In which I attempt to be “a gentleman [writer] and a scholar”
Republishing an old article I produced in 2010. Since a new school year just began, I’m sure there are plenty of new graduate students who are also creative writers, and struggling to determine how to balance their studies and their writing. Here’s my advice.
Recently, I received an e-mail from a self-described “budding author” that required some thinking before I could give a proper response. I’m giving my answer here, since one of my goals for this site redesign is to make the site more useful to my students, and I daresay that my response might be helpful.
The basic question concerns going to do an MA (with an academic focus, not a creative thesis) yet also wanting to remain a creative writer. How to focus on creative work and academic work at the same time? How to be a writer and a scholar at once?
It’s a good question. I’m going to try to give a good answer, and to do so I’m going to break the question up and tackle its aspects in isolation.
Set Clear, Attainable Goals.
First, like anything else, it’s important to set goals that are clear and attainable. “Publish my first novel” is a perfect example of a bad goal, as is “Complete my MA.” A better goal is “Complete final polish on my first novel manuscript before the world ends on Dec. 20, 2012″ or “Defend my MA thesis before I get married on Jan. 15, 2013.”
These goals are more specific, they are measurable (you know when you’ve completed them), they are attainable (“publishing” isn’t “attainable” in the sense that it relies on an outside party — all meaningful goals should be possible to accomplish without the intercession of others), they’re realistic (in theory; of course this depends on other, personal factors, and whether the timeline makes sense when taking them into account), and they are time-sensitive (there’s a date attached, it’s not just a vague thing).
My goals going into my Ph.D. were simple:
– complete all of my course work in the first eight months
– complete each stage of the program as fast as possible (I set additional, specific timeline goals for each stage)
– graduate within four years
– apply for every grant that I’m eligible for and aware of (grant deadlines are obviously time-sensitive)
– complete a draft of a novel as my thesis, so that I have a working draft to edit when I graduate
– complete a book of poetry and submit it to publishers before I graduate (in this instance, and the next, my timeline was determined by the “graduate within four years rule)
– complete and submit at least three essays to academic journals (at least one refereed)
Notice that my goals are both creative and academic.
Having clear goals helped me immensely. Not only did I accomplish them all, but in fact I completed five poetry book manuscripts (some of them I’d already started before the program began). Two were under contract to be published before I graduated. (One I redesigned later as The Politics of Knives, and two I trashed.)
Note that I didn’t set a goal to publish anything. You can’t control whether or not somebody accepts your work for publication, and even if they do accept it, you can’t control when they publish. All my goals were to “complete and submit.” Even if I’d published nothing, I would have met these goals. However, I was determined to publish, so I kept “submit” in my goals.
Now I will tell you the deep, dark secret of graduate school. A simple rule you MUST follow if you plan to go to graduate school as a writer or even just to teach.
Remember that nobody cares about your grades. Getting good grades is your least important concern.
Are you shocked? You shouldn’t be. Remember that it’s NOT an UNimportant concern. It’s important, but of the least importance. In other words: Getting As is the bare minimum.
Everyone else will get As. You’d better get them too. But if you spend all your time trying to do well in class and get As, then you are wasting your time.
What you need to do is set yourself apart, without being aggressive or a competitive jerk. What people care about, when you enter the so-called “real world” after graduate school, is PUBLICATIONS, AWARDS, and EXPERIENCE.
Everyone has As. Everyone passed. You’re all brilliant. But who’s actually done something? If you don’t do anything outside of graduate school, you look like a total loser to a potential employer AND you’ve been putting your life on hold for no payoff. Which leads me to remark:
Don’t put your life on hold.
There are no substantial rewards after graduate school. The jobs are scarce, the jobs don’t pay well (for the education you actually have and the time you put in), and you don’t get the respect you deserve. Even from your Mom.
Moreover, putting your life on hold is a great way to look myopic and like you can’t manage your time properly. If you can’t get through grad school without having time for outside activities, then how can you possibly teach a full course load AND conduct research?
