Dear Anu
Yes, you’ve been told many times that an MFA is usually for the beginning writer. But you always wanted to do one, didn’t you? And you were accepted into an MFA programme last year. But since this was after a few books of yours had been published already, you were asked, understandably: why an MFA now?
True, you’ve always felt like a beginner, but there’s something an MFA helps you more with: To see the world anew as a writer. So, Anu, here’s why I think you were right to enrol.
Writing more, writing better
There are always the questions to begin with; the most basic ones and then the existential. For you, it was never really the MFA vs NYC argument – Creative Writing vs publishers in New York – but a more fundamental question: why after all, an MFA? If an MFA served as a stepping stone to writing, then why do one after your book’s done and published? When with book already done, you believe writing can’t really be taught.
But with writing, the doubts come later, first creeping in before you realise these have always been there. Writing is more hard work, and only part inspiration. And the more you write, the more you discover. Perhaps an MFA will help you write better.
Sharing skills
Your first creative writing school was other writers – generous, accessible for the most part, and always forgiving. Before you had a novel published, you plucked up the courage and wrote to them. You thumbed through an old Mumbai telephone directory to find someone’s number. You asked a friend in a newspaper for another author’s email.
And one morning, there was that phone conversation with Shama Futehally, her offer to read your manuscript that turned out to form several impromptu lessons in writing, over email. But one novel done, you couldn’t really impose. There will never be any one quite like Shama Futehally and you miss her still. But you hope someday you might be of some help to other writers too. An MFA teaches you how to teach.
Postpone the answers
Writing a first novel was an indulgence on several levels. You were chasing a dream, and you thought it wasn’t possible. Everyone around you too put up with it, with a kind tolerance. After all, there was every chance of failure. One fine day, after all the rejections, there came the yes. Who’d have thought then you’d begin to take this writing thing seriously.
Although you didn’t dare call yourself a writer and even now you hesitate, writing is what you knew you wanted to do. Late nights, early mornings, snatching time whenever possible from other things, till people around you began to find you tiresome. There are always questions, some unasked, that you still have no answer for.
Why do you write? There are no bestsellers to your name. Then you always remember the question you were asked soon after a novel was published. The distributor sizing up your book and its potential for ‘display’? What do you do, he’d asked. And despite your fumbling answer, he persisted. I know you write, but what do you really do?
Niggling doubts will always want to tell you: A writer is a writer only when she churns out bestsellers, or wins plentiful awards, that nicely fit into a one-line bio. You only felt you were an embarrassment to your family and you were grateful for their support. For now, you are a writer, no matter the defence you’ve to constantly offer. Put off the defending, do an MFA. You needn’t answer every question – yet.
Living with deadlines
You remember your time in Mumbai and Gurgaon. Your house was a mess, yet you wrote on. You relied on domestic help. For all their utter unpredictability, they still dusted and cleaned, and you said nothing the days they didn’t come. You hid your compassion for fear they would take another day off, and you didn’t want anything to intrude into your writing.
But you thought, in all the houses you changed as you moved cities, that your domestic helps, with their sunken cheeks, hollowed eyes, forever bent at work, talking about their ration cards acquired more often than not with a bribe, just as they paid bribes to the local policemen every time their husbands were rounded up on suspicions of being illegal migrants, were angels in a way, with their ever ready excuses.
So you did let the dust gather, your baby napped nearby and you wrote on guiltily, with everyday routine looking over your shoulder. In Singapore, well-meaning friends said you must hobnob first, and yet all you wanted was to tinker at your keyboard. You had to get that story done. An MFA implies submitting to a deadline for months on end, and you thank heaven for the dishwasher, the dryer, and the daughter too, no more a baby and you hope, now more understanding.
Asking the right questions
You wanted to write something different. Perhaps you didn’t know how to. You were told or maybe there were these voices inside you that suggested what you must write; always different from what you really hoped to write. You couldn’t be the voice of the youth but you did want to write about the angst of a generation. You didn’t want to write love stories, families in strife, immigrant struggles, murder as revenge, but you did want to have them all in a book.
