The movie got me thinking about an essay I read by Tony Hoagland not too long ago entitled, “The Slipperiness of Metaphor”. In it, Hoagland talks about the unintended effect (oftentimes comic) of bad metaphors. Recently, I read a story from someone looking for an honest critique of the piece. In the story, the writer was trying to describe the movements of an attractive female bartender as elongated and swelling, “like those of a giraffe.”

This is an example of a simile that doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite intended effect of what it’s trying  to do (portray sexiness). This doesn’t mean that the entire piece is no good, but lines like this may serve to confuse or even discourage the reader from finishing the story.

That’s not to say that I haven’t written a few clunkers myself. Here’s an example of a particularly bad line from a draft of a story I wrote two years ago (I cringe when reading lines like this):

“Hey girrrrl!” she shouted into the phone when I finally answered. The people babble punctured by shrieking laughter blasted through the receiver.

Ugh! This line is bad on so many levels, I can barely stand it. Where’s my red pen so I can cross it out?!

One benefit to re-reading our sloppy, ill-conceived old stories is that they serve the role of pencil marks on the wall – we can look back almost fondly and marvel at how much we’ve grown since writing such flawed pieces. And in reading the rest of my own bad story, I found that there were some interesting ideas and several very strong descriptions that would be worth salvaging for better stories.

So I suppose my parting thought is that bad writing happens – will continue to happen – and all we can hope for is that we improve and get better with time and lots of hard work (and some helpful instruction).

Of course, I still have four more applications to submit (or maybe, hopefully, just three): Michigan-Ann Arbor, Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Texas State-San Marcos, and maybe BU. Originally BU had been a definite on my list, rising to about mid-level for desirability, but now it’s fallen down to dead last and may be off the list permanently (I still haven’t decided for sure). Although there are some positives for staying local, and the program itself is quite good, there are some pretty big drawbacks. First of all, a year just doesn’t seem like enough time to write a novel or short story collection of publishable quality. And even if you go into a program with all of your stories written, who knows if – over the course of the program – you improve so much that your new work is so much better than your old work, so much so that the thought of working on the older stories becomes unbearable. Then there’s also the cost. Yes, I knew that the funding wasn’t great, but I didn’t know how un-great the funding actually was until recently. Apparently, at most they give you a tuition waiver and a measly $13K stipend. In Boston. There is absolutely nowhere in Boston where you could live on so little money. There’s not even a suburb where you could live and support yourself. I’d have to take out at least $15K in loans, or worse, keep working at my job. Neither option is appealing. Of course, they do have the new Global Fellowship in the summer after the first year. Poets and writers are given the opportunity to live anywhere in the world for three months and get paid to write. The places I could go…just the thought of it makes me giddy! There are so few opportunities in life to live in another country and not have to worry about getting a job or having enough money, or any of the other red tape that prevents me from packing my bags right now.

So, back to applying. I’m at the half-way mark and it feels damned great, although I’ll feel fucking amazing when it’s 100% done. For anyone thinking of applying to MFA programs (and this advice applies to my future self if I don’t get in this year and try to apply again next year or sometime in the future), I think it’s important to realize just how much work it is. I actually had my sample done more than a month in advance of my first deadlines, but I was far more lax about writing my personal statement. I’d write something terrible and then ditch it and start again. I did that about twenty times. Ultimately, I sent the statement I hated the least to three of my schools (UT, Michener, and Wisconsin). I personalized each one perhaps more than I should have because it ended up taking a lot of time and being a lot more work than I had anticipated. What’s worse, I didn’t have anyone else read my essays. Mostly because I was embarrassed to show anyone. But I think I probably made a big mistake in doing that. I don’t think my essays were as clear or coherent as they could have been, but by the end I just had to send them off.

UC-Irvine was particularly monstrous. Luckily I started working on their online application early, because I realized that the program wanted a 2 – 4 page “autobiographical sketch” and the graduate school wanted two additional essays: a personal statement and a personal history essay. Because the personal statement I had written for the other schools combined all three of these elements, I had to write three.new.essays. Yes, that’s right. It was total hell. And sadly, I don’t think any of them were particularly good. I feel like I overused the following words: experience/experienced, opportunity/opportunities, point of view, rigorous, challenging/challenge, and, I.

