I applied to six fully funded creative writing MFA programs for fall enrollment. I received my last rejection today via email. It really hurts. I am doomed to my desk at the insurance company it seems.
Do any of you have any recommendations for next year? I had a nice writing sample, a compelling personal statement, and a near 4.0 gpa from undergraduate and graduate school.
I am really down in the dumps.
>a nice writing sample, a compelling personal statement
That's what you believed.
did you have sufficient writing credits? submit to literary mags/contests over the next year
and post your writing excerpt
No. My friend works on the selections committee at Columbia. He told me botb were Far above average
You aren't a minority, I'd imagine.
Next time say you're legally handicapped and that you're gay.
Yes I’ve been published multiple times. Didn’t seem to matter much.
are you a white male? did you go to a good undergraduate program? what was your major and SAT score?
where were you published?
what MFAs did you apply to?
what schools did you graduate from?
If you were published in good magazines you may have actually been over-qualified. After David Wallace got his first novel published (not a huge commercial or even critical success) while he was doing his MFA he said that everyone seemed to wonder why he was still there. None of his classmates had that kind of publication credit.
Attached please find my writing excerpt (the intro is all I could fit)
Fucking kek. That ending... please tell me you didn’t actually submit this.
Hey man,go back to the drawing board with this and reevaluate your goals in life so disappointment doesn't make you bitter. I don't wanna be rude, but that was not good...
You should have identified as a black lesbian native American
try again next year
What wasn’t good about it? I liked it.
Dude, what are you doing, dude
As someone in the Columbia MFA I'm telling you your friend is lying. Tons of shit writers get in. It's more about economic trends of what works, artistic statement, and resume/familiarity with writing scene which usually means just attending tons of writing workshops.
after reading this I change my advice. Get a literature bachelor's and then try again afterwards.
The primise is ludicrous, the pseudo-modernist style is old hack and worst of all its just not very good
what fiction is considered good now?
>muh poetry in prose
Even I write better than that. In English. And I am not a native English Speaker
Anyway, my advice: drop the fucking tropes. Write from the heart
After reading this I would say you should write a few more short stories. They're short enough to submit several to application and you'll improve your writing.
Zingers are detested everywhere. Drop your last sentence and never write it again even in irony.
Not OP but..
What don’t you like about it? It reminds me Gaddis but it’s funnier. Or Maybe Beckett
It has absolutely no structure, inner coherence, the ending is painfully trite, the pacing is the antithesis of literary thought, the statements by the grandpa are non-sequitors at best, and the sentences are so forced and short that there's no room for nuance to breath in the complexity
Why are you encouraging this clearly talentless person to continue? Its cruel
What tropes
Good fiction. Be honest to your craft and become technically proficient. Columbia is a big enough program they accept Junot Diaz first generation people of color writers and people like me who write Finnegan's Wake set in the south.
Just practice sentences and scene construction. Study Katherine Anne Porter, Guy De Maupussant, and Grace Paley. Study their sentence structure and you'll improve.
>Or Maybe Beckett
Shut the fuck up you God damn imbecile
OP here. This is not my writing sample.
literature is not for you.
Everyone starts out talentless. If people can enjoy Franzen or Lispector then there's hope for him. Reading good literature produces better writing. Honest practice can make anyone capable.
I wouldn't ever recommend the MFA though. I hate Veeky Forums mentality and just come on here to give practical advice others pay to get in workshop.
>Everyone starts out talentless
Speak for yourself. I wrote good shit when I was a kid.
And nobody has heard of you.
You don't know that
Shoot for a higher tier of publications maybe?
I mean if you ever think your writing is that good you'll never make it far.
Of the five national book award writers i know, only one of them still enjoys their older work, and it's nonfiction which has a different affect.
Quit shitting on an earnest effort of either the OP or some kid writing ironically (earnestly). You'll never develop as an artist or reader.
>I mean if you ever think your writing is that good you'll never make it far.
Nonsense, most successful writers were always incredibly arrogant. They might not look well on their work years later but they nearly as a rule think whatever they put out is a masterpiece
I kek’d
You're using your own narcissism to defend yourself. Read the letters of Ellison and Bellow and you'll find beneath their bellicosity is an intense rigor to improve. You don't even need to talk to faculty, someone on lit posted Pynchon letters on Gravity's Rainbow and he was horrified by how no one criticized him the way he hated that book.
You obviously are in college or stuck there. Be honest about your work and stop pushing down others with a fetishists view of writing that supposes the product appears perfect and not the result of a mental chaos similar to a painter's workshop.
MFA bro here. Where are you based out of? I could give pointers sometime even if I'm in my first year. I'm young but the faculty comment that I approach writing like a professor already.
>Ellison and Bellow
Who? I'm talking about successful writers
Funny because it's not awful until the "ow the edge" moment.
Its awful from the start actually
Alright. You're an idiot. Thanks for showing everyone you'll never amount to anything, representing the manchild tepid brain that prevents anyone on lit from feeling the sun.
>of the award winning authors i know
you people should be liquidated, the literati are pure evil, the bourgeoisie and literati/intelligentsia are one and the same, all of you need to be executed
It's not great, very formulaic, but the quality takes a huge nosedive at the end.
