.

You thought I forgot, didn’t you? Like nearly a whole semester has gone by with nary a mention.  Well no I didn’t! What follows is a discussion on loving the author, but maybe not loving the work. The bone of our contention was Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No one’s perfect after all, not even literary icons!

There are several things that struck me when reading your critique of Garcia Marquez. The first thing is you can love the author, but you don’t have to love everything they write. To use a cliché, you don’t have to hit a home run every time—on both ends. There are reasons for this, one of which is the perks of being a literary icon. This being one of GM’s later works, after several critical and commercial successes, after winning the Nobel Prize, his publisher more than likely gave him a no-edit clause. Quite literally, they will publish every word the author writes. The author becomes their own editor in the sense that they have the final say over what stays or goes in the work, as their work is considered beyond “fixing,” and that people will buy anything he’ll write anyway. Only big authors get this privilege, and I’ve seen some of my favorite writers go this route to the point I couldn’t read them anymore. Take one Ken Follett.

Back in his prime, he was one of my favorite writers. Not for his deep literary talent, but for pure escapism. His genre was historical thrillers, and he wrote several novels set during WWII, two of which The Eye of the Needle and Night Over Water, kept you on the edge of your seat with every turn of the page. They were novels you’d read far into the night, mainly because you simply could not put them down. Then his success led to a no-edit clause. The first book I read after that I couldn’t get  50 pages in. It’s been years, but I haven’t read anything by him since.

What struck me next doesn’t have so much to do with Garcia Marquez as with how much you’re learning about magical realism. You’re discovering what works and what doesn’t, or rather what works for YOU and what doesn’t. As you read, you’re also developing your own style, as what you would write if it were your own book. I read with interest your synopsis of the work, as it boiled it down to the elements that stood out to you. From what I could gather, it lacked the enthusiasm of when you really enjoy something (as with Beloved  — and oh yes, did you enjoy the firestorm the book caused in the recent gubernatorial election in Virginia? Guaranteed 99.99% of the complainers didn’t read past the first page). Another thing that struck me was the blatant symbolism in it. Calling the protagonist Sierva, at least an Anglo play on the Spanish for servant servidora.  Then there’s her hair being a symbol of freedom, and how hers is shorn. It reminded me of the fairy tail, Rapunzal, whose long hair kept her captive in a tower. Irony, maybe?

Again, we don’t have to love everything from a beloved writer. We can allow them a few misses in their entire body of work. But as I pointed out you can still learn from them, and if that’s not what to do, if we can hone our own style out of theirs, then a lesson learned is a lesson learned.