Category — MFA Sunday School

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work.

Hopefully you’ve now found your groove of 15 minutes a day.  Let me repeat something that was in that last lesson: if it’s going well, stick with it.  Now is not the time to try to bring it up to an hour. (Unless you’re a full-time writer, and then your problem wasn’t finding time; it was using time and forcing yourself to write… and that is a different lesson that we’ll get to in the future: making yourself write when you don’t want to write or getting over writer’s block.)  Stick to 15 minutes a day for a few weeks until not only your groove but other people’s expectations are set.  Then take a hard look at your schedule and see if you can afford to move it to a half hour a day.  If you can’t, stick to 15 minutes (you can write a book in a year working on it in 15 minute increments).  If you can, that’s when you increase your time as long as you can maintain it daily.  I promise you, years of bad writing habits have taught me this lesson well.

So today’s lesson: sestinas.  Some people put down on the form that they wanted to learn about poetry, and I’ve had a crap week and needed to do something fun.  So this lesson is really about playing with words in the form of a collapsing sestina, which is a non-rhyming fixed form poem.  I wrote similarly about it last month for NaBloPoMo, except your homework today will be very very different from the work you did over there.  So give this a chance even if you’re on the fiction or creative non-fiction side of this MFA department.

Fixed form poetry is meant to free the mind by providing a structure much in the same way a house frees the person who lives inside to focus on things other than the elements outside.  Hmmm… interesting concept, right?  Believe me, we’re going to employ it a bit in our fiction writing too because it’s true: when we know we’re not being held against our will, being boxed in sometimes makes humans feel safe and comforted.  Think: hugs, cozy sleeping bags, sleeper cars on trains.

The sestina has six stanza, all six lines long, with a final three-line envoy. Unlike a lot of other fixed forms, sestinas don’t rhyme or have a set meter. Instead, they utilize six end-words in various ways, pointing out sometimes the subtle meaning shifts in those end-words depending on their context.

One of the easiest poems to look at in order to understand the form is Carole Oles “The Magician Suspends the Children” published first in The Loneliness Factor in 1979 which begins,

With this charm I keep the boy at six (A)
and the girl fast at five (B)
almost safe behind the four (C)
walls of family. We three (D)
are a feathery totem I tattoo (E)
against time: I’ll be one (F)

Ignoring those letters in parentheses for a moment, the six end-words are all numbers in this case: six, five, four, three, two, and one. Yet you can already see Oles playing with the form in the first stanza. Instead of the number two, she incorporates it into the word “tattoo.” Later in the poem, she uses “won” in place of “one,” “too” in place of “two,” and “for” in place of “four.” It’s a poetry form with a lot of leeway.

To see other usages of end words, check out Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” or Ezra Pound’s “Altaforte.”

The second stanza takes those end-words and uses them again to end each line, except it mixes up the order. If you look at those six lines above as each pertaining to those letters in parentheses, the order then collapses upon itself — A, B, C, D, E, F becomes F, A, E, B, D, C (or last, first, second to last, second, third to last, third).

In the third stanza, it collapses again: C, F, D, A, B, E. If you look at the end-words in the third stanza, you’ll see that they are fore, wun, three, six, five, onto.

In other words, the full form of a collapsing sestina (since there are also sestinas that utilize the end-words as end-words but play with the order of the lines):

Stanza One: A, B, C, D, E, F
Stanza Two: F, A, E, B, D, C
Stanza Three: C, F, D, A, B, E
Stanza Four: E, C, B, F, A, D
Stanza Five: D, E, A, C, F, B
Stanza Six: B, D, F, E, C, A
Envoy: uses two end-words per line (with three lines total) with one word appearing in the middle of the line and the other word still being utilized as an end word.

Pretty cool, right?

Homework: Let’s have a little fun with this.  You know the Food Network show Chopped where the contestants open their baskets and have to utilize a set of mismatched ingredients and bring them together to form a cohesive dish? (“Contestants, open your baskets.  You have smoked oysters, grape jam, watercress, and corn chips… go!”)  I’m going to give you the six words to play with so everyone has the same end-words.  I’ve chosen words that can be utilized in numerous ways.  Once you’ve used one or two of your 15-minute sessions to play with words this way and write your sestina (since, you know the Chopped contestants only have 15 minutes too), either post your poem in the comment section below or post it on your blog and return with a link to your poem.  We’ll gather them up and have our own verbal episode of Chopped, except instead of chopping the weakest poem, we’ll just honour the most delicious one.

