We'll take a cup of kindness yet

Is it the last day of the year already?

My 2011 New Year's resolutions:

1. Read more outside my comfort zone.
2. Finish revisions and rewrites on my WIP.
3. Keep up with my journal writing.
4. Run twice a week.
5. Eat my five-a-day.

Anyone else? What new leaves are you turning over this January?

My MFA Experience, Part 4: The Wrap-Up

A quick summary of my year studying for an MFA in England:

Pros:
I had a year to focus on writing.
I had a great time living in another country.
I made lots of amazing friends from all over the world.
I met my fiance.
I started to seriously think of myself as a writer.

Cons:
High tuition fees and the resulting student loan debt.
An MFA doesn't help much with finding a job after graduation.
Classes weren't as in-depth as I would have liked.
I didn't have a finished novel at the end of my degree.

So, is getting an MFA necessary if you want to be a serious writer? Absolutely not. Can it help? Of course. But so can lots of other things--taking a creative writing class at your local college. Getting together with a critique group. Going on a writing retreat (I've never been on one, but they sound cool, don't they?). In other words, getting an MFA isn't the right route for everyone. You don't need one in order to be published; all you have to do is write an amazing story. I mean, most of the authors I love don't have an MFA. Some don't have a BA either. When I saw Ray Bradbury on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, he told us about how he educated himself in the local library when he was young because he couldn't afford to go to college. And I think that illustrates an important point about writing: things like talent and qualifications will only get you so far. When it comes right down to it, it's persistence and hard work that, in the end, will separate wannabe writers from real authors.

Happy Boxing Day

Hello! I've been suffering from the flu for the past week, which is why my final MFA post has been delayed. Hope you have all had/are having a fun Christmas/Winter Solstice/Kwanzaa/Festivus. I've got lots of shiny new books to read and talk about, as soon as I stop coughing/shivering. Expect new posts soon!

Inspiration post

Radiohead. Because their songs always make me want to write really, really sad stories.

My MFA Experience, Part 3: Struggles

The thing I struggled most with during my MFA was time management. This had never been a problem for me as an undergrad. I was always working on something, and was able to prioritize my workload well and get all of my assignments in on time.

My MFA program was different. I had classes just one day a week and I studied only two subjects at a time--for example, I had a writing workshop and a historical authorship class. And while I was able to keep up with all of my obligations for my classes, I was often left with the uneasy feeling that I should be doing more.

After all, I was studying for a master's degree. The MA students at my American university ran around looking perpetually stressed out and exhausted; in between classes, exams, teaching, reading, and papers, it was sort of amazing that they were even able to stand. Meanwhile I was having a comparatively relaxed time: writing stories, researching literary theories and typing up essays in between visits to Brighton Pier with my new friends and going on crazy adventures with Big Chimp. In short, I had the sneaking suspicion that it was all too easy. Surely being a graduate student was supposed to be, well, somewhat painful? Or at the very least unbearably stressful.

As I began to get assignments back with good grades and positive comments, I gradually learned to relax a bit and enjoy the experience. When our final grades came in, I received a "merit," the second highest grade possible, above "pass" and below "distinction." So all that worrying? Completely unfounded. It was just that the British system of education was very different from the American one to which I had become accustomed.

Another thing I had trouble with during my MFA was focus. I feel like if I had had a clear vision for the novel I wanted to write, the entire year could have been more productive. And while I did learn a lot about writing, at the end of the year I still didn't know exactly what I wanted to focus on. I had jumped between a couple of different stories over the course of the program, but wasn't entirely happy with either of them. It wasn't until a couple of months after graduation that I finally got a clear idea of the basic plot for Water Magic--a story I had put on the back burner a few years before--and started working seriously on it.

The other frustrations I experienced came mostly as a result of studying in a foreign country. I was not used to the way things worked in England, and at times the university where I studied seemed unbearably antiquated and silly. Where in America I would handle my class schedule, financial aid, and pretty much everything else online, in England I ended up having to visit various offices in person, and having to go through (what seemed to me to be) ridiculous amounts of paperwork and red tape, as well as stand in a lot of queues, just to do basic things like register for classes or claim my financial aid.

Another frustration was the short opening hours of various offices on campus. The financial office, for example, was only open for a few hours a day. Shops around town were the same: many closed at five or six in the evening, which was a huge change from the 24 hour stores and restaurants I was used to in the US.

And then there was all the trouble I had with my British bank, which never sent me my ATM card, so I had to go into the branch every time I wanted to withdraw money. No one could figure out why the card had not been sent, or how to rectify the situation. They also were unable to look up my account using just a photo ID, which I found absurd. In the end, they suggested I write them a letter to find out about the ATM card, so I ended up just switching banks. But the whole time I was thinking, this would never happen at my American bank.

So looking back, it was culture shock that caused me the most frustration during my MFA year. Things were different than they had been in America, and I found that difficult to deal with at times. My advice to anyone planning on studying abroad would be: just go with the flow, and try to laugh it off when things seem silly. It's all part of the journey.

Next time: My MFA Experience, Part 4: The Wrap-Up

SNOW DAY!

