Shenny Does Gradschool: Writing Samples
Dear Friends:
I’ve lived all but 8 years of my life in schools. Running the math on that, I’m unsure how I feel: Was I just Good At School as a kid and failed to imagine anything else for myself? If, as many believe, school ≠ ‘the real world’, have I fled the real for something fake? Does the pursuit of happiness we’re all entitled to involve following your talents, as identified by others, or your dreams, as felt inside?
Happily for my theme this month, these same questions run through the head of anyone applying to gradschool.
I’ve got lots of thoughts (shocker) about gradschoool, having been a student there for 7 years, a professor now for 14, and an MFA program director for the last 5. Recently, the student who runs social media for our program (applications now open!) asked me what I found most special about the MFA experience, and I replied that ‘An MFA is a beautifully, importantly, wildly nonsensical thing to decide on.’
I believe this more than I believe in myself. But I also know how gradschool is an ugly yet resoundingly sensical thing for people on certain career paths. This is the boring truth about gradschool: it will both change your life and fail to change your life.
Go to gradschool if you want to pay, with time or money (see below), to be with other people who also want to learn something not many end up learning. Or go to gradschool because you need to jump salary scales at work, or because someone else will foot the bill.
Whatever your reasons, for the month of November, Shenny is going to demystify the application process. If you have questions or suggestions, sound off in the comments.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Not Paying for Gradschool
The average amount of debt a U.S. undergraduate owes is $28,400 [PDF]. And that shit sticks around: of the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, 23% of it is owed by people 50 or older. No room here to get into the damage wrought by 40+ years of willed public divestment in higher ed, but if you’re going to a grad program that doesn’t spell out its career pathways, or all but guarantee finding you employment with your new degree, you should not pay money for it. There are enough programs around the country that will employ you, the grad student, to teach low-level classes the tenured faculty refuse to teach. You will be paid a pittance for this, but you will get your tuition remitted. This is how I got through 7 years of gradschool.1 It took me two years of applying to find a fully funded program that accepted me, so take the time to find the one for you.
2. Paying for Gradschool
As much as I like to say I didn’t pay for my MA and PhD degrees, of course I paid. I paid in the time I spent prepping for two different classes each semester, teaching writing while still also a student of writing, grading the papers of 30-40 undergraduates who didn’t want to be in another composition class. And I paid in my imagination on what career paths lay before me: more than anything else, what I was taught in gradschool was how to be a college professor. And this is one way that the horror cycle of career adjunct–teaching happens: if the goal of gradschool becomes the tenure-track job, most grad students are going to feel like they lost some race. I’ve written in more detail about why you should pay for your MFA degree, so go read that post if you’re still skeptical, but it boils down to this: ‘Free’ MFA programs more often than not lock you in academia,2 and they don’t necessarily have better teachers who know how to serve students.
On the Writing Sample
This Main Matter is the first in a series of three posts on applying to gradschools, specifically MFA in Writing programs, which I’ve taught in for 13 years and have directed one for 5. Find the next two posts here:
What It Is
Simply put, the writing sample is a collection of your original creative writing. Sometimes there’s published stuff in there, but rarely. Its ostensible purpose is to display your promise and talent (if you believe in talent). Its real purpose is to separate you, favorably, from the mass of applicants.
Why It Matters
Here’s Brown on its MFA application page: ‘Admission is highly selective, and is based primarily on the quality of the applicant’s literary writing. Your writing sample, therefore, is the most important part of your application.’
Michigan re the writing sample: ‘This is the most important part of your application. Your creative work.’
Houston gets all-business about it: ‘Primary emphasis will be placed on the creative manuscript in all applications.’
My own program calls it ‘the most heavily weighted component of the application’.3
But depending on the program and its popularity (thus selectivity), the writing sample can feel like a catch-22: You want to go to gradschool to learn how to write, but to get in the door, you need to show you already know how to write.
How to Put Together a Good One
Let’s return to Brown’s app specs for sec: ‘In putting your sample together, you should emphasize quality rather than length.’ I was about to write I can’t stress this enough, but actually I can:
In putting your sample together, you should emphasize quality rather than length.
Programs will give you a page limit, and those numbers will fuck you up. What do they want? It’s a familiar anxiety, not unlike when people ask authors whether or not they write by longhand. (It’s also an anxiety common to school more broadly, about which more at the end.) You want to prove you’re good and worthy, but don’t do this quantitatively.
For prose, Brown says 30–40 pages. Alabama wants 20–30. We ask for fewer than 20. The Michener Center wants 9,000 words or less. These numbers are all different for poetry, and from all my years of reading applications I can tell you that 90 percent of applicants, thinking quantitatively, turn in the exact top-limit of pages. (Never on your life go over the limit, not even by a page.)
