The Portable MFA in Creative Writing

Raise your hand if you believe any book that claims to pack two years of graduate school into 280 pages. (You in the back, put your hand down, this is serious).

I will say right now, I do not have an MFA in creative writing, and unless I suddenly come upon enough money to support my family for the rest of my life, I probably never will. Instead, I read this book, and I actually enjoyed it.

The authors of The Portable MFA all teach at the New York Writers Workshop, and they're quick to point out that MFA programs are not all they're cracked up to be. They make it quite plain that such programs are not necessary for writers, and can actually be extremely detrimental.

The introduction conveniently lists all the useful lessons you're likely to get from such a program:
1) Write what you know; don't write what you don't know.
2) Flashy style and language without a story to tell is "all dressed up with nowhere to go."
3) Writing can't be taught.
4) Cut out adverbs.
5) Never use the word "always."
6) "You will never be fictionists."
7) Don't write screenplays; they will destroy your ability to write prose fiction.
8) There are kinds of stories.

So...why write the rest of the book? And why read it?

For starters, the authors don't claim to have it all figured out, and they seem to genuinely want to help aspiring writers, not just make a sale off of them. They tell you what the established 'rules' are, but they also offer examples of great writing that breaks them. The only real rule is that you can write "whatever you can get away with, but you'll find you can't get away with much."

The book is split into five sections, by five authors: Fiction, Personal Essay/Memoir, Magazine Writing, Poetry, and Playwriting. If you find that discouraging, don't. I rarely write anything but fiction, and I found that section extremely usable, and the other sections offered interesting insights into other types of writing. The book is a great jumping-off point for any of these types of writing, and it's probably even better if you're looking to expand your repetoire or just experiment.

Each section offers several exercises to try and an extensive reading list. Of course, these lists of "great literature" are biased toward the authors' preferences, and they're fairly limited in genre (I didn't recognize any SF/F). However, if you're like me and you read in mostly one genre, it's worth exploring some other areas of literature, and these lists are great for that. Although I've only read a couple of the novels and stories mentioned, almost all the ones I recognized were fantastic. I have no reason to believe the rest of the list won't be of the same quality.

I think this book is one of the few that should be on almost every writer's bookshelf. It's unpretentious and lays out the kind of 'refresher rules' that are good to remind yourself of once or twice a year. Its broad view of writing also serves as an important reminder: regardless of what you write, you're not in a vacuum. There's a huge world of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and play out there.