Welcome to MFA Lore!
This is the very first post in the MFA Core section of Aimee Liu’s newsletter, where I share my legacy as a creative writing professor. The bulk of these posts are drawn from my correspondence with MFA students and teachers over 15 years, as I realized they contain nuggets of insight that will apply to anyone writing creative nonfiction or fiction.
Each post will focus on a particular writing challenge. Today’s challenge is Story Development. The student on the receiving end of this letter was just starting her MFA journey and had submitted several fledgling stories in various stages of development. I decided that my comments on certain key aspects of the most promising piece would be most useful to you.
I would love to hear from you if you find this post helpful or if it raises questions that you’d like me to address in future posts. I’ll also keep expanding this community by interviewing some of my former students, faculty, and fellow writers, editors, and agents I’ve worked with over the years.
Here, then, is your first excerpt from The MFA Archives— sections from an actual MFA letter sent to one of my first-semester students.
Promise
We have pay dirt. The narrator is the teenage daughter of a KKK accountant. Brilliant! And her voice, her ATTITUDE are vividly clear and ring true from the first lines. Her voice alone tells us she has a stake in what happens. Bravo! And a clear unexpected and tension-packed situation: picking up trash to prove the KKK’s bona fides as a service org.
There are so many ways to go with this piece. It could be a solo story. It could be a chapter in a young adult book all told in this voice. It could represent one voice in a book told by several voices – including her father’s or uncle’s – that reaches an older audience. Depends on how deeply you understand this character and her family, what your ultimate objective is in writing her story. I’m reading The Bee Season right now – completely different world, but beautifully detailed – a family told from the POV of each eccentric individual, but via an omniscient narrator whose voice holds everyone together.
As you develop your story, control the SEQUENCE of scenes and reflections. Please don’t get ahead of the story, unless there’s a strong reason to do so. Please build your scenes carefully, from beginning to end. Don’t loop backward just to tell us what we already know. We know that Dad wants to turn the Klan into the Elks because nobody thinks of the KKK as a kindly service org. You don’t need to say essentially the same thing on p. 2 – unless you can deepen it.