Sorry? I literally never heard of either of those names before, I googled them and I'm not even sure if they're the right people. Did you seriously cite a sci-fi writer?
I salute this bait.
thanks for the recs.
Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow
Lmao do you even know which writers I'm referring to? One of them is a lit favorite.
You either cite the greats to better contextualize yourself or you become a Tao Lin that ironically becomes the same iconoclast that you parody. I swear no one ever reads the letters of writers anymore.
>One of them is a lit favorite.
Pynchon is a meme not a favorite
How long have you been out of school? A couple of years?
A lot of places, and I know Iowa particularly does this, tend to prefer candidates (who aren't unicorns) to have 5 - 10 years outside of the education system because they've started to clue into the homogenizing nature not of the programs themselves but of the undergraduate to graduate MFA pipeline experience.
Also how about letters of rec? MFA admissions departments look for those because it shows you are good at accepting tutelage and will probably be a well contributing member of the workshop.
But DESU your application is probably just not distinctive even if it's accomplished. If you're not distinct you have to be amazing at the kind of thing you do.
I suggest you both double down on your writing and try to make a breakthrough, and consider ways you can participate in the community aspects of writing. Are there any interesting writers are local colleges you could try and study with?
OP here. I’m based in New York but not intent on staying in the area.
No prob mang. I also suggest reading authors such as John Cheever and Julio Cortazar. I dont always like their stories, but the more fantastical elements are clearly developed from grammatical rules and systems established in the first paragraph. Rather than copy paste the themes, look at how the writing services the themes to produce a stronger show.
From there, you can expand your study of strong writing to big novels. Oh, Vollmann is also a wonderful technical writer. His Last Stories show how you can keep your style but using new grammar rules and how these rules generally create a sense of a national style.
Right maybe use full names next time when quoting your second rate favorites
Gimme an email if you like. I'm visiting of out of state this week but we could meet and talk. I don't know shit about admissions but can talk about experience, you can share writing and I can give my particular feedback on it.
>never heard of ellison and bellow
literature is not for you
>mfw someone moans about working in insurance (Georges Bernanos also worked in that industry)
>I'm young but the faculty comment that I approach writing like a professor already.
I'd hang myself if I was told this
t. Monolingual
No one cares about these New Yorker B-listers anymore you impertinent chickenshit
>Not appreciating New York
If you’re American, you have nothing and nowhere else to appreciate your literature. And no, Faulkner doesn’t count, as he too moved to New York
The magazine genius
Good for you? Where do you think writers work nowadays? And some people love teaching. Imagine if anyone on lit actually had a good instructor. They wouldn't be so bitter and alone.
Omyb
>Where do you think writers work nowadays?
Since when should writers aspire to "work"?
Name 3 good writers of the past decade and explain why their writing is good then.
You might as well after using ad hominem because you don't get how important Invisible Man or Herzog were.
Yeah it's not like Pynchon or Maupussant had a writer teaching them.
They shouldn’t. A cultural obsession with “work” is why China doesn’t contribute art to the world in any capacity and why American literature has deteriorated to Foer/Franzen levels of awfulness
I don't read contemporary fiction, it'd be a waste of my time given the state of the literary market
Teaching isn't the same as wagecuck you idiot. Teaching writing improves writing. It's why students do writing workshops.
Ah, so a virgin then. How big are your breasts now my lad?
>Teaching isn't the same as wagecuck you idiot.
Nowadays? Not really.
You’re responding to the wrong user you retarded faggot
To be honest, I can't name one truly great writer who has one.
Excuse you I may be illiterate but I'm no retard. Many great artists were illiterate, like Phillip Dick
Dave Wallace, MFA
Also Evan Dara
>Wallace
>Truly great
Exactly, great writers study literature not "creative writing". Can you imagine someone like Joyce taking pointers from some dipshit crusty hack?
Its absurd, you have the entire history of the canon to instruct yourself with and these hucksters pretend like their ridiculous platitudes should be payed for.
>Evan Dara
Oh great, fucking no one
Some crusty hack at Iowa was Phillip Roth.
Is that supposed to mean anything to me?
Why does Veeky Forums hate the William Gaddis of the millennial era?
Raymond Carver
evan dara has two PhDs and a MA but no MFA
Which phds?
God is telling you to stop wasting your education
OP here I definitely wrote this
Well then you should give up on everything in your life and work in a fast food restaurant.
I believe you user, but it would be a lot more convincing if you actually posted a sample of your writing.
did you try being black
OP here i send this as part of my resume, how is my poetry?
you dodged a bullet. MFAs are a waste of time unless you want to teach, in which case you should just get an English degree and teach
But he had Flaubert as a mentor
Research Joyce's life user. Paris was a hyper MFA at the time
>Paris was a hyper MFA at the time
Oh right, so literally anything can be a MFA, this website is a MFA. Only they don't cost $100,000
read something happened by heller and take a seat here at the table with us, the useless cunts
Okay, so you are just unaware of literary history and we should disregard your uninformed opinion
I assure you my man, I know more of literary history than your entire bloodline ever will. I just find your comparison proposterous
I know all the literally history.
I got accepted to four MFAs (Yale, Virginia, Columbia, Fairfield)
I would end up dropping out of Yale and I haven't written since
AMA