"We are currently accepting manuscripts for review."
By Elise Blackwell
The Internet is popping with outrage over James Frey’s new publishing entity Full Fathom Five, a stable of writers assembled to produce mostly young-adult novels with film potential. The fact that his recruiting has targeted students in top New York M.F.A. programs has caused some observers to question why young talents would sign the ridiculously exploitative, nonnegotiable contracts that Frey demands. Many writers are dismayed but unsurprised. Some observers blame the M.F.A. programs involved, offering good practical advice but perhaps missing the point.
Shortly before I entered the M.F.A. program at the University of California at Irvine, 23-year-old student Michael Chabon sold his first novel for a six-figure advance. One of our professors there had sent the manuscript to his agent, launching an enviable career that would have happened anyway. The event turned heads, spiked applications, and raised expectations. Then came the swooping: agents contacting students, editors asking to sit in on workshops, and the guy from Lucasfilm. This last creature materialized at a party populated by inebriated Earnest Young Writers to express his outfit’s interest in our concepts for straight-to-film treatments. Mentions were made of the amenities at Lucas ranch. The professor who’d sent Mysteries of Pittsburgh to his agent warned us to be careful. In fact, he looked disgusted.
I remember feeling tempted, but I can’t remember whether anyone pitched to Lucasfilm or sent a manuscript to the brassy West Coast agent also hinting at fame and fortune. At any rate, nothing came of it. It’s worth noting that the poets sat this business out. Then we all toasted Michael and got back to work. Many of us went on to publish—a few famously—the old fashioned way.
Later the program would go so far as to refuse workshop access to respected editors. The idea was not to grow hothouse flowers but to protect writers for two or three short years so that they could write a book without distraction. At the end of that time, the writer was sent, manuscript in hand, to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers to schmooze with agents, editors, and published writers. (Snobby if you say so, but Irvine’s publishing record is hard to fault.)
Some of my students want quicker assurances, or at least to plan ahead, and I’m sympathetic. Taking it too far was one incoming fiction writer who arrived with a query letter seeking representation for a novel he planned to write. (He seemed a little hostile when I suggested that he start the book and then revisit the query.) But most of my students have fair expectations. They want to know how to secure a legitimate agent, the relative benefits of large and small publishers, whether entering contests is a good idea, which conferences are worthwhile and which ripoffs.
Most programs offer that instruction, with varying levels of formality. I’ll argue that a one-on-one session with a trusted professor who knows a student’s work and ambitions is more useful than a semester-long course on contract law. Here we discuss publishing in the workshop and over coffee; we bring in visiting writers who answer professional questions; we help students write query letters. We’re also adding the semi-formal approach: a series of workshops on publishing, academic and nonacademic careers, and commercial writing. In addition, we’re housed in an English department that trains students to make public presentations, conducts mock interviews, and much more. Students want this and I’m game, yet I worry that stressing the utilitarian too soon may be counterproductive. You have to write a great book to sell a great book, and it’s hard to write a great book when you’re already fretting over how it will be marketed.
Some suggest that Frey’s “victims” were made vulnerable by MFA programs that didn’t educate them about publishing, but it requires little training to identify Frey’s contracts as absurd. (Does anyone really think $250 is fair market value for a commercially viable novel or that letting someone else use your name as they please is smart?) The writers who signed those contracts weren’t acting out of ignorance but from some combination of desperation, hope, and a sense of exceptionalism that writers need to get out of bed. (“I know James Joyce died in poverty, Kafka worked a desk job, and Dan Brown can’t coax a sentence out of a bag, but I can be brilliant and rich.”) Some of them were just taking a flyer.
If you can't trust James Frey, who can you tr-- ... Oh never mind.
If any M.F.A. program is to blame—and there’s a more obvious villain—it’s not because it failed to educate in business law but because it landed starry-eyed students in debt. For many exiting Irvine, their degree was worth exactly nothing in monetary terms, which means they got what they paid for. (Irvine fully funds all M.F.A. students.) The M.F.A. is an art degree that makes no promises. The poets at Irvine understood this. Their expectations for six-figure publishing contracts were nonexistent; they sought time to write, pressure to read well, good company in which to do both, and a shot at respectable publication and a teaching job.