The end-words in your word basket: fair, to, sun, hope, rest, sing (will also accept for this last one, song).

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work.

Let me guess what happened last week.  On the first day, you created a character.  On the second day, you couldn’t find time to do it.  On the third day, you made two characters and started on a third one just in case you missed another writing day this week.  And that’s what you have now because you did end up skipping the rest of the days — three and a half characters.  It is hard to find time to write.

I dated a guy back in graduate school who was inflexible about his meditation time.  He meditated twice a day for about a half hour each time.  He meditated some time between 7 – 8 am and again between 3 – 4 pm.  And guess what, he always got to meditate.  Most of the time, it didn’t affect me — I just read a book or I’d meditate with him.  But sometimes, I’d want to go to an afternoon movie or I’d be antsy and not want to sit inside.  And those were the times when I’d point out things we were missing because of his meditation schedule.  And he’d shrug and say, “I’m still meditating.”  Not because he was an asshole who didn’t care about my feelings, but because it was that important to him.

And that’s how writers (yes, YOU) have to approach writing.  You need to set a time to do it and hold it sacred regardless of what other people need you to do too.  This is how you’re going to do it:

You’re going to start with fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes only.  You get no extra points for writing for a half hour or an hour.  Fifteen minutes and then stop.  Before you start doing this, you will need to pick a time of day that works best for you, that is consistently good with few exceptions.  Then you need to go explain to everyone who may need you during those fifteen minutes that you no longer exist for a quarter of an hour — you know, the amount of time it would take to shower and get dressed.  Not a lot of time.  But they need to understand that you are (1) writing and cannot be disturbed and (2) need them to support you so you can write uninterrupted.  I’m going to assume that most people are going to write at home rather than use their lunch break.  Therefore, carve out your time in the morning, mid-day, or evening, but explain to all the people who live in your house (yes, even the two-year-old that you need to plop down in front of the television for fifteen minutes) that this is your sacred time and you cannot be disturbed.  If you need to, hand them this post and say, “this is what I’m doing and this is how I need you to help.”

And before you start saying how you can’t possibly find fifteen minutes every day, I’m going to tell you to stop talking.  Eat your three meals five minutes faster, go to bed ten minutes later and wake up five minutes earlier, cut out a television show, ask your partner to take the baby for fifteen minutes.  If you want to find fifteen minutes (and it’s only fifteen minutes because you don’t even need to use time to commute somewhere), you can find fifteen minutes.  And I promise you, it’s the only amount of time you’re going to need.  I am not going to ask you to go beyond fifteen minutes.

After you have found your time, take away other possible distractions beyond humans.  Disconnect from the Internet.  No, you can’t check your email first for a second.  No, you can’t check a fact online for the story you’re writing.  Turn off your smartphone, don’t answer the home phone, and literally cloister yourself.  By the way, I often will leave a string of gibberish letters in the middle of a manuscript in order to come back and plug in the fact later.  BUT I never just go online for a second because — I’m sorry — that’s the fastest way to become derailed.

So fifteen minutes — that’s it.  And when fifteen minutes is done, you walk away.  Guess what — it will seem as if you’re accomplishing nothing.  Maybe you spent the whole time staring at the screen.  Maybe you only wrote three sentences, and you don’t feel very good about them.  It wasn’t a waste, I promise you.  Come back again tomorrow and the same thing will happen, and perhaps the next day too.  Some people — like me — sometimes need four or more Channel Days before they actually get into the heart of a writing project — a place that we’ll call finding the pulse.

To understand the concept of Channel Days, we need to take a page from yoga.  Yoga isn’t an end-point: it’s merely a way to train the body so the mind the meditate.  According to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, yoga is a pathway to somewhere else, and some yogis stop the physical practice of yoga once they can train the mind to meditate for long periods of time and the body is strong enough to sit still.  Channel Days within writing are also a pathway to somewhere else — the rhythm or pulse to a project — which means that they aren’t a waste of time.  They are a very important exercise you need to go through in order to get to that pulse.

Most people can’t jump in and out of writing with ease.  If you step away from a project for a bit, you need to spin the dial on your internal, mental radio and tune into the words again.  If you think you’re not getting anywhere and step away, you’ll forever be stuck in Channel Days.  If you work through them and sit with the project, realizing that these days are far from “wasted” time and necessary for getting where you want to be, you’ll come through them into the pulse of the project.

