What Nobody Tells You About Life After the MFA

I won’t bury the lede: What nobody tells you about life after the writing MFA is that cozying up to the blank page and writing the first word doesn’t get easier.

This is not what writing is like after you graduate, FYI // Photo by Fred Moon on Unsplash

It doesn’t change at all, as a matter of fact, except it may become a little tiny bit harder.

You may have spent the last two or three years rigorously engaging with the work of brilliant peers, fighting about why Housekeeping is so good, delighting in the singular pleasure of discovering a writer nobody’s heard of and buying every novel of theirs at the used bookshop, and drinking box wine at an afterparty where you try to tell Lorrie Moore a funny joke she’s never heard before (good luck). You may have written more than you ever had in your life. You may have produced a volume of work that surprised you — after all, your thesis is already mouldering in the basement of a brutalist library on campus, and there lies the proof. You may have even, if you were exceptionally lucky, hardworking, and stubborn, produced a first draft of a novel or started to publish your stories in national magazines.

And yet, degree in hand, when you sit down to write, you find that you are met with … silence. Except this time, the silence also carries an echo, because there is no workshop waiting to read your efforts. The rooms where you met with your peers are now filled with…