M.F.A. programs are about the creation and study of literature, and it’s worth reminding people that you don’t need any degree to be a writer. A young writer whose central goal is commercial success should skip graduate school. (You don’t apprentice at an opera company and expect to be introduced to Nashville music producers, which I say with no disrespect to either milieu.) Programs should prepare their students to publish wisely and the good ones do. Yet the best thing an M.F.A. program can do for its students is to help them write their first book without sinking into debt. Many of the best programs offer a free ride or close to it. Frey has targeted programs in which most students are paying their own way, garnering no teaching experience, and living in one of the world’s most expensive cities. (For example, this year’s M.F.A. tuition at Columbia is $48,519, and their Web site lists substantial additional fees for “students who opt for thesis advisement.”) That he has done so is no coincidence, though to be fair he might have found at least a few takers most anywhere.
Frey-like maneuvers date back beyond George Gissing’s satire of them in New Grub Street, which was published in 1891, long before the first M.F.A. program lifted its head. Generations of unsavory folks (often themselves writers or failed writers) have recognized there’s a buck to be made off the aspirations of others. Read the terms of Frey’s contract together with some of the ads in the back of writing magazines (or just search the phrase “book doctor”), and you may conclude that a young writer’s willingness to join Full Fathom Five isn’t about professional under-education but something else.
Elise Blackwell directs the M.F.A. program at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of four novels, including Grub, which is a retelling of New Grub Street and has been called a cautionary tale for young writers facing the sometimes bad practices of the writing industry.
James Frey photo at New York magazine’s Web site
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11 Responses to A Fray Over Frey’s Play to Prey on M.F.A.’s
gerryhoward - November 17, 2010 at 12:11 pm
I have been a book editor for 33 years, and quite a few of my best writers both earned MFA’s themselves and teach or taught in such progams. Examples: Kate Christensen, James Welch, Susan Kenney, Donald Ray Pollock, Walter Mosley, David Foster Wallace. Some haven’t and don’t: Don DeLillo, Rafi Zabor, Chuck Palahniuk, Walter Kirn. Genuine talent finds its own way. Putting aside the complicated issue of literary aesthetics — does the workshop system produce a standardized and domesticated product? Or not? — one of my real worries about the MFA industry is Malthusian: the population growth of such degree-holders has outstripped the publishing resources available for their care and feeding. And by a really alarming degree.
This is another issue too large to be addressed with even minimal adequacy in a comments post, but one thing that seems absolutely esential for responsible MFA administrators to do is to make the practicalities of a literary career a fixed part of the curriculum. And that should not be hard to do. Most MFA teachers have agents and editors in their lives, so persuade those people to come to the program for a day or two and answer students’s questions and maybe give a lecture. We’re pretty generous people, believe it or not, and if a modest honorarium and/or travel expenses were part of the deal, that would be nice. Not to arm MFA with the knowledge necessary for them to recognize the charlatans and predators that inhabit the seamier neighborhoods of the literary universe feels like educational malpractice to me.
dank48 - November 17, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Smart of the poets to sit that one out. Don Marquis put it perfectly: “Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
Fiction’s a little less iffy, but not really by much. What gets me is that so many would-be writers don’t seem very interested in reading. I don’t understand poets who don’t read poetry, novelists who don’t read novels, or short-story writers period.
The odds of writing a bestseller are probably not much different from the odds of a college baseball player making it into the major leagues.
spotsalots - November 17, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Interesting. No comment on the appalling bad-contract stable, but… Years ago I figured MFA programs had little to offer me, so despite parental urgings to apply to them, I just worked a variety of jobs and diligently mailed my stories. The description of Irvine’s program actually sounds appealing, and gee, if I’d gone there, I might even have been in class with Michael Chabon, whose work I enjoy. (Then again, I’d have been in a part of the country I was glad to leave at 18…)
Oh well. I went my own way and have my growing list of fiction publications plus a PhD in a different field. It’s worked out. I hope younger writers find interesting and not-too-exploitive paths as well.
domynoe - November 17, 2010 at 5:42 pm
but to protect writers for two or three short years so that they could write a book without distraction. At the end of that time, the writer was sent, manuscript in hand, to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers to schmooze with agents, editors, and published writers.
So the program tries to protect them while in the program, but then just sends them out to the wolves? EVERY college program, from the Associates to the Ph.D should prepare the student for their field, ALL ASPECTS of their field. To not do so is to cheat the student. Period.
judithbaumel - November 17, 2010 at 7:45 pm
The good news about the Frey fray is that we are actually having serious and complex discussions in public about what an MFA program can and can not be. (We’ve been talking about them in faculty meetings and conferences for decades.) This smart and elegant essay is a welcome contribution to an important conversation.
What’s the take-away here? it is “M.F.A. programs are about the creation and study of literature, and it’s worth reminding people that you don’t need any degree to be a writer.”