For the first few weeks, you’re going to stick to fifteen minutes a day.  After you’ve had about three weeks of this and you’ve established an expectation with others around you, you may increase to a half hour, though you don’t have to.  Consider the sustainability: It is better to write fifteen minutes every single day, than to write at varying lengths of time three times a week.  Better to stick forever at fifteen minutes a day than to miss days, and since you need to take other people into account and don’t want them cranky with you, it’s better to fulfill their expectation than to give them a sense that writing is a flexible thing for you.  Feel free to commit to fifteen minutes every day but grab a few longer days when you can.  But never skip.

If you are going to increase you time, do it in fifteen minute increments over the course of a few weeks.  So fifteen minutes a day for a few weeks, a half hour a day for a few weeks, forty-five minutes a day for a few weeks, to an hour a day.  Just as you wouldn’t run a marathon without training, don’t make your brain and body sit for an hour when it isn’t trained to do so.  That’s a recipe for frustration.  Fifteen minute increments to increase your writing time.  Though, again, don’t feel you need to stretch beyond fifteen minutes.  Better to drain every last drop of concentration for those fifteen minutes than to poorly plod through an hour.

At fifteen minutes a day, even once you find your groove, you may only write a paragraph or a page a day.  You’re certainly not going to churn out a chapter in that amount of time.  But think about it — if you write a page a day, you will have a 365-page book by the end of the year.  Not too shabby.  Also, this isn’t a race.  You are not competing against anyone else.  You’re not even competing against yourself.  You may have wanted the project or post to have been finished yesterday, you may be chomping at the bit to hit publish or start sending something out, but deep breathe.  This really isn’t a race, so panting as if you’re in one.  Slow and steady writing reaches the finish line, and if you look at the big picture, it doesn’t matter the date you cross that finish line.  It just matters that you’ve created something; that you have something in hand that wasn’t here on earth before you pulled it out of your brain.

I gave you the character development exercise last week and the time budgeting exercise this week because I needed you to see how hard it can be to devote uninterrupted time to something that you love.  Maybe you believe that only published writers have the right to demand writing time because then it’s not a hobby, it’s a job.  If you want to hold on to that belief, you can, but it will always limit you.  This is why you deserve time to write: it’s important to you.  It makes you feel good, it centers you, it is your mental exercise, which is just as important as physical exercise.  You take the time in your day to eat and you take the time in your day to sleep; this is important to you too: you should take time in your day to write.

So now go backwards to week three and try your hand at creating seven characters, working on them for fifteen minutes each day without distraction.  You may only get three and a half complete within that amount of time, and that is fine.  This is your Channel Week.  In yoga, you learn how to breathe in and out, slowly and calmly.  And in writing, your Channel Week is that time period where you learn to steadily work without distraction.  For just fifteen minutes each day.

Homework: Choose your time of day, talk to your family, and start writing fifteen minutes every day.  In the beginning, start making a checkmark on a calendar after you complete your fifteen minutes to serve as a visual reminder.  You better have seven checkmarks when I see you here again next Sunday for the next writing lesson.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work.

Last week, you practiced writing by examining the fine details of your project and your writing motivation — which are the sort of things you need to always be considering within storytelling in general.  In that sense, you were the character in the story last week, and in order to complete the project, you needed to figure out a few things: namely, what and why in that six question scope (who, why, what, where, when and how).

One of the best pieces of advice that I got in my undergraduate writing program is to know what your character had for breakfast.  My professor would kick off the conversation about our story by asking a question of that ilk: what did Rachel have for breakfast.  And you were expected to answer without needing to think about it too deeply.  In the case of my character, Rachel Goldman, I can tell you that she eats yogurt most of the time, but she eats late in the morning — after she has been up for a few hours — and on occasion, she grabs a bagel or muffin.  So no French toast or scrambled eggs or even frozen waffles.  She doesn’t even eat cold, leftover pizza from the refrigerator.

Why is this important to know?  Because the reader subconsciously picks up on small clues (just as we do with the people we encounter in the face-to-face world) as they try to discern what sort of person Rachel Goldman is and predict how she’ll react in various situations (and try to figure out what will happen next in the story).  What do we know about Rachel from this?  Well, she works at home and has the time, but she doesn’t make a hearty meal for herself.  She doesn’t wake up and eat but chooses to do other things before she gets around to putting food in her body.  She goes for things that are simple and quick.  See, we just learned all sorts of things about Rachel just based on the way she consumes breakfast.  You’d understand her to be a completely different person if she woke up and set the table and ate scrambled eggs and bacon.  And a different person still if she ate an egg-white omelette with a few cantaloupe slices on the side.  Or if she didn’t eat breakfast at all.

