Workshopping

Every year, when the leaves start to fall, I think about applying for MFA programs. I watched Girls and read Bunny by Mona Awad at an impressionable time in my life and so have a vision of MFAs as cutthroat and dreary. This is despite much evidence to the contrary - I know plenty of people who liked their programs and found friends and communities in them. Still, it is hard to shake the feeling that putting your writing under a communal microscope in this way would expose its raw vulnerabilities. My fiction feels more fragile and personal to me than essay writing, which after all has an objective standard it must meet, unlike fiction, which beyond a certain point, is tremendously subjective.

The MFA fantasy for me, then, like for many people, is a fantasy about time. I imagine myself holed up in a little cabin somewhere doing nothing but writing. My life at the moment is not really like this at all. I live in New York City and work a lot. I have devoted professionalism and focus to my career, in order to make money, and have little will or energy to give such professionalism and focus to my creative work off the clock. None of this is to complain. I feel very lucky to have a good and interesting job and to be able to sustain myself. It is simply a reality of this kind of life.

Still, as the old adage goes, I figured that if I could not bring myself to a workshop, perhaps I could bring the workshop to me. So I have attempted to sacrifice everything at all dispensable in my life and the long and short of it is that I am writing a novel. I write mostly at night, both because of my schedule and because of my preferences, and so I am trying a monastic form of living where all I do is work and write essentially. My aim is to finish this novel before the end of the summer because I am a Virgo and it is good to have a timeline. Wish me luck!

In the spirit of workshopping, however (and this is the reason I am making this corny announcement), I am looking for fellow fiction or CNF writers who are interested in writing communally once a month or so. This could mean sharing pages, maintaining joint goals, or actively writing in the same space. If you are in New York City and working on a project and also looking for this, let me know! Feel free to reply to this with a little bit about what you’re working on, how much time you’d have to commit to this, and what you’d be looking to get out of it. I am restricting this to New York for now because the intent is to move it off the internet and bring it into the real world. There is no minimum requirement in terms of publications or experience, but I would be looking for seriousness, rigor, and follow-through (as well as kindness and respect for others, obviously).

As a side note, I will still be writing occasionally on this newsletter but for now am prioritizing the fiction project. My posts here will continue to be sporadic for now.