For all the questions you could never answer, there are always other questions you don’t know of yet. Perhaps an MFA would help you ask these. Just as an MFA can force you to look at your own writer self, square in the eye, rid you of any confusions, and make you own up to your mistakes.
Learning from the best
There’s the privilege of listening and watching eminent writers and poets. You have read them but now, as an MFA student, you can gaze up at them, high on a dais, or sitting across you in class.
You take in their mannerisms, their inflections and marvel at how the words you’ve read sound when read aloud. There’s always a different meaning.
You are impressed by the very literary questions your classmates ask. The inane, unnecessary questions are all asked at literary fests, with the mandatory selfie. And you are privileged to have some of these writers as your teachers. Writers as teachers read your work in an entirely different way, helping you see things you would never have. You become your most ruthless editor.
Reading right
You have always loved to read and now you must. And then you learn to read like a writer, stopping to ask constantly: what is the precise role of the objective correlative here; or somewhere else, what makes the second person narration work? You realise the magic of the rhyming action – the unconscious way events mirror each other in life, and you also learn that contradictions can be life-affirming. A writer needs to be a reader first and an MFA reaffirms that old truth in several ways.
Full acceptance
Once you were in a hurry to get that idea down on paper. You had to write that story in whatever form, for fear you’d forget it the moment you saved, closed and shut down. For you fear a story could be forever lost in chores. But the essentials, down to the barest sentence, matter the most. You have to be a writer first, breathe in being a writer. With an MFA, you accept that the writing life is all pervasive, it’s in you and maybe you just have to discover it. A story can never run away from you, not if you have learnt to let it seep inside you, all the way through.
So, Anu, you took the right decision, after all.
Yours affectionately
Anu
Anu Kumar lives in Maryland and is in the MFA programme in writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has written for children and older readers alike.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Yes, you’ve been told many times that an MFA is usually for the beginning writer. But you always wanted to do one, didn’t you? And you were accepted into an MFA programme last year. But since this was after a few books of yours had been published already, you were asked, understandably: why an MFA now?
True, you’ve always felt like a beginner, but there’s something an MFA helps you more with: To see the world anew as a writer. So, Anu, here’s why I think you were right to enrol.
Writing more, writing better
There are always the questions to begin with; the most basic ones and then the existential. For you, it was never really the MFA vs NYC argument – Creative Writing vs publishers in New York – but a more fundamental question: why after all, an MFA? If an MFA served as a stepping stone to writing, then why do one after your book’s done and published? When with book already done, you believe writing can’t really be taught.
But with writing, the doubts come later, first creeping in before you realise these have always been there. Writing is more hard work, and only part inspiration. And the more you write, the more you discover. Perhaps an MFA will help you write better.
Sharing skills
Your first creative writing school was other writers – generous, accessible for the most part, and always forgiving. Before you had a novel published, you plucked up the courage and wrote to them. You thumbed through an old Mumbai telephone directory to find someone’s number. You asked a friend in a newspaper for another author’s email.
And one morning, there was that phone conversation with Shama Futehally, her offer to read your manuscript that turned out to form several impromptu lessons in writing, over email. But one novel done, you couldn’t really impose. There will never be any one quite like Shama Futehally and you miss her still. But you hope someday you might be of some help to other writers too. An MFA teaches you how to teach.
Postpone the answers
Writing a first novel was an indulgence on several levels. You were chasing a dream, and you thought it wasn’t possible. Everyone around you too put up with it, with a kind tolerance. After all, there was every chance of failure. One fine day, after all the rejections, there came the yes. Who’d have thought then you’d begin to take this writing thing seriously.
Although you didn’t dare call yourself a writer and even now you hesitate, writing is what you knew you wanted to do. Late nights, early mornings, snatching time whenever possible from other things, till people around you began to find you tiresome. There are always questions, some unasked, that you still have no answer for.
