tiny gigantic

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the MFA Writing students at California College of the Arts. I’d been asked there to talk about how they could use their newly-honed writing skills to make a living in the world. I’d done a similar talk for the entire undergraduate classes a few weeks before, in which we talked about publication technology, about how to be generous rather than proprietary, and about the idea that what they understood as writing, the act of laying words down one after the other, was only a very small part of what writing actually is. Consequently, they’d all bought into the idea that there are only a few things you can do with your writing degree:

You can teach.
Sure, it’s fun and interesting and you get to be around writing and writers all the time. Problem is, this means that your world stays small, because everyone’s practicing the same discipline. There’s not much opportunity for newness. And unless you’re very dedicated and very prolific, you’ll spend more time reading student papers and writing comments, than writing whatever it is you want to write. There’s no job security, you’re getting paid almost nothing, you’re competing with your colleagues—hell, you might as well work at a coffee shop and continue to work on that novel. Oh yes, I tried my luck as a teacher—that didn’t go so well.

You can scrape by in obscurity hoping for the big break.
Sheeeit. It’s a romantic notion, no doubt. But there’s not that many people out there who have the balls or the talent to pull it off. This is not to say that if you believe you can do it, that you shouldn’t. I’m only saying that it’s hard as fuck. At least it was for me.

You can get into publishing.
Which means you’re not gonna be writing that much. Unless writing rejection letters is your thing, you’ll be spending time reading and copyediting—not a bad way to spend the day no doubt, but it isn’t writing, not even the way the graduate students understand it, and certainly not the way it should be understood.

These three directions—teacher, starving artist, editor—are the only ready-made avenues available to someone with a writing degree. The thing is, they’re not the only ways to go. Not by a long shot. There’s a whole universe of careers you can create for yourself if you try. It’s just much harder to actually figure out what it is you want to do with your time, than it is to choose from a list of options. It’s hard because it takes courage and confidence and imagination. It’s hard because no one can know you like you know yourself and so no one can do it for you.

Here’s why I’m writing this:

During the conversation, one of the students said: “so I’ll have this degree soon. Then what do I do?” This was the question of the day, the reason I’d been asked to come speak. The weird part was that when I responded by asking her what it was she actually wanted to do, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “yeah.” And that was the end of it. As if the question, as trite as it sounds, were too big to even go about trying to answer. It’s a big fucker, no doubt. But it’s also the way to greatness.

Finding your path has very little to do with your resume, and everything to do with knowing yourself a little better every day.

01/14/08 by josh kamler

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.