Gerryhoward offers a wise e perspective. It’s true: “the practicalities of a literary career [should be] a fixed part of the curriculum.” Blackwell describes one way, through one-on-one mentoring from a student-focused faculty. At my program, Adelphi University, we have a Practicum course which does exactly what Gerryhoward suggests.
As a member of the Board of Directors of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, I have seen many other options as well. Any thoughtful pedagogy recognizes that one size does not fit all;there are as many ways of addressing student needs as there are students. Some students are ambitious, some tentative, some foolish, some dedicated, some just finding their way, and some are all of the above. Hence Blackwell’s important conclusion: “a young writer’s willingness to join Full Fathom Five isn’t about professional under-education but something else.”
wendyj - November 17, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Does the Shoe Fit?
Postgraduate Writing Masters Programs promise to deliver opportunities for students to develop their writing knowledge. Do these programs deliver to student expectations? Are they a success or failure? Do academic programs offer a place to teach writing?
Please read Does the Shoe Fit?
http://www.lilydale.swinburne.edu.au/journal/vol4_essays.htm
We invite other MA writing students to share their experiences of academic writing courses for a global discourse here:
http://fittingtheshoe.blogspot.com/2010/09/does-shoe-fit.html
francishamit - November 22, 2010 at 2:42 pm
I’m a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. I’m also a business person. That, along with Drama, were my original undergraduate majors. So, I’m very far outside the mainstream when it comes to these issues. I actually have taken a year of Business Law and a couple of years of Accounting courses. That is a very useful thing to have in my intellectual arsenal because it has made it possible for me to make a living while continuing to pursue a writing career. And that was true even when I was a student. I had a professional photography business and then became (I believe) the only member of the Workshop to have also been a member of the Iowa City Board of Realtors.
And there were always people from publishing scouting. Nothing new about that. It’s just that most of us didn’t have anything worth publishing. Not then. It’s a slow process. One spends years writing a work that can be consumed in a few hours or days.
Mister Frey is no less odious than the rest of the New York publishing establishment. You don’t have to actually write to be an “author”. Just to have a good idea and a franchise. Frey is simply organizing a creative enterprise where he controls all possible outcomes, much like the Film Industry does with a “blockbuster” film. If he were to offer $25,000 for these works, he would be praised to the skies for giving young talent a leg up. At that rate one can actually make a living. His offer exploits the desire of aspiring authors to simply be acknowledged as such. A week’s instruction on Managerial Economics or Cost Accounting would convince them otherwise and that this is a bad deal. So we can fault the MFA programs for ignoring the need for a basic non-credit course on how one can actually make a living at one’s craft and leaving them prey to wolves like Frey, but these students are in graduate school, have research skills and are presumed to be adults. At their age, they should have figured it out. They should have, at the very least, sought advice before signing on to something like the Frey program. (The year of Contact Law doesn’t make you a lawyer. It just tells you when you need one.)
The MFA degree and appropriate publication, when I was in school, was supposed to help get you a teaching job so you would have further time to work on your masterpiece. Well even in the 1970s, when there were only 15 such programs rather than more than a hundred, one could look around a class room and see that there were going to be many more applicants than jobs and that the jobs went to people who had the gloss of a critical reputation rather than any kind of degree. (None of my instructors at Iowa had a MFA and the only one who’d been in the program never got his and was hired back on the basis of his critical reputation. He was a disaster.) So, this is where those Accounting courses came in handy; one could apply for such a job but figure on doing something else in the meantime. And that was not the end of the world. If anything, it could be a source of material. And now, as then, a Ph.D is really preferred to get a college teaching job at any level.
Not that MFA graduates could ever look to New York for publication, but the situation now is especially bad. I read a lot of popular novels and can see that, while a MFA degree is a certification of raw talent it is no guarantee that its holder will produce readable or interesting or (I speak heresy here) entertaining prose. Those publishers are not interested in the future of American literature, which is what the MFA programs pretend to produce. They are looking for products which can be sold quickly to as many people as possible. The system, from acquisition to placement on a store shelf, tends to work against the serious writer with something to say. The emphasis is on replicating previous success; on chasing the market. And if you have any business experience, you recognize this as a recipe for failure for the beginning writer because Maxwell Perkins and his kind are long dead and the current publishing establishment can’t even be bothered to copy-edit a book properly. No one will nurture your career but you.