But forget about you — as the writer, I need to know Rachel that well.  If I can’t even tell you with authority what she ate for breakfast, how can I expect to know what sort of decision she’d make when faced with something high stakes, something the entire plot hinges on? You need to know your characters inside and out, left and right, back and forth.  You need to be able to open their closet doors and know what you’ll see hanging from the racks.  You need to know what their locker looks like at school.  Even if you never use these small details outright, they will seep into the story in other ways.  Jimmy has a nasty locker filled with old, rotting bag lunches and last week’s homework that was never turned in crumpled under his coat?  That says a lot about Jimmy as a person and unless he’s going to grow a lot as a person and change drastically (and maybe that’s the story), he’s not the best person to throw into the role of class president or head of the environmental club (not with those bag lunches!).

We’ll talk more about character motivation in the future, but considering how your character approaches small daily tasks or their relationships with common people is a good place to start when talking about character development.  Your homework this week is to create seven character sketches.  Again, this hopefully isn’t busy work and you’ll be able to cannibalize from this exercise in the future as you start a story and realize that you’ve already created the perfect character to fit a part.

Homework: What I’d like you to do is create seven distinct characters — one for each day of the week until we meet again.  The more you can write about each character, the better.  You need to love your characters (even the ones that are traditionally unlikeable such as Voldemort) or we — the readers — won’t love your characters.  And you need us to love your characters so we’ll stay with the story.  The best way to show that love is to write effusively about them, examining them in the way a preteen examines Justin Beiber’s every move.

For every character, I’d like you to know the following facts:

• Name
• Age
• Physical traits (height, weight, hair and eye colour, scars, distinguishing characteristics)
• Basic familial relationships (are they married, have children, no siblings, two mothers?)

And then, specifically, one for each day of the week, I’d like to additionally know this next fact:

• Sunday: what did he/she eat for breakfast today?  Is this usual?  Unusual?  And why?
• Monday: what sort of relationship does he/she have with his/her parents?  Are they still alive?  Does he/she see his/her parents?  Why or why not?
• Tuesday: what is your character wearing at this exact moment?  Are these his/her normal clothes or are they wearing something for a special occasion?
• Wednesday: if your character is old enough to vote, how is she/he voting in the next election?  If your character is too young to vote, how closely do they follow political issues?
• Thursday: where would your character like to go on vacation?  Why?
• Friday: describe where your character lives.
• Saturday: does your character like him/herself?  What are their favourite personal traits?  What do they wish they could change about themselves?

Even if your goal is to write better blog posts or poetry or creative non-fiction, please try your hand at this lesson.  There is a greater point I’ll make about this next week, but that post (which is applicable to all writing) won’t make sense unless you try creating characters.

See you back here next Sunday (with your homework!) and another lesson.  Remember, if you end up posting this on your blog, please leave a link below so other students can go read it.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop.  MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.”  If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work.

Query letters may seem like an odd place to start an MFA program.  In actuality, they’re something you cover much later in the game, when you have possibly publishable pieces of writing under your belt, but I think waiting to learn how to write one is a mistake.  Which is why for my MFA program, I’m starting with them.

Close your eyes… no wait… keep your eyes open because you need to read this paragraph…  Okay, sit with this thought for a moment: query letters are a verbal map.  They are a verbal map to a project, giving the receiver an understanding of how they should approach the work, but more than that, they’re a map to YOU.  They tell the editor or agent about your writerly self; what you’re like as a writer and as a person.  Which is why a query letter is just as important as your project itself.  It’s mood music.  It’s an overture.  It’s a prologue.  It’s the notes that set the scene.

But it’s not just that: it’s the window through which the agent or editor can get a glimpse of YOU.  During my four years on staff at a literary magazine, I learned that you can tell a lot about a person based on their query letter.  It didn’t take long before I gave more attention to the short stories that came with a succinct cover letter that followed proper format.  I may have missed out on some terrific writing by doing that, but when you’re sifting through 500 stories and can only use 5 for the issue, you’re going to look for ways to reduce your workload.  And people who wrote a good query were usually people who were good to work with — prompt, hardworking, communicative, eager.