I’ve been in communication with other writers during this application process, and I’ve heard many of them say that the personal essays aren’t important and don’t account for much in the admissions committee’s decision. I tend to disagree – ok, not completely, but I think that somewhere someone heard/read/was told by some authority somewhere that the personal essays aren’t important…But I think there was something lost along the way and that something is the word “UNLESS”. Obviously, the essay doesn’t matter if you’re not under consideration. Let me be crass and say that your sample sucks. It’s one of the worst samples Samantha Chang has ever read. Ok, well, guess what? You personal essay doesn’t matter. Why? Because she hasn’t even read it. It’s probably gone into the recycling bin / shredder/ whatever along with your sample.

But let’s present a much happier scenario. Let’s say now that your sample gets pulled from the stacks and you are in the pool of top candidates. Yay! This rules! But wait. This is when I think your personal essays, recommendations, and even your GPA becomes far more important. Let me use a true example from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In an interview, Samantha Chang said that last year they got about 1,300 applicants in fiction, and that about 80 applicants deserved to be in the program. But they could only choose 29. Now let’s say that of those 80, 40 were great but not super great. Those 40 get tossed out. You still need to narrow down the pool from the remaining 40 to 29. What if the remaining stories are all fantastic in their very different ways? How do you decide then? It just seems illogical to me that the personal essays would not come into play at that point, or even at some point sooner. If the essays weren’t important, why would the programs even ask for them? I figure that if it comes down to me and one other person, my essay could be a deciding factor. Think about it: these programs are so competitive that even if your writing is good enough to get into Iowa, you could still get a rejection letter in the mail.

So this is my long way of saying that if I were to do it again, or if I was a total stranger reading this blog and thinking about applying to MFA programs, I would most certainly start the essays early and make sure you have an English professor/editor/strong essayist look over your personal essays and re-work them until they are as polished as the writing sample.

That’s just one thought for now, but I will have many more to come in the weeks and months ahead. To all of you out there who are applying this year: good luck!

So, as you can imagine, I get that pencil scratching fever when I read a sentence that uses fifteen words to describe, for example, a tomato instead of just writing “tomato”. Please – save the adjectives for something that matters. Describe the way your character combs her hair in the morning, the way she lingers in the bath, but do not go in a roundabout way to describe the simplest of movements, do not use fifteen adjectives to describe a noun when you could just use the noun and continue writing, continue getting to the important part of the story.

Unfortunately, in every workshop I’ve been in over the past year, there has always been at least one classmate who overwrites, in some workshops two or even three. It can be painful. Nobody ever “says” or “said” anything. They all growl, scowl, demand, command, yell, pout, grimace – you get the point.

And the problem doesn’t just reside in dialogue tags. Every action is detailed. The character doesn’t get up and cross the room to answer the door, he heaves himself up by pushing his arms down on the arms of the chair, stumbles on his feet before regaining his balance, clutches at his aching back, ambles across the room, all the while thinking about who it could possibly be at the door and why didn’t the person call first – how rude! ….And on and on. As a reader, I pay attention, thinking that maybe we are getting every detail because this is a really important moment in the story – but, inevitably, that moment leads absolutely nowhere. Twenty pages later, the person who rang the doorbell has made it only as far as the living room couch, and maybe the two characters are getting along or maybe they’re not – perhaps that’s the conflict -  but by then I couldn’t care less. To be honest – if I weren’t required to read such a story out of deference to a fellow writer in the class, I would have put the story down after reading the first few excruciating sentences (or maybe even thrown the story across the room, which is what I did after reading only about 40 pages of Atlas Shrugged).

OK, so maybe it’s me. Maybe this is really beautiful language and the reward is the lyrical twists and turns, the detail is there to amuse and titillate. To be fair, I have read stories where I enjoyed and appreciated the lyricism of the piece, and as an English major in college, where the only major was a literature major (you could take creative writing electives, but  neither a major nor a minor was offered) I have read my fair share of 19th Century novels. I’ve read Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Hardy and the like.

