MFA Thesis Survival Tips

Photo: wolfgangphoto

Lately things have been quiet over here at Grout as each of us is struggling through various stages of the thesis process. Yep, the MFA thesis: that wonderful and terrifying time when you are suddenly set loose from coursework, ready to begin unleashing your brilliant project on the world. You've been inspired by memoirs and lyric essays and strange, experimental books and you have a grand dream of exactly what your own book could be.

Then, if you're like me, you start the earnest work of thesis and panic sets in. All the parts that fit so elegantly in your mind now appear to be clumsily hacked together. Suddenly you don't have an amazing book. You don't have any book at all, only a mess of hundreds of disconnected pages. But luckily over the last month I've stumbled across a few strategies are are helping me continue to work. Not to spontaneously produce some brilliant manuscript, but to slowly keep writing, producing sentences then paragraphs that are imperfect but satisfying.

And so in case these tips might be useful to your thesis or similar project, here are my top survival tactics:

1. Find your people
Being part of a thesis group is critical. Determine what kind of group is helpful for your process: a critique group that will push you to hone exactly what you are saying, or maybe an inspiration and writing group, where you meet with others, come up with prompts and just write like mad.

I've found that I need a group to simply support, encourage, and hold me accountable. In my thesis group, we discuss our struggles and successes, cheer each other on, and read a few pages aloud. In particular, the act of reading work aloud reminds me to continue writing in order to communicate and connect, keeping me motivated from week to week.

2. Your thesis might not be a book
In this lovely essay on the Brevity blog, Tabitha Blankenbiller recounts her journey from an ambitious undergraduate to a more thoughtful writer as she worked on her MFA thesis:

I stopped stretching on my tiptoes for a narrative that would fill 265 pages and moved to personal essays. This allowed me to zero in on structure, on picking words with care, to be theatrical in doses and precise in droves. I told stories, moments, snippets well, instead of a long journey poorly.

She warns of the dangers of talking about your thesis as if it were a book and the value of keeping the work private until it is ready for critique:

Imagination is precious and ideas are fleeting. Even if it seems obsessive or superstitious or pathological to squirrel my work away, I’m finding the peace to draft more than worth the antisocial tendencies not sharing my early work produces.

3. Fail, but fail better
I often re-read Zadie Smith's essay, Fail Better to remind myself that writing is constantly an act of failure. Our work is never quite what we hope or imagine it could be, but we need to continue struggling to fail better and to be awake to language and meaning:

... in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince; less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which "inauthentic" is truly the correct term.

4. Go on a poetry diet
After a recent reading by poets Deborah Keenan, Jim Moore, and Christopher Howell, I resolved to go on a poetry diet, taking a break from essays and memoirs. I have spent the last several years studying structures and strategies of nonfiction books, but now that I'm immersed in my own thesis, I simply need to trust that these forms are embedded in my instincts. When I read nonfiction books right now, I'm too easily tempted to drop my current ideas and embrace the form of the book I'm reading.

But poetry, especially brief poems, help me find a stillness, to remember my appreciation for language and imagery. The act of reading becomes precise and focused as I absorb how an arc can be honed through just a few lines. Poems like this one that Deborah Keenan opened the reading with in honor of Adrienne Rich:

Picnic 

Sunday in Inwood Park
the picnic eaten
the chicken bones scattered
for the fox we'll never see
the children playing in caves
My death is folded in my pocket
like a nylon raincoat
What sunlight is it
that leaves the rocks so cold?

- Adrienne Rich 

Confessions of a Research Addict

I admit it. I’m a research junkie. 

            I love sifting through articles and books for buried treasure, those golden nuggets that somehow amplify and deepen what I’m trying to write about. It's almost scary how easily I can delve for hours into a book or cyberspace, trying to unearth information about whatever happens to pique my interest at that moment. It's a dangerous addiction. I can lose myself in it, and come out feeling light-headed and slightly nauseated, as if I’ve eaten a dozen jelly donuts and have nothing to show for it but a box full of crumbs. 

Write Wherever/Whenever? Yes, You SCan!

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
                                                     -John Irving

The picture to the right shows my writing desk. Made of solid wood and topped with a plate of glass, this desk sits next to a window overlooking trees and a nice view of the Ford Parkway Tower. Each one of the desk’s drawers is crammed with writing utensils, paper, items of inspiration to help me compose. I have a comfy chair and a cushy couch if the desk isn’t doing it (or, more likely, is covered with papers). There’s also the Hamline Bush Library, with its variety of tables, carrel desks, and overstuffed chairs. Any one of these would make a good writing spot and you might think I get most of my pages written at these places.

Except you’d be wrong. Most of my writing happens at work.

Before you contact my boss to get me in trouble (or steal my job), I should tell you what I do. I work in an office as an administrative assistant, and after I’ve set out the coffee, checked the electronic documents, alphabetized the filing, and typed any dictations in my inbox, my duty is to scan each file from the prior year onto a database and then shred the file. I really like my job but I like the scanning part of my job the least of any task. It basically entails making sure each page goes through the scanner smoothly, the office equivalent of watching paint dry. But it gives me lots of time to think. And thinking, for me, equals writing.

Early Bird: Grabbing the Words Before Sunrise

If I could, I would write only when I’m inspired, when the sun hits the walls of my office at just the right angle, when I’m alone in a silent house, have finished off my cup of French press coffee and read a little poetry to put me in the mood. I would look out my oversized window at the ducks skating over the pond and the poplars swaying in the wind, lean back in my chair, close my eyes and wait until that perfect idea, that perfect word, entered my head. I would write it down and keep going. I would build up steam as the hours flew by, losing myself completely until it hit me that morning has become afternoon.

Oh, the dreams we dream.

Fact is, there’s no pond outside my window, no swaying poplars or cute little ducks. All I can see is the dirty gray vinyl of my neighbor’s garage ten feet away, which blocks out most of the light. There’s no coffee, just me and my morning breath. And if I waited until I was inspired to write, I wouldn’t be writing at all, because that only seems to happen when I’m washing dishes or brushing my son’s teeth and there is no paper or computer in sight.

Most of my writing happens before 6:30 a.m. This is not because I’m a morning person. Far from it. But the fact is, I have a three-year-old and other commitments taking up most of my day, and early mornings are usually quiet and they’re my only guaranteed times to write. I wear my pajamas and slippers. Sometimes I brush my teeth. I am not a morning person, but I have found that in the morning at least I have my subconscious going for me, my half-awake dream state.