Learning like a MF-eh!

I flip-flopped A LOT in the last year about getting an MFA. I figured if I found an institution that catered more towards fantasy, popular fiction, or young adult genres, I would have more success not only in my writing but surviving the program.

When I met Elisa several years ago, I had returned to my University for additional classes. Why? I wanted to take the creative writing classes I was too frightened to take in conjunction with my business degree. I had been paranoid about my GPA and wanted to keep it high before I took a writing course.

Because I believe I suck at all things English.

It’s a horrible thing to say but the more I say it and realize that is what I believe about myself, the more I want to defeat that line of thinking. I have never done well to my own standards in English classes. I scraped by high school with high 70s, low 80s in English and Social Sciences while my Chemistry and Calculus 98% grades offset my average into the mid 90s. It was something I could never figure out about myself–why could I not succeed in English into the high 80s, low 90s?

The answer is that I didn’t believe in my intuitions. I would read a piece and think that the theme I was considering was too obvious. I had to boil down my approach to literature to a basic and formulaic method of thinking in order to not diverge too much in my timed essays. It was horrible. I took extra tutoring for my English marks, believing I couldn’t read properly and that was the problem.

I didn’t believe in myself.

This continued through university. I was hesitant to take English classes for fear of failure. I read copiously, I reviewed young adult fiction for a national newspaper chain, but I still had no confidence in my own abilities. I graduated with a minor in English but only by taking tangental classes, usually in fantasy and queer literature because I felt I didn’t have the traditional English-learning chops.

My first English class in university, I got a D on my first paper and felt DESTROYED. “The ideas are there,” the teacher–who I later came to hate for many reasons but I will cite this among them–, “but the writing isn’t.”

That one assessment destroyed me for years. I boiled down my approach, removed any possible pronoun to remove confusion. I became hyper-detailed in my literature analysis, tearing apart scant quotes and literary devices because I couldn’t trust myself to branch out in assessing theme, character, motivation. I reverted to the details because it was all I could do to survive.

I sat in the writing course with Elisa years later but still simmered with a seething hatred for traditional creative writing teaching environments. I withdrew from the course, frustrated by the professors lack of appreciation for fantastic literature, and frustrated by the other students’ lack of conviction, submitting hastily written pieces littered with grammatical and spelling errors. I would learn on my own, I thought.

I drowned at work. I drowned in stress of life. It was all I could do to keep working and keep my spouse’s head above water as we faced trial after trial.

But in the last year, I looked for escape and school was that escape. I could try for an MFA, a distance learning one, where the genre I wanted to learn about would be appreciated as legitimate.

In the end, it was money that squashed that ambition. Most of the schools that offered fantastic MFAs were in the US and, as we all know, US graduate schools are EXPENSIVE. Especially compared to Canadian schools.

So, instead, I plan on teaching myself by writing lots and giving myself a lesson in the real world of writing. I am very self-conscious and have mostly low hopes for myself. But I’m hoping that I will grow out of my depression and gain confidence as a writer.

In other news, I am very proud of the Canadian pun in the title of this blog post. Perhaps a little too proud.