Like nearly everyone, my time is limited and my aspirations are not. Twelve weeks ago I thought perhaps that I could go against the tide and achieve one of my lifelong goals without it falling prey to the limitations of time. Guess what? I did and it didn't. How wonderful! How marvelous! The thrill of writing a complete short story meeting my standards for entertainment, philosophical content, and satisfying conclusion was so delicious and energizing as to take me to a higher plane of existence where I dwelt for some days. It is an experience I want to repeat. I want to become addicted to the feeling of accomplishment associated with completed fiction. Prior to this semester of creative writing, I had no idea of the empowerment awaiting at the final sentence, the denouement of a fiction created by the focusing my creative energies.
Now comes the time for the hard part, the troubling future. Were I to be honest with myself, I would admit that my plate is too full with time commitments inconsistent with a writer's life. Instead, it is likely that I will continue to deceive myself, thinking "this quandary will succumb to the forces of my will," when I know with certainty it won't. One option is to add the commitment of enrolling in an online MFA program. Truth be told, I have already applied to a couple of these programs and find reminders of my reluctant, halting, start-stop progress lurking in my gmail every month as the schools continue to send follow-up inquiries and enthusiastic encouragements to sign a check and enter the rabbit hole. Goodness, what to do?
There is a psychological mechanism at work in these deliberations, one I've come to acknowledge only within the last few years: I am a better student than entrepreneur. For, when one examines the most basic attribute of a successful, successively published author, one particular quality comes to the fore. Agents, contracts and partners aside, an author must work alone in the hope of finding a market. Writing must be a business or it is nothing but a dabble in creative aimlessness. The hundreds of pages and hundred of thousands of words I have written have so far have only been read by my teachers and fellow students. In other words, people who are compensated in one way or another for focusing their eyes and brains on my work are the only ones who have entered into the realm of Osborne's literature.
I am very accustomed to being a student and methodically cranking out responses to assignments so as to remove them from my to-do list and earn a grade. I am kept going by the little endorphin shots generated from seeing those grades posted along with the encouraging and often entertaining commentary from professors. The problem comes when I have to give up the little doses of pleasurable brain chemistry for an extended period of time during which I must "toil in obscurity," a cliché unavoidable for it's accuracy in regard to the image of me sitting along before a keyboard without the luxury of knowing that at least one person will read what I am cranking out and give me a little reward.
Will I take the easy, though expensive way out by committing to an MFA, of will I writer-up and do the hard work on my own? I wish I knew the answer. Does it really make sense to pursue a masters degree when, as I presume, the majority of published fiction authors never bothered to sign on the dotted line of a university contract and send in their check in hopes of finding a path to publication? My gut says no don't do it, but my wayward heart says yes. I just like school too much.
Friedrich Nietzsche — 'One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.'
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