But I don’t fault that style of writing in the context of that time period. I don’t even fault a foray into lyricism by more contemporary authors, as long as it’s successful, artistic, and not overwrought. It’s tricky to do well, and unfortunately many beginning or emerging writers get it wrong.

In my spring workshop, for example, one of my classmates used an entire sentence to describe a potato chip. I re-read the sentence three times before I figured out what she was trying to describe. The potato chip was unimportant to the story. She just wanted to find a different way to say “potato chip” so she chose to describe it – in detail – instead.

I’ve found that among writers, there’s a certain reluctance to say that a certain way of writing is “wrong”. Some writers might concede that there is such a thing as “bad” writing, but it’s almost a taboo to say so. The word “subjective” is tossed around and then that’s the end of the conversation.

But I think that there are certain ways of writing that just don’t work. Excessive use of adjectives, overwrought writing (“overwriting”), dialogue tags that use every verb but “said” (although there is an occasional exception – when it works, you know it works, because it sounds right). There are other examples, but I won’t list all of them. You know what I’m saying; you’ve read stories like this – or maybe even written a story like this – at some point in your life.

The good news is that I’ve seen writers who embrace this style learn to reign it in, and, over time, some of them learn when to go off on a lyrical tangent, and when to keep it simple.The key is to 1) Recognize that your writing style is overwrought (yes, it is bad writing)  and 2) Be willing to improve your writing, and learn to describe the more important things more lyrically, and the less important things more simply.

And me? I’ll always stick with a leaner prose style, and occasionally appreciate the skillful flourish.

I think it’s exciting when I read a fellow classmate’s work and I’m totally blown away by it. Those conversations are always fun. People trip over each other when they talk: everyone can’t wait to chime in with the parts he or she liked.

Occasionally, there’s a story that grabs my attention for a different reason. “Oh no,” I think, as I wince through long, overwritten paragraphs, crazy plot twists, the revelation on the second-to-last page that the couple we’ve been reading about lost a child years earlier. Every now and then, we writers produce a dud. And having to critique a dud is almost worse than having produced one.

One of my former classmates once told another classmate, “You can do better.” The room got quiet. Even though she was known for her blunt statements (and her equally blunt fiction), it seemed wrong, somehow, for her to say this (even if it was true). The writer’s face fell. He didn’t return to class after that.

I have mixed feelings about what happened. On the hand, the writer probably recognized that this story was not his best work. And those of us that read it could sense that too. If that’s the case, is it appropriate to say it out loud? Or is it better to just point out the parts of the story that aren’t working and encourage the writer to improve on them?

I’m not really sure. I’ve only experienced one critique where I felt like people kept piling on the complaints to the point of discouragement. I knew that the work was poorly structured, that certain things needed to be deleted. The whole thing needed to be re-worked, perhaps even re-conceived, or abandoned altogether. This critique happened in a writing group. The group was an odd mix of different personalities: the aforementioned blunt Australian woman; a mother of two and former businesswoman turned angsty housewife (who tended to write about…you guessed it…angsty former- businesswomen-turned-housewives); and a third woman who wrote mostly genre fiction, but who did produce a few gems.

The housewife seemed to take particular glee in tearing down my story. Her fervor was infectious. The other two joined in.

This had never happened to me before. I generally handle critiques quite well. I’m more buoyed by them than discouraged. No one is a harsher critic of my work than I am. The story had many faults, structurally, and the characterization was not strong. In retrospect, it was not ready for critique; it was a fledgling mess of a piece. What it really needed was more love and attention. I sent it out to be critiqued too soon.

There is this idea that we are bringing our first drafts to be critiqued. I wonder if doing so destroys the potential of the work. This, I think, is how “fiction by committee” happens. It’s when a writer brings in a piece that’s not fully formed and the other members of the group start to give that writer “ideas” of “where you could take it.” That’s when a good fiction instructor should step in and stop the conversation. The writer’s work has been hijacked.