When I hear “I can’t imagine forgetting about my novel for a year!” I shudder. This is exactly the kind of thinking that is foisted on people. “You must put all aside and focus on your studies!” saith the dean. But I will say it again: I wrote SIX BOOKS in first draft (two in final draft) including my thesis, AND finished on time. And I’m not that special. The reality is this:
Completing your novel, instead of putting it on hold, is the most important thing you could do for your future career.
If your novel IS your thesis (i.e., if you’re doing the creative thesis option), then I would hope that this would be obvious. But even if it’s not, as in this example, even if you’re doing an academic thesis, then your novel is STILL the most important thing.
Why? Because everybody else is also going to have a completed thesis when they are done. Because everybody else has As. Because everybody else got award X or scholarship Y. Everybody else is going to publish in at least one refereed journal (and it goes without saying that you’d better submit work to journals, along with getting As and winning awards).
How can you set yourself apart? Not by competing in-class to prove your intellectual superiority. You’ll look like a jerk and people will shun you. Not by getting an extra RA or TA job. Everyone else did that. But who else is completing and (hopefully) publishing a book? Or a schwack of essays?
Almost nobody. When people look at my CV, they are impressed by precisely three things: (1) I got a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, (2) I have a book published and another forthcoming this fall, and (3) it’s 10 pages long in the short version, and I’ve only been out of school one year. (There are unimpressive aspects of my CV, but I’d be a fool to broadcast them.)
Besides, they are hiring people, not pages. Who’d you rather hire, somebody who has been hell-bent on graduate school to the expense of having a personality, or somebody who managed to tag all the bases including drafting up a strong thesis, AND managed to craft a novel? Who sounds more interesting, more organized, more capable, and more fun to chat with in the common room?
Nobody is impressed by my transcript with all its As and A+s and awards, aside from seeing the SSHRC on there. It looks just like everybody else’s transcript. Except, maybe, that I completed my studies on time.
Complete the program on time, and as fast as you can.
There’s a lot of bullshit competitiveness in grad school. Sidestep it all. Be nice to people and make friends. And quietly complete the program as fast as you can, faster than your peers.
You’re not struggling against them, you’re struggling with them, and against yourself. Nobody cares about your grades, unless they are low. Not even the department you’re in. What do they care about? They care about how far along you are in the program.
When they have money to give out, they give it to the person who’s the farthest along in the program, barring something specific that must be taken into account. If you just do things quickly, you’ll be competitive without having to compete, and thus without having to start any turf wars or feuds or other nonsense.
When I was done, my thesis needed a lot more work. I’m slowly doing that work now. I could have done it earlier, but the goal isn’t to craft a perfect, publishable thesis. Your goal is this:
Craft a workable, defensible thesis — then get the hell out of there!
Polish and rewrite and get the thesis perfect and publishable on your own time. You’re getting a degree, not publishing a book. The longer you stay in the program, the worse you look to an outside observer.
Nobody expects you to get your book accepted the moment you’ve graduated. They expect you will have to rewrite it anyway, and “get the dissertation out” before it’s publishable. They had to rewrite their dissertations, why shouldn’t you?
I know I was asked about an MA program, but I talked about my doctoral studies because the answer’s still relevant, and is also now relevant to readers thinking about the PhD. That’s an overview of my general advice regarding graduate school. How about specific answers and comments?
“Did you feel like you were compromising your creativity?”
No. I was careful. I minored in literary theory, which is broadly useful in academia and also of use and interest in a personal approach to writing. And I majored in Canadian literature, which helped me get a sense of where there was a gap in the literature of this country and where I might attempt to find a niche as a writer myself. For me, this made sense and fed my interests; another writer might justify another field in another way.
If you’re going to have two careers, you need to make them complement each other. It’s hard enough to have a single career. You don’t need the hassle of a second one. You have to find a way to merge them and to view/sell your creative work as an asset and a branch of your research (without crafting boring, theory-heavy books).
I didn’t do ANYTHING in graduate school unless I felt that it was going to help me as a writer in some way. Or improve my teaching abilities (because I love teaching and think it’s important to teach). And I made the time to write, regardless of how busy I was, even if I only wrote for 10 minutes.
So though I often bemoaned my lack of time, as I continue to do now, I was still slowly progressing on both creative projects and academic ones. Where I DID compromise too much was in not doing the creative thesis option immediately.