The purpose of the limit is to (a) give you enough space to show what you can do while (b) managing the overall reading of applications for those who read applications.4 So if you’re applying to a number of schools that all have different ranges, you’ll need, in prose, 2 or 3 good pieces (‘good’ is defined next) that you can combine to land somewhere in any school’s given range. Don’t give us or Brown 28 pages, but give Alabama 28.
And don’t give anybody a single 28-page story or essay. For an explanation of why, let me talk about how I’ve read writing samples at two different MFA programs. But first, because I don’t know where else to put this, if you’re a prose applicant at a school that accepts nonfiction (which most ‘top programs’ still don’t!), it’s a good idea to indicate the genre of your sample on the first page, just to avoid confusion when a lot of fiction and nonfiction read like one another.
What We’re ‘Looking For’
First, a caveat: I am one person who has never read or decided on an application alone. Other people reading applications have their own ways of doing so. Do not take anything here, or in this month’s series of posts, as universally true. (I’m also writing here as a person with opinions, not as a program director with policies/procedures.)
Now: for three years, I read applications at the University of Alabama, which—with four years of tuition remission and a stipend to teach undergraduates—was highly competitive, meaning we’d have hundreds of applications for sometimes 12 or fewer spots.5
Those numbers made it imperative to cull, weed out, dwindle the stack (digitally) piled in front of us, with a tight deadline looming. This meant a lot of keeping one eye open for the first reason to say no to the sample.
Alabama was a program with a certain flavor: formalist and experimental. So traditional fantasy and sci-fi, traditional anything, was a no. A story that opened with a character waking up in bed? No. An essay where the narrator was a blameless victim of others’ unfair treatment? No. Sentences that read like sentences we’d read a million times before? No.
Yes, faculty reading applications all have their pet loves and peeves that they bring to the decision. That’s both a bad thing and a good thing: faculty at top programs may dislike your sample, and may reject it, and as painful as that is, you’ve spared yourself years of having to learn from someone who doesn’t respect what you do.
At the program I now direct and teach in, we don’t have tuition remission, so we’re not half as competitive as Alabama, and reading applications is less about saying no than figuring out what kind of writer we’re looking at. If this draft were submitted to a workshop, would we be able to have an instructive discussion about it? Or is this writer early in their development, needing more time before entering a grad program?
You can’t answer this questions with or in your writing sample. What you can do, regardless of how competitive the program, is amass your best polished pieces. Submit the stuff you love, the stuff that excites or moves you, or the stuff that you think is funny.
Send them the work that shows who you are, not who you wish you could be.
And ideally work that resembles the stuff you plan to write while you’re in the program. Sometimes our applicants in nonfiction, say, submit term papers they love, or journalism from their school newspaper, but they’re coming to gradschool to write a memoir. Write some of the memoir first, get a chapter or two into shape, and then apply to gradschool with that sample.
Finally, I really like to see two pieces, because I like to see that an applicant has ideas plural, or topics and interests plural, or a range of styles and voices. Note that ‘or’ there. I don’t need to see a range of styles if you have one that works for you. But a range of anything helps me see that we’ve got a student of writing on our hands, someone at work exploring what this artform can do for them.
Final Thoughts
Many Shenny readers, if they’ve scrolled this far down, may have no intention of applying to gradschool, or they did it years ago. But writing about the sample, I’m realizing how this doesn’t stop, this submitting work blindly to people. We do it for residencies and fellowships. We do it to agents. And I always do it with the hope that I can game the system: if I think hard enough about What They Want, I can write it and guarantee my success.
That’s the Being Good At School anxiety I talked about earlier. When you’re good at school, you get grumpy when the instructions aren’t crystal clear, because you’re good at following instructions perfectly enough to get the ‘A’ you need.
Here’s another way it works: When I give students 5 minutes of in-class writing to describe, say, the room we’re in, they begin typing and don’t stop until I say time’s up. The institution of gradschool will give you a lot of institutional limits, structures, strictures, etc., and to grow as an artist you’ll need to figure out how (and when) to fight against them.
The writing sample is where you start. If you polish your work to the imagined expectations of shadowy MFA faculty, this will start your education of conforming to their tastes and interests. Instead, look deeper within, at the writer you are right now. The many fish in the sea metaphor is apt here. Cast a wide net.6 Take your time to attract the program that wants you for you.
Any questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll be sure to reply.
This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this leathern phone:
It’s worth noting I did this in Lincoln, Neb., where the highest my rent ever got was $680 (for a gorgeous and huge 2-bedroom, 1.5-bath townhome with off-street parking).
Whether it be in a town where 100% of the culture comes from the college in it, or in a dead-end career path you can’t figure out how to escape.
Which on closer inspection maybe we ought to reword; gradschool applicants don’t need any reminders about weights on their shoulders.
At Iowa, applications are read by their grad students, which is not unlike letting the other sick folks in the waiting room decide on your medical care.
The number varied by the year, and I might be misremembering whether this was 12 overall or 12 in prose alone.
If you can afford to. Syracuse’s app fee is now $75. Arizona’s is $90!