When I type up a critique letter for my classmates’ work, I’ll point out the areas that aren’t working for me. “I was disappointed by the ending,” I’ll say, “it doesn’t seem to work in the context of this piece.” I don’t make suggestions of what I think a better ending would be. Such suggestions only serve to confuse and discourage the writer. The ending needs to be a natural extension of the work; of the writer’s idea.

Recently, I did make a suggestion. At the end of one story, the protagonist had done poorly during a job interview and was at the brink. In the building where he’d had the job interview (his potential employer), there was a gym for employees. The protagonist went into the gym and started using one of the machines. The receptionist who had greeted him when he first arrived was on the phone, but after he goes into the gym, he can see her coming up to the door. The story ends there. We get the sense that in the next moment, she’ll open the door and ask him to leave.

I liked this ending. I thought it was strong. The writer who wrote this piece is strong overall. She has a mastery of craft and a beautiful prose style. I made one suggestion for the ending. Have him lock himself in the gym from the inside, while the receptionist raps on the glass door, trying to get his attention (the writer liked this idea, but preferred having the receptionist jiggle the door handle – even better!). I thought that such an action would demonstrate the protagonist taking control while also losing control in a very beautiful way.

But notice that I focused on a detail. I didn’t suggest, for instance, that the writer have the protagonist pull a revolver out of his coat and start firing (this is exaggerated, of course, but I have had people make the craziest suggestions for my stories, ones I would never even consider). When fellow writers make suggestions for such huge changes, I think it’s best for the writer of the piece to immediately discount them and continue to work on the piece as he or she had envisioned.

There is also the matter of the poor quality critique. You know the one. Where the critique writer totally missed the point (even though everyone else got it -  the caveat is, if everyone in the class or even a majority missed the point, well, your story has some serious problems). Or made crazy suggestions for how the story “could be better”.  These poor quality critiques can be hard to shake. Maybe you find yourself thinking about them over and over, and wonder if there could be truth somewhere within them. Maybe that paragraph of description you wrote – the one that everyone loved, even the instructor – isn’t so good after all? Maybe the character’s motivation wasn’t so clear, even though no one else in the class was confused?

Push such thoughts out of your head. That’s what I’ve learned to do. Trying to revise a work by incorporating everyone’s suggestions – many of them misguided and wrong – is not only a mistake that will likely ruin the story, it’s writing by committee, and it’s also incredibly discouraging. This may be the reason that some writers quit: they become incapacitated with all of the possibilities, with the poor critiques that trash a story. The story is no longer theirs. As Ian Curtis once sang, “She’s lost control again.”

Before I end this post, I do want to point out that certain critiques are incredibly helpful and necessary. Many successful writers have “first readers” – these readers are people they can trust with their work, people who understand their vision, and who want to see them do better and succeed.  Those critiques can help a writer make a decent piece great, or a great piece outstanding. Find those first readers!

Ever since I started taking my fiction writing seriously, I have become listless at work. I would rather spend my day writing, but there I am, stuck at my desk, expected to do work. Not the kind I want to do, but the kind that is so boring that I have to force myself to do it. Today, my boss asked me to compose a few dozen personalized thank you letters. This should be easy stuff, something I could do in an hour or so. But it took me half the day. I just sat there. Staring at my computer.

Meanwhile, my mind was racing. I was brainstorming ways that I could get paid to write. I was thinking about the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Specifically, I was imagining myself in a sparse room, writing and thinking about writing.

I know what this means, of course – I need a new job. I’m not sure what I’d like to do, but I do know that if I get accepted to an MFA program, I will quit my job and feel nothing but joy (and freedom – cue George Michael).

I was hoping to have a manuscript done by now, or at least mostly in the works, but I’m still re-writing and self-editing a few different stories, none of which I feel are ready for submission to schools. I am oscillating between pushing myself hard to do this thing and apply, or waiting yet another year, when (I’m convinced) I’ll be more ready. Whatever that actually means.