This is why I want to begin with query letters: until you know who you are and what you want to do, you can’t explain yourself to anyone else.  Part of storytelling and poetry is conveying how you see the world or what thoughts excite you.  Writers who know themselves well start knowing their characters well.  They start noticing personality traits in other people, and see how these traits can be used to construct the motivations of the character.  People who know themselves see the small details, the sorts of details that can make a scene or verbal image pop off the page.  Writing is exploration of the self; of how you see the world, what you think is important, what interests you.

And a query letter is the map that gives the reader directions for exploring you and your project.

So let’s map you out; make you plot-able.

Back in the “get published” series, we touched on query letter format.  This format works best for querying an agent; a query letter to a literary magazine is usually even more succinct, dropping a few elements of the agent query.  So let’s start with making a fictional query letter to an agent asking them to consider you for representation based on whatever project you’re leaning towards working on (a blog post, a chapbook, a short story, a novel, etc).  Do you query agents in real life to ask for representation for your blog posts?  No.  But this is an exercise to help you ground yourself as a writer.

Oh… because you write, therefore, you are a writer.  So start internally calling yourself writer because I’m going to call you a writer.

I’d like you to do this letter out of order.  Start with the third paragraph and in a few sentences, give the reader a glimpse into your writing life.  Do not focus on any details about yourself that do not pertain to writing or the project at hand. (If you’re writing a novel about canaries, it’s fine to tell the agent that you’re an ornithologist.  But if you’re writing a novel about canaries, you don’t need to tell the agent that you’re a father of triplets.)  Since this letter will never actually be sent to an agent, feel free to admit why you write; what drew you to words.  Though you’d never tell an agent about how you fell in love with short stories when you wrote your first one in Mrs. Quacklemeier’s first grade class, this is a fine time to put it down on the page and look at those words, think about how long you’ve loved writing.

Now move to the first paragraph.  Forget about the hook line: focus instead on what type of projects you foresee yourself working on in the next two years.  It may be blog posts.  It may be a poetry collection of 300 villanelles about your cat.  It may be the most kick-ass love letters for your partner.  It may be the novel that has been sitting in your heart for the last three years.  Name it.  Caress it.  Honour it.  You have an idea in you that can only be painted with words: if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this post.  So own it.  No one is going to see this piece of writing unless you post it, so go to town putting down all your hopes.

And then move to the second paragraph where you give the meat of the projects.  Why these projects as opposed to other ones?  What is it about this novel idea that has a hold of you?  Why does it need to be villanelles instead of terzanelles when you write about your cat?  Why do you want to work on this love letter project as opposed to sending your partner sexy text messages?  There are reasons for why these projects over all others.  Write it down.

And then pin this letter by your workspace.

This is important.  You’re going to get lost from time to time and forget why you write.  You’re going to get rejection letters and need to remember that this is really important to you.  You are going to get stuck and feel like giving up.

So this query letter is also a map for YOU.  For you to get back to your writerly self when you’ve lost your way.

Think of it this way: though you’re writing it, you are also the agent in this exercise.  You need to convince yourself that you’re worth investing writing time in.  That you have some good ideas jiggling around in there.  That if the chance arose and the tables were turned, you’d certainly take yourself for representation.  Because until YOU believe in you, you can’t get others to believe in you.

If you are moved to publish your sample query letter on your blog, please leave a link to the post in the comment section below so your classmates can find it.  Or simply jump into the comment section to give your thoughts, express any roadblocks you hit during this exercise, or ask questions.

P.S. You will never use this letter to send to an actual agent or editor, but you’ll be able to cannibalize from it in the future so it’s still worth doing even if you have all the confidence in the world.  In a few weeks, we’ll write an actual, usable query letter and hold a critique where people can get feedback on their query letter before they use it.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop.

Whether you are joining from the very beginning or finding this first post in the series at a later date, this is the place to get to know your virtual classmates, find writing partners, and introduce yourself to the rest of the group.  From time to time, I will be reminding people to dive back into the comment section below and find people to connect with over writing.  So introduce yourself even if you’re late to the game.

But first some logistics.

MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings.  You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.”  You don’t need to read them on Sundays — in fact, you probably want to save them until you can concentrate on them.  I’ll usually give you homework at the end.  On the other hand, there will also sometimes be time-sensitive lessons such as a query letter critique, where once the critique is closed, we won’t be giving you an edit on your query letter until the next one.  So… follow along as closely as you need to follow along.  If that makes sense.

