First Semester MFA Takeaways

Remove dust jackets from hardcover books before use;

Drafts should be completed and started over from the remembered remnants;

“Real writing” takes place over winter break;

Anxiety is normal and should be encouraged (i.e. the productive kind);

Workshop leaders will continue to confuse first-person narrators with their progenitors — even in graduate school;

Writing about one’s homeland is one’s birthright and opens the deepest, most intimate veins of narrative; (Where is my homeland?)

Proper literary criticism assumes an author anticipated and intended all undergraduate-level interpretations;

Plot problem? Have sex/a gunman enter a room/leave a room;

Write with AUTHORITY;

Telling is quicker than showing;

Columbia MFA work goes in the priority pile (what is the priority pile?);

One can assume that strangenesses that don’t quite cohere to a narrative are taken directly from an author’s life.

More as I think of it….

Published on December 16, 2009 17:37.
Filed under: Columbia, Fiction, School Tags: Fiction, MFA

Portfolio

You’ve reached the portfolio belonging to James Brandon McGirk. This visit may be recorded and its analytics used as fodder for anxiety and speculation. What would you like to do today?

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Published on February 2, 2019 22:16.
Filed under:

James McGirk