When I was six, seven, eight years old, I dreamed of one day experiencing that wonder of winter: a snow day. Unfortunately I grew up in San Diego, California, where the winter comes wrapped in sunshine and blue skies. And while on the coldest days the grass might be covered in a thin coat of frost which melts by midmorning, snow is only a dream that six, seven, eight year old children have.

But today, wonder of days, the college where I work has been closed due to the heavy snow we've been having in southeast England. So, almost twenty years after I first dared to dream, my dream has come true: I finally have a snow day.

I am going to tramp through the (rather very deep) snow in my Wellington boots, and then I'm going to do some hardcore writing on my WIP, followed by some serious reading. I've picked up two more advanced copies of novels from the bookstore where I work, and I plan to finally finish Gayle Forman's If I Stay today (I had to stop reading it a month ago because I found it too disturbing). I've also just started Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and I'm still making my way ever so slowly through The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey.

Any other lucky snow-dayers out there today? If so, what are your plans, and more importantly, what are you reading?

My MFA Experience, Part 2: Reality Check

The first thing that I did when I got to my British university was run out of money. Those of you Americans considering studying in the UK, keep this in mind: American checks take between two and six weeks to clear through a UK bank. And financial aid from the US Department of Education will come in the form of a paper check mailed to your British university. The best thing to do is sign over these checks immediately to the university. They take out money for university fees and then give you the rest about two weeks later. Being used to my financial aid arriving like clockwork each quarter at my american university, this delay came as a surprise to me. I would recommend either taking a year off to save up some money, or selling your car before you leave for the UK. Even after selling a lot of my possessions the summer before I left, I was eating crackers and Nutella for most meals during the first two weeks of my program.

Still, I was excited to be there, happy to meet new people, and having fun exploring Brighton. I was put in an off-campus house for postgraduate students, in a nice area a few steep blocks up from the seaside. My ten housemates were from ten different countries: Holland, Canada, England, Russia, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, and Ecuador. The house was an old three story converted for student use, with a shared kitchen and a large back garden. The house next door was also a postgraduate house, filled with a similar hodgepodge of nationalities, and in good weather we would sometimes get together in one of the gardens for a birthday party or a potluck dinner.

In the first week, I had my program orientation at the university campus, a twelve-minute train ride away from Brighton Station. There was a general orientation for everyone in the department, and then we split into our specific MA groups. My group went to a nearby classroom. It was a small group, and became even smaller when I learned that a lot of the other students were part-time, and wouldn't be having classes with the full-timers, of which I was one. We each partnered up with another student to talk about our writing and get to know each other a bit. Afterward a buffet lunch was served in the building's cafe. I started to talk to the only other person on the programme who was near my age. We left the cafe and sat on a bench outside and talked about ourselves, writing, reading, and books. And that's how I met my now fiance, Big Chimp.

The program itself wasn't quite what I was expecting. We spent only one day a week in class, with the weeks alternating between creative writing workshops and authorship theory classes. There were no exams, but a 5,000 word essay or creative peice due for each class each term, and a 20,000 word dissertation due at the end of the summer.

What I wasn't expecting was all of the free time I had. It was nice, to be sure, but judging from what I'd seen of master's programs at my American university, I had been expecting something more in depth. This seemed to be a common sentiment among my American friends, who were studying English, media, and international criminal law, so I don't think it was exclusive to the creative writing program. English universities are just set up differently. They expect you to do more work on your own and spend less time with instructors. Personally, for the amount of money it cost, I would have preferred more than one day a week of classes (although to be fair, the one day did last all day long). It wasn't that I didn't have to work, because I did, but I had grown used to the way things were at my American university: intense, fast-paced, and crammed full of lectures, discussion sections, quizzes, exams, reading, and essays. And to be honest, that's still the way I prefer to learn. But I guess the take-away lesson here is: a degree program is what you make of it. Especially in Britain, where the onus is on you, the student, to make the program work for you. As the old saying goes, the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it.

However that's not to say that the program was bad. I learned plenty from it. It was a new program at the time, and there were definitely kinks to iron out. And I wish I had had a clearer idea of what I wanted to write, so I wouldn't have ended up changing projects several times throughout the year. But there was value in what I was learning, and the most important thing I took away from the program was learning to see myself as a writer. Not someone who wants to be a writer when she grows up, but someone who already is a writer, someone who works hard at writing with the goal of someday being published. And there were smaller, just as important things -- avioding elegant variation, watching those adverbs didn't get out of control, making sure setting was present in each scene, etc, etc.

My American friends who were also studying for MAs at my university all seemed to agree: our programs, while not bad, didn't seem to be worth the hefty international fees we were paying for them. However, the experience of living for a year in England -- specifically of living in as vibrant a city as Brighton (Britain's most progressive, laid back, artisitic and all-around awesome city) -- of traveling (I visited France and Morocco that year, as well as taking a road trip around Britain with Big Chimp), of meeting new people (like my amazingly cool friend Pauline, from Kenya, and of course Big Chimp, my soon-to-be husband), of just having the experience of this amazing adventure -- that was worth so much more than money could buy.

Next time: My MFA Experience, Part 3: Struggles