Pondering the MFA

Too often, instead of writing, I pretend to write: I think about writing, writers, writing programs, and conferences.   I also spend too much time checking out writing programs and conferences, poking around MFA programs' and writers conferences' websites (like writersconf.org), as well as blogs like After the MFA.   

I haven't yet answered my own question of whether/when I'll go back for an MFA.  But here's another procrastination place to bookmark: writer Nancy Rawlinson's MFA links, which Practicing Writing's Erika Dreifus pointed out last week.   If you're so inclined, you can spend hours checking out these many links, instead of writing.

Write anyway

My writer friends and I spend an awful lot of time talking about procrastination, our failure to write, the way our kids' needs and our messy households seem to get in the way of writing.  We know we need to stop talking, stop complaining, and start writing.   Still, it helps to know we're not alone in our many forms of procrastination, and day after day we do tell each other to go sit down and write.

Writer and writing coach Elizabeth Stark offers some wise words about the daily writing routine.  Don't let it be a choice; write no matter what.  Write anyway, she says.  And now, that is what I am going to do.  One thousand more words before I go get the groceries and my mind has to focus on kids and dinner and piano lessons and laundry.

Word of the year

"Unfriend" is the word of 2009, according to Oxford New American Dictionary.    

Long-form journalism on the web

Nineteen thousand words about the Mumbai terrorism attack -- is that too many words for a blog entry?

This week, Virginia Quarterly Review begins a multi-part series on the Mumbai attack, running it on the VQR blog.  Ted Genoways, VQR's editor, wants to know if people will read such long pieces online.  Certainly more people will at least take a look on the web than will buy or order a copy of VQR.   (You can't even buy VQR at our Borders or local bookstore up here in NH.)

Writing moms

A couple of helpful posts on writing through parenthood -- rules to live and work by.   Here's one from memoirist Louise deSalvo, at Christina Baker Kline's blog

http://christinabakerkline.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/guest-blog-louise-desalvo-on-why-having-kids-is-no-excuse/

And here's a response from creative nonfiction writer Lisa Romeo:

http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/2009/11/writing-and-kids-not-so-mutually.html

It's good to have a room of one's own, but if you're the primary caretaker, it helps to learn to write anywhere, rather than being bound to that one place/method.  Notebook in the park; laptop at the hockey rink.

The old days

Almost twenty years ago, I was a young assistant editor working on book excerpts, short stories, and essays for Ladies' Home Journal.  The older editors complained that times were tough, that magazines were folding, that editors could hardly make a living.  All true -- the magazine recession started a year or two before the early-nineties recession.  

Still, that was a golden time for fiction.  Every month, a short story or novel excerpt showed up in the well or in the back pages of LHJ.  And not just icky mass-market types like Danielle Steel.  LHJ ran stories from both literary unknowns and big names: Sue Miller, Bobbie Ann Mason, Elizabeth Berg, Marianne Gingher, Anne Tyler, Anne Rivers Siddons, Amy Tan, Allan Gurganus.  Sometimes the stories were what we called women's-mag fiction, shorthand for a story about a woman at a turning point, who goes through or over that turning point or change in a way that surprises her.  But not always.  Allan Gurganus' story was about an angel who falls to earth in an old woman's backyard, and the angel lets her touch him.  (I think.  Will have to look for that story.)  And in my memory, there was a ton of fiction getting published -- novels, short-story collections, not to mention the short stories running every month in lots of other big, mainstream magazines.    

My kingdom in those days was the slush pile, the mountain of paper-clipped unsolicited stories that I could never get to the bottom of.   But those writers (not the crazy ones, who wrote about receiving alien transmissions through their dental fillings) actually had a chance of getting published, and getting paid a lot for a story -- I passed along some of those stories every week to higher-ups, with my little reader's note.   

Now mainstream magazines are thin, and laying off people, and disappearing one by one.  The conventional wisdom used to be that you could sell an ad against almost anything -- health, beauty, food, psych articles -- just not fiction, but magazines were still willing to publish fiction, because readers liked to read.  Along the way, calculus must have changed to "no one wants to read short stories in magazines anymore; they want short/quick/helpful lists and charts, not long, slow, not particularly helpful short stories." 

I can't really imagine going back there, to a time before the Internet, when half the editors were frightened of computers.  A time when there were far fewer literary mags, writers' conferences, MFA programs, or online ventures.  A time way before Kindle.  But even so, I miss those days.