#Title
ESSAY
Disassociation and an MA in Creative Writing
MEHRUL BARI
I recently received my MA in Creative Writing. I went abroad and did all the things they say you should do. I wrote more than I otherwise would have, and I technically “mastered” something I taught myself. It was a nice little program which saw me live in Paris, where I spent almost all my time in movie theaters, watching films in English (there were times, of course, when I’d find out all too late that the movie was dubbed in French). I didn’t engage too much with classmates and fellow writers, though they were more than friendly. I didn’t converse too much with teachers, though most praised and heavily encouraged my writing. I didn’t even write too much. Most of my assignment submissions were short stories I had written, or was working on, from years ago. And I didn’t read too much. I only bought one book, and that was because the author’s quote on the back spoke of how Mr. Dickson Carr “went to Paris to study: this probably being the only thing in Paris I did not do.” Carr, it would seem, partied a lot, another thing I didn’t do.
See, a writer’s worst enemy is a combination of time and themselves. How much time do you have in a day to sit down and write anything worthwhile? How do you allot time for work, for yourself, and for writing? Worse even, what do you do when writing is your work? I can’t speak for everyone, but “time” is a distant second in my enemy ranking. The biggest problem really is yourself—it is motivation.
What do you do when everyone encourages you to write but yourself?
We can be defeated; we can stop writing; we can say, “Hey you were right” to those uninterested and discouraging people (and some of them will be friends and family); and truthfully, these feelings will always circle back to us. This is every writer. But writers don’t write for these moments, we write it for those lucid moments where things just fall into place. It’s this place in-between that we need a bridge to, where we find ways to reverse-engineer motivation. The ways work differently for different people, but the process, at its core, will be identical: you will have to find something that forces you to write and to think about writing. In my case it was my master’s program, whether I knew it at the time or not.
Now, most degrees in Creative Writing would be MFAs (Masters in Fine Arts), where the whole program is structured around writing and no real coursework beyond that. The program I did at the University of Kent, though, implemented reading as well—reading to improve your writing, reading to better understand writing. These classes and discussions, built around reading, were more informal. There were no real obligations to participate, and no grades were lost in not reading your weekly readings. This, again, will force you to consider writing, even in the case where you’re like me and you’ll study everything one week and nothing the next. You will at the least absorb the discussion, the varying thought processes, by being in that same space.
The other half of the MA—and this is where grades are tallied—is exactly what you’d get from an MFA. The assignments, workshops, workshops, workshops. These were the sessions I’d look forward to, giddy with anticipation the night before. Someone actually reading your work, studying it, telling you what you do well, telling you what you can improve on, all phrased constructively (“I like this!” was a banned phrase). If you’re pursuing writing, workshopping—on some level or another—is what you’ll need. I got great feedback from my teachers, supervisors, and classmates. A lot of it, I still go back to; their criticisms, their praises. You don’t grow at anything if you don’t go beyond yourself. The MA, if nothing else, forced me to try more, to reverse-engineer a habit.
It’s been a few months, and I’m writing again finally, submitting stories again, thinking of things to do again, and the fluffy bit of text I’d written on my application essay just to get accepted (something about “bettering the literary scene of Bangladesh in terms of English writing”) is something I’m actively interested in. For our writers to go abroad, or even to stay here and advance their craft, we can come back and actually do something here. We just need something to force us to write more, and writing more will always be the only way to get better.
Mehrul Bari S Chowdhury is a writer, poet, and artist. He received his MA in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Kent in Paris. He has previously worked for Daily Star Books, and is the editor of Small World City .
The assignments, workshops, workshops, workshops. These were the sessions I’d look forward to, giddy with anticipation the night before. Someone actually reading your work, studying it, telling you what you do well, telling you what you can improve on, all phrased constructively (“I like this!” was a banned phrase).