I entered the program with an academic thesis and held onto it for almost a year. It was a mistake. I should have jumped in. It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble. Not because writers should always do creative theses, but because my academic thesis was a worse idea. You should just go with the best idea, whether academic or creative. Your most impressive project should be your thesis. Your second-best project can be your secondary focus. It sounds obvious but it’s not always obvious when you’re on the inside.
“I’m learning increasingly that writing is not only about talent, but mental perseverance, time management, organization…”
Hallelujah! This is, to my mind, the biggest misconception about art in general — that you don’t need to be organized, persistent, or efficient … just “talented.” Whatever that means.
Whoever told me that “Hard work is more important than talent” was right (it was either Maurice Mierau or David Bergen).
“[What about] negotiating between the writing mind and the scholarly … not only the varying mental spaces, but also how to go about establishing a routine that can accommodate both…”
It’s hard, but for me it’s not the transitioning that’s hard. It’s the “only so many hours in a day” thing that’s difficult. I struggled with this then, and I still do, but even though it’s hard, the answer is simple: you have to prioritize BOTH.
(And, as noted above, you need to think of your writing as a branch of your broader research and think/plan/work accordingly, without getting into a headspace where you end up producing clunky, academic fiction.)
You should, to my mind, always have four projects on the go. A LONG CREATIVE project, a SHORT CREATIVE project, a LONG ACADEMIC project, and SHORT ACADEMIC project. The LONG projects are your top priorities, even if they are not urgent and have no deadlines, and even if the short projects are urgent and do have deadlines. (This ability to focus on important, non-urgent projects without ignoring more urgent matters is essential to long-term success.)
Then, every day, try to take one concrete step towards completing these projects. I define a concrete step as reading X pages or writing X words. So, right now, this is how I’m working. Here are my current projects [I revised this part so here are my current, Sept. 2012 projects]:
LC – The Lightning of Possible Storms (a short story book)
SC – A short story within said book, “Explosions”
LA – John Paizs’ Crime Wave (academic monograph book, in revision stages)
SA – Book review of Deluded Your Sailors by Michelle Butler Hallett
Every day, I produce at least 500 words on one of these books (since I have fast-approaching deadlines for the academic book, I’m focused on that), and if possible I do more (a lot more if I can). Then I work on a short work (whatever has the earliest deadline), completing some predefined task (today, I will read at least 50 pages of the Hallett book).
In other words, I insist on having CLEAR PRIORITIES and PRE-DEFINED PROJECTS and DAILY QUOTAS. I try to do more. But I focus on not doing less.
Even if I feel like garbage. Even if you write nonsense you’ll have to later delete, it’s better than writing nothing. It helps you think and it helps you build discipline and it helps to practice. And if you write a single usable sentence in that 500 lousy words, then you’ve done more than if you put it off until tomorrow when you’ll supposedly have more time or feel refreshed.
Also, importantly,
Don’t get trapped into reading/researching when you should be writing.
You need to do both. But your reading and research should not get in the way of your writing. Even if you are doing preliminary reading/research to prepare an essay, you should be writing a different essay or writing notes AS YOU READ. It will be easy (ha!) because you will:
Write according to a schedule.
Studies have shown, time and again, that if you do the same kind of writing at the same time, daily, even if only for a small window of time (like 20 minutes), you will be much more productive (like, produce 3-5 times as many pages) than if you write in large yet irregular blocks (writing like this, people tend to only write slightly more than “controls” told to write NOTHING that they don’t HAVE to write).
That’s my advice. The most important thing to do if you plan to be a writer and a scholar is to remember that AND. You have to commit to BOTH.
You don’t put one on hold while you work on the other. Trust that your success in one area will feed into the other — I’ve been hired to teach creative writing courses based solely on my publication record — and get yourself organized, get disciplined, and work efficiently.
Commit yourself and treat both your studies and your writing as a job. Clock in at 9, clock out at 5, or whatever, and work sensibly.
Most other so-called writers and scholars will work when they “find the time” or when “inspiration strikes.” You have to make the time and manufacture inspiration.
Hope this helps.