Why do you write? There are no bestsellers to your name. Then you always remember the question you were asked soon after a novel was published. The distributor sizing up your book and its potential for ‘display’? What do you do, he’d asked. And despite your fumbling answer, he persisted. I know you write, but what do you really do?
Niggling doubts will always want to tell you: A writer is a writer only when she churns out bestsellers, or wins plentiful awards, that nicely fit into a one-line bio. You only felt you were an embarrassment to your family and you were grateful for their support. For now, you are a writer, no matter the defence you’ve to constantly offer. Put off the defending, do an MFA. You needn’t answer every question – yet.
Living with deadlines
You remember your time in Mumbai and Gurgaon. Your house was a mess, yet you wrote on. You relied on domestic help. For all their utter unpredictability, they still dusted and cleaned, and you said nothing the days they didn’t come. You hid your compassion for fear they would take another day off, and you didn’t want anything to intrude into your writing.
But you thought, in all the houses you changed as you moved cities, that your domestic helps, with their sunken cheeks, hollowed eyes, forever bent at work, talking about their ration cards acquired more often than not with a bribe, just as they paid bribes to the local policemen every time their husbands were rounded up on suspicions of being illegal migrants, were angels in a way, with their ever ready excuses.
So you did let the dust gather, your baby napped nearby and you wrote on guiltily, with everyday routine looking over your shoulder. In Singapore, well-meaning friends said you must hobnob first, and yet all you wanted was to tinker at your keyboard. You had to get that story done. An MFA implies submitting to a deadline for months on end, and you thank heaven for the dishwasher, the dryer, and the daughter too, no more a baby and you hope, now more understanding.
Asking the right questions
You wanted to write something different. Perhaps you didn’t know how to. You were told or maybe there were these voices inside you that suggested what you must write; always different from what you really hoped to write. You couldn’t be the voice of the youth but you did want to write about the angst of a generation. You didn’t want to write love stories, families in strife, immigrant struggles, murder as revenge, but you did want to have them all in a book.
For all the questions you could never answer, there are always other questions you don’t know of yet. Perhaps an MFA would help you ask these. Just as an MFA can force you to look at your own writer self, square in the eye, rid you of any confusions, and make you own up to your mistakes.
Learning from the best
There’s the privilege of listening and watching eminent writers and poets. You have read them but now, as an MFA student, you can gaze up at them, high on a dais, or sitting across you in class.
You take in their mannerisms, their inflections and marvel at how the words you’ve read sound when read aloud. There’s always a different meaning.
You are impressed by the very literary questions your classmates ask. The inane, unnecessary questions are all asked at literary fests, with the mandatory selfie. And you are privileged to have some of these writers as your teachers. Writers as teachers read your work in an entirely different way, helping you see things you would never have. You become your most ruthless editor.
Reading right
You have always loved to read and now you must. And then you learn to read like a writer, stopping to ask constantly: what is the precise role of the objective correlative here; or somewhere else, what makes the second person narration work? You realise the magic of the rhyming action – the unconscious way events mirror each other in life, and you also learn that contradictions can be life-affirming. A writer needs to be a reader first and an MFA reaffirms that old truth in several ways.
Full acceptance
Once you were in a hurry to get that idea down on paper. You had to write that story in whatever form, for fear you’d forget it the moment you saved, closed and shut down. For you fear a story could be forever lost in chores. But the essentials, down to the barest sentence, matter the most. You have to be a writer first, breathe in being a writer. With an MFA, you accept that the writing life is all pervasive, it’s in you and maybe you just have to discover it. A story can never run away from you, not if you have learnt to let it seep inside you, all the way through.
So, Anu, you took the right decision, after all.
Yours affectionately
Anu
Anu Kumar lives in Maryland and is in the MFA programme in writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has written for children and older readers alike.