MFA programs are usually organized into two umbrella categories — fiction and poetry.  Some programs also hold classes on creative non-fiction and playwriting/screenwriting.  MFA Sunday School will cover the basics of poetry — free form and fixed form.  The basics of short story writing.  How to dissect fiction and then use what you learn to enhance your own work.  How to develop a novel.  How to write creative non-fiction.  Formatting for playwriting/screenwriting.  How to look at your own work with a critical eye.  How to submit to literary magazines.  How to pitch to editors.  How to form a relationship with a writing partner and look at each other’s work with a critical eye.  Critique of query letters.  And any other topics you’d like to know about that are usually covered in an MFA program.  In other words, anything and everything related to writing.

A few years ago, I wrote an eleven-part series on getting a book published. (You need to unfortunately read it from the bottom up since the top post is the eleventh or final post.)  We’ll be delving back into that too, especially because the publishing world keeps changing and as new options open, such as e-books or Amazon singles, we need to keep looking at the process of getting your work out there.  If you liked that series, MFA Sunday School is going to be similar except it will cover a wider range of topics.

I am your main teacher.  I have an aforementioned MFA.  I also studied creative writing as my undergraduate degree, so I have seven straight years of workshops.  I’ve published two books so far — one fiction, one non-fiction.  I have a handful of published poems.  I’ve been the editor in chief of two literary magazines.  I’m a section editor at BlogHer for Blogging & Social Media.  I’ve written the blog Stirrup Queens for almost six years.  I’m going to need to pull in other writers from time to time as well as agents, publishers, literary magazine editors so I won’t be the only person you’ll see here.  Hopefully we’ll have some fun guest speakers.

Why an online weekly writing program?  Why not.  I have the information in my brain; I know it’s expensive to go to university full time — it seems like a win-win.  The focus of an MFA program is not to get you published per se but to get you to be a better writer, a goal that many bloggers share with book writers and poets.  So I see this as a way of mutually supporting each other to become better writers whether your medium is fiction writing, poetry writing, playwriting/screenwriting or blogging.  I like connecting with people who like to write, who want to write better, who want to understanding the process of writing, who like words and want to play with them.

So, last few things before we start getting to know one another.  The comment section will be your space to speak to your classmates (always in a civil tone).  There will be exercises sometimes at the bottom of the post, and I would appreciate it, if you have a blog or online space, if you could post your work on YOUR blog and then post a link to the work in my comment section.  Then people can jump from here to visit your space.  If not, the comment section will become extremely crowded (sestinas are long!).  If you don’t have a blog, don’t worry; you can post your work here in the comment section.  I’m just trying to cut down on the number of people who do so.  The comment section for each lesson is open indefinitely.  If a particular exercise resonated with you, it’s a good idea to bookmark that post and return to it from time to time to see if there are new comments and new pieces of writing to read.

I definitely also recommend getting a writing partner.  You don’t have to do this immediately, but pay attention to other people in the comment section and see if there is someone who sounds like they could be a good fit.

I’m also going to start using the Prompt-ly list for general writing discussion, and it will compliment the MFA Sunday School posts.  It will be a place to ask questions, find writing partners, discuss the topic of the week, etc.  If you’re already on the Prompt-ly list and this appeals to you, no need to do anything.  If you’re not on the Prompt-ly list and want to be able to take the discussion off-blog and to email, sign up via that link.  If you’re on the Prompt-ly list and don’t want to talk about writing… well… then I’m not sure why you’re on the Prompt-ly list since I wrote in the opening post that there will be how-to information in the future.  It will still be a place to throw out blog ideas, interesting articles, and the like.  But this will take it one step further where it will be about all mediums of writing.  I’m not sure how often we’ll need to go to email for discussion, but throwing it out there as a resource that is already in place — an email group of writers.

And… that’s about it.

It’s now time for you to introduce who you are and why you’re here.  First and foremost, tell us about what you write: your blog, any publications, whether you’re more interested in poetry or fiction.  Tell us what you hope to learn as well as what you like to read.  What are your long-range goals?

And then please vote below to let me know which of the following topics appeal to you most (all will be covered, but I’m trying to get a sense of what people want to learn in depth vs. what people want to touch on briefly).  There is an “other” option for you to fill out other things you’d like to learn.  Or feel free to add that in your introduction below if you have a few items.

So welcome to class and let’s get ready to learn.