I wish I could just ask someone straight out and get a real answer, but I’m sure the response would be, “…because it’s so subjective…”

Yes, that word again. Subjective.

There’s also this: most people won’t tell another writer she sucks. And even if that was a completely acceptable thing to say, how many “sucky” writers have been published, been praised, have received awards?

And who’s to say what sucks?

Last night after workshop, I re-read the piece I submitted. I thought to myself, Oh God, this is so bad. I’m going to get killed in workshop next week!

But, here’s the thing: I like the criticism. Yes, sometimes I cringe, sometimes I even get a bit irritated (“This revision is nothing like your first draft, and I really liked the first draft” – Thanks, but that’s not very helpful. Please don’t compare this new draft to the old one, try to look at the new draft as its own piece of work that stands alone and needs your full attention and critique. This revision is closer to the story I want to tell). Without the workshop, I’d never know the impression my work makes. I’d have more trouble finding the clarity issues, rooting out the bits that fell flat or rang false, or prose that was just goddamned lazy.

There are a few things I want to achieve in my writing: 1) Electricity 2) The way it feels to have someone’s hand pressed up against your throat. When I get to that place, I have a story.

What confuses me even more is the work I read that has been published. Some of it is simply not good. Or is it? Is it really that subjective?

Also of concern: I work slowly. I can work for hours and only write two or three pages. I am easily distracted from my work. I have to force myself to keep going. I wonder this: Am I an artist? I feel strongly that the answer is, well, no – not at all. It’s all so pretentious to me. And that, too: Am I not pretentious enough? Is it a prerequisite?

I have questions I struggle to answer and choices that I am afraid to make. And I sit in front of my computer and stare at a blank screen.

Today marked the last day of my Flash fiction class. It was only four, two-hour classes, Monday and Thursdays. It was a bit of a disappointment, because we were only allotted 15 minutes of feedback from our peers, and we did not exchange out stories – only listened while a class member read his or her story out loud.  Unfortunately, if someone was a particularly bad reader, I found myself being unable to focus. Strange thoughts would flit across my brain for half a second, and then I’d refocus and realize that I’d missed two or three sentences.

I wrote two promising stories for the class, both of which ultimately need to be longer according to the instructor. Flash fiction seems easy, but it is actually quite challenging. It’s easy to express thoughts in a limited number of words, but it’s not so easy to have a full story with all of the necessary storytelling elements present.

I suppose I just need to work harder! On a positive note, at least two people in the class told me they liked my stories, although I don’t know if I believe them.

Well, my eyes are dragging as I type this. I need to go to sleep soon. I’m praying to the snow gods that work is delayed tomorrow, or even better, canceled.  Praying for snow…

My purchases: Naming the World, Edited by Bret Anthony Johnston, and Best American Voices 2010, Edited by Dani Shapiro.

Naming the World is a great way to get the writer’s mind thinking and it provides inspiration and some handy tips to writers, particularly anyone who is doubting herself and her abilities. I have doubted my writing ability at times, but it helps to read a book that reiterates the importance of determination and dedication and plain hard work. I’ll risk redundancy and quote some truisms from the book that gave me the extra push that I’ve been needing:

Being a writer is, in the fullest sense of the word, a vocation. It’s labor, but it’s also more than that; it’s a calling, an act of courage, an act of faith.

Much of the writer’s work must be-can only be-accomplished by doggedly venturing into territories unknown, by risking failure with every word.

I encourage the aspiring writer to show up at her desk every day. This is what I believe in, what I trust will ultimately distinguish those who want to write and publish from those who do write and publish: work.

Corny, yes, but it does remind me that talent is nothing without the hard work and practice that all successful writers do.

The Best New American Stories series is great, and has likewise been an inspiration, because the stories are so good, and yet, still flawed here and there. The women and men writing these stories are still learning, and it makes me realize that being 30 and just starting to think about getting an MFA is not something I should worry too much about: we’re all still learning and improving as writers.

Number of Veggie Burgers Consumed: 1

Number of Caffeinated Beverages Drunk: 2

Cumulative Hours of Sleep Since Monday: 11