So what is to be done? I suggest that MFA writing programs start giving writers what other such programs provide in the other arts: experience. You can’t get an MFA in Painting without actually painting something or one in Drama or Music without having produced a performance. A MFA in writing should require the production of a published book, even if that book is self-published. And most will be because no one in New York is interested in buying it. Actually struggling with the process of producing a physical product, that meets a technical standard of excellence as well as an artistic one, will change the game. Most will not be “bestsellers” but the point of a career is not the first book, but all the ones a writer will produce in a lifetime. The game has changed and New York publishers are losing it anyway.
francishamit - November 22, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Let me add something about the Young Adult market. Most novels in the genre seem to be written by women in the 50s. I’ve met a few of them and they grind them out to a formula demanded by their publishers in the same way that mysteries and romances are written.
At one of my book signings in 2008 I was approached by a sixteen year old girl who wanted to know how to break into the Young Adult market because none of the novels she read in that genre addressed the lives of people her age. She was obviously bright, so I gave her the standard advice about what to study in college and then added that she should really ignore old farts like me because we are part of the problem and that she should just write what she wanted and publish it herself. I cited Christopher Paloini’s breakthrough with his first novel at age 15. Of course he had tremendous family support. Since her father was with her and she had come specifically to get my advice I had hopes that she too would enjoy this kind of support.
rosefiend - November 23, 2010 at 4:46 pm
I am not sure what YA books you have been reading lately but you’re a little off base as far as your comment goes! Read Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, Pretty Monsters by Kelley Link, Feed by M.T. Anderson (and don’t forget the Octavian Nothing books). Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and of course The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Check out some of the Printz award winners. Then get back to me about that formula that YA publishers demand.
Good answer to the 16-year-old, though. Wish she had a better library to browse through so she could find these books.
msumenglish - November 24, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Some students in every MFA program in the U.S. expect to be published authors. There are hundreds of such programs – full residency, low-residency, online, and hybrids. Every student who graduates has written a “publishable book-length thesis.” In some cases, that’s an accurate description, but often a thesis that earns an M.F.A. isn’t publishable. Some M.F.A. graduates find full-time teaching or publishing jobs. Many don’t. For two years, though, students are part of a literary community that takes them seriously; the ones who persist past graduation with writing become, whether full-fledged or tangentially, a part of our literary culture, which is diverse and no longer centered on either coast. In America today, it’s not only M.F.A. students who go into grievous debt to get an education. Those M.F.A. students who choose to do so, however, either because they foolishly decide they need such a degree from a “prestigious” place – all M.F.A. degrees are equally persuasive to a prospective agent or publisher, since it’s the quality of the manuscript that matters – or because they want to spend more time writing and less time at menial labor, get what they pay for: time for their passion and vocation and lifelong friends. It’s a decision made for the sake of the spirit; very few of them are actually geniuses of the spirit, and even the ones who have such genius might labor on great work without sufficient recognition (or any recognition), but it’s an honorable choice to make.
As for Frey, every profession has scam artists. In Frey’s case, students who sign up with him will now do so with eyes open. Given the publicity accruing to his exploitation, I think the system is working the way it should: he’s been called to account for his unethical practices. His idea, apparently based on what some visual artists have done, isn’t a bad idea if it’s cooperative and not exploitative. Why shouldn’t young writers with time on their side crank out crappy but commercial novels in hopes of a payoff? Only thing is, why do it for Frey? If you’re going to write crappy novels that have more to do with commercial three-act screenplays than with literature, do it for yourself without Frey’s assistance. There’re tons of agents looking for popular fiction to sell.
francishamit - November 26, 2010 at 3:22 am
I will admit total ignorance of YA fiction. It’s not something I’ve ever aspired to write and I’m sure that some of it is very well done, but you just can’t read everything. Just now I’m researching my next Civil War novel and the reading for that goes very deep because there are a lot of things that went on before the war that no one covers in Historical Fiction.
I also agree that the MFA degree no longer has any utility and that there are far too many programs (105 in the USA alone) with too many students. That said, I do believe that giving these students a reality check about their prospects of getting a contract with a New York or agent would be a kindness. And the cold fact is that you do not need a degree of any kind to be a successful writer. Talent, yes? Hard work, yes. A certain mental toughness needed to complete a work, yes. A degree, per se? No. But like most graduates of such programs, I would do it again because I got to study with people who had been there and done that. Their ability to communicate how they did it varied widely. Vance Bourjaily was simply the best teacher of writing of that era. Raymond Carver was drunk and so was Nelson Algren. The only service either one performed at Iowa was to demolish the myth that a great writer must also be a drinking man.
But the only way to become a writer is to write. The first million words are the hardest.