On the Occasion of the First Day of the Semester

This morning I start my second semester toward getting an MA in English. I don't think I can overemphasize how well I know that this degree is not technically worth the paper it's printed on, much less the tuition that I will ultimately spend to attain it. Nor can I fully explain how thoroughly my first semester convinced me that I made the right choice by going in for the degree.

A recent online discussion in which I participated got around to arguing about "in-demand" graduate degrees, and "using" vs. "not using" a graduate degree for which good money is paid. I am grossed out by this kind of rhetoric when it comes to degrees of any kind. Education is a gift, and to talk about that gift in a way that only acknowledges its dollars-and-cents utility is repellent to me. What do I gain from pouring money into my brain? Only everything. How and when do I use it? Every day, in every way. Someone on the thread asked, point blank, why you would select a graduate degree that isn't "in demand," and I said, point blank, "Oh, gee, to learn? To improve one's life and mind?"

My choice to get an MA in English is, in a way, indefensible. I was raised by a very literate mother and I tend to read everything I can get my hands on; I've already read, just as a consequence of being me, fully half the books on one of my syllabi for this semester. Even if I wanted to, I can't teach with an MA, and (IN THEORY) if my career path is to be a novelist, the MFA is the "useful" degree, the terminal and teachworthy one, the equivalent of an MBA for a financial adviser. (Sort of.) A lot of people who would certainly know might say that there's little an MA can offer me that I can't get on my own, and that my time and money would be better spent on writers' conferences, library fines, even an MFA - but not on what I'm choosing.

If someone asked me straight out why on earth I'm bothering with an MA in English, I would acknowledge it was a fair question and then desire to explain at length. I want to understand literature better, which is a process I'm not sure is entirely achievable just through reading. I want to spend a few years learning (yay for learning!) in a structured way, because I learn better in structured environments than I do on my own. I want to meet new people, folks who love books and learning too. I want to take creative writing classes at the college level, dammit, something I've never yet managed to do. And, critically, my first semester stimulated me and made me cheerful in a way I couldn't have predicted and hardly understand, except that I want more of it.

It was a hard choice. There's some family baggage for me around graduate degrees and their tuition. I have a lot to say about it. (Obviously.) But in this space, the thing that I really want to say is that I don't think the decision to get a graduate degree should depend on its nuts-and-bolts utility. Certainly I think this is true in humanities fields, where utility is often irrelevant to the life of the mind

, but even in more practical disciplines, why not pursue a degree because you want to learn, because you want your life to be a little bigger than it was before? I believe it's folly to go after education with a concrete, utilitarian state of mind. How can you have any fun learning with such a rigid perspective?

I don't expect to "use" my degree in any more practical manner than every day, in every way. It won't get me a job or a promotion, and while I think it will make me a better writer, I might be able to get the same improvement with time and practice rather than tuition. I'm doing it anyway. Some people travel in planes, see the world with passports, but I walk into classrooms and bring my notebook.

When All Else Fails, Read More

Writing. Oh, the drama. Oh, the angst.

When I read Prozac Nation, I wondered how it was possible that the author could have any friends at all who retained any patience with her. I would have given up on such a drama queen long before. I'm now in a position to wonder why others aren't giving up on me.

I don't mean to be cryptic, but believe me, you don't want to hear the drama. It's so lame to be tempestuous about your writing and to see that you're doing it even as you're doing it and to press on anyway. SO lame.

Here's the news I can talk about: thanks to a recommendation I'll talk about later I ordered Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway et al., and it arrived yesterday. I flipped through it and read some bits and pieces during Balcony Time yesterday. Awesome book, y'all. It's a textbook so it was absurdly priced, but I think it'll be worth it.

I was reading about how detail interacts with the reader's perception to create character, which is a preferred and more skillful way to create character than to just set forth traits, and it dawned on me that this was the first time I had read or heard about this in a non-oblique way. Sure, I'd known that showing was preferable to telling, and I'd known that writers I liked gave me concrete reasons to like their characters rather than just saying "Lucy was brave", but no one had explicated the technique of it at length in paragraph form for me until now. And I hadn't understood that "show, don't tell" is a flexible statement that applies to more than one mechanic.

Writing suddenly seemed like carpentry. Like using a bunch of skills to build a table, rather than creating art per an unpredictable muse. There's artistry in a nice table, fo' sho, but I'd thought it was all mysterious and weird and woo-woo when you're creating something beyond The Da Vinci Code. I'm just not sure anymore that's true. Even high-literary writers and wacked-out experimental writers seem to have a grasp on such techniques, I realize, and I'd somehow thought it was stuff that couldn't be taught, at which you just had to have talent.

Later on I read about story form, plot, structure and the opposite thing happened: I just couldn't knock this shit down to size in my head. It all seemed abstract. Power? Conflict + connection? I couldn't make it into a framework; it seemed like the writer was saying many disconnected things with similar terms. This gave me cause to make noises of frustration aloud (quietly, so the neighbors wouldn't call the police), and to wish desperately that I could do my undergraduate degree over again and take half a dozen writing classes instead of anthropology and politics. I wanted a teacher to knead through this material class by class over the course of a semester and answer my questions and grade my papers.

Instead, what faces me is self-education. Weeks and weeks of reading this book and taking notes and doing exercises on my own. I'm going to really set down some effort on this, try and make it a self-taught class in writing fiction, and I expect to marvel during the process about as much as I despair.

I have been thinking lately about trying to take a couple of writing classes at Cal State Northridge, which is not the finest university in California but which is only a couple of blocks away. Not a bad place to start, at least. I'm not sure I can afford it and I have no idea what the protocol is for enrolling someone like me who already has a B.A., but I'm seriously frustrated about feeling like I'm at square one every time a question of mechanics or technique comes up. I need a better toolbox. And you know what Hermione does every time she's stuck and doesn't know what to do? She goes to the library. This is what I was taught to do, too.

That's how I got my hands on Writing Fiction, in fact. Some weeks ago, after getting a rejection, I asked an English professor I happen to know what she thought I should do about feeling inadequately educated in writing. She was very much against an MFA, but she suggested looking at syllabi for MFA programs and reading those books instead. I thought that was a terrific idea, and she did me one better by asking a colleague of hers, a writing professor whose name I know because she won an O. Henry a few years back and I read that story, whether she could recommend any books for this purpose. She did, and that led me to yesterday's grrring on the balcony.

And that brings us to...now.