THREE VALUABLE LESSONS LEARNED AS AN MFA STUDENT

by Helen Sears

Working toward an MFA in writing is akin to watching your own appendectomy. It’s agonizing, physically and emotionally excruciating, but fascinating beyond any previous dream.

In the intense two year process, a dozen toolboxes of writing techniques are acquired; but more than that, a student learns lessons he or she might have gone a lifetime without discovering. Among them are:

• Noticing details is an art form that can be learned and practiced. Like daily vitamins, details keep a writer’s skills healthy. But unlike a capsule that is taken in one gulp, noticing is taken in small sips throughout the day. It can be activated with help from a morning journal that examines a single gesture, facial expression, bird wing angle, a shopper’s tone of voice – and always with the purpose of lifting the surface to find what’s underneath. Once in place, noticing keeps working to provide a writer with catalysts and story details that can be noted and used at will.

• Respecting a reader isn’t a polite mannerism to remember when fantasizing about book tours or readings; it’s the core essential that keeps writing true and of any value at all. Without a constant awareness of a human intellect on the receiving end who deserves a writer’s best efforts in everything from weaving elements to deploying commas, a page of words slips to the equivalent of a concert master conducting in frayed jeans. “The Reader” becomes a sacred invocation that demands a writer’s total talent and attention.

• Subtext can be created with language rhythms and sound, and spaces created with white space, interrupted narrative and dialogue patterns, and punctuation. These subtexts allow what’s not described or spoken to emerge, and encourages the reader to bring his own experience to a piece, a process that creates more interaction between reader and author, along with the writer’s hope for a more satisfying experience for the reader.

Once these, among many other epiphanies of an MFA program are experienced, there’s no going back. Everything is different. Even when fully recovered from the operation, the patient’s incision will always be visible. And always changing, the way it curves and catches the light, the way it itches when in the presence of authority figures, the way it turns a Gatsby dawn blue when temperatures dip below freezing...