When my undergraduate students enter my classroom on the first day of a new term, I have them answer a brief questionnaire about their learning goals for the class and how they plan to achieve them. On the last day of the semester, I return their questionnaires and ask them to reflect on how they did. This is an exercise in metacognition, or thinking about how we think, and it's growing in popularity as a pedagogical tool. The idea is that such reflection helps students recognize errors in their thinking and develop more effective practices for learning in the future.
It occurred to me, as I sat down to write this Kernel, that this series of essays I have been writing about my MFA is essentially a form of metacognition on the experience of going to school to become a fiction writer. I hope this exercise may be useful to you, if you are weighing the pros and cons of applying to MFA programs, or if—like my fellow Kernelists Neidy and Natalia—you will be entering your first year of a graduate program in the fall.
(This is Part Three in an ongoing series about getting an MFA in creative writing. Read Parts One and Two. If you have questions, drop them in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them here or in a future installment. I plan to post an update each term until I graduate in Spring 2026.)
When I look back on my intentions for this past semester, my primary goal was to scale back the time and energy I spent on coursework and on preparing for my job as a teaching assistant so that I could scale up the time I could spend on my writing. I didn’t write as much as I thought I would during the first semester of my MFA program—at least not on my primary project: my novel—and I didn’t want another semester to pass without making serious inroads on that goal.
Like most people embarking on an MFA in creative writing, I felt that drafting my novel was the most important use of my time. My expectation was always that I would spend the first two hours of each weekday writing. This is the golden rule of every book of writing advice I’ve ever read, and in theory, my schedule should have allowed for this. But in practice, I have only ever managed to achieve this ideal schedule during school breaks and for the first two weeks of each term before something—some family crisis or work travel or course reading or all three—blew up these carefully laid plans.
Well, I’m sad to report that I did not finish drafting my novel this semester. In fact, I haven’t even looked at it since I returned from AWP in February and had to hit the ground running in my classes. But oddly enough, I’m not at all sad about not working on my novel, and it’s because of what I did with my semester instead.
To begin with, I did succeed at freeing up a few hour a week by leaning away from my teaching responsibilities. Last semester I was a first-time teacher and spent an incalculable number of hours preparing to teach my discussion sections and taking on additional opportunities to improve as a teacher. I attended regular pedagogical workshops offered by my university. I scheduled several faculty observations of my teaching. I taught a one-hour guest lecture (which I spent two weeks preparing for!). And I spent a lot of time giving my students carefully calibrated feedback on their written work. Well, this semester, I made the calculated decision early that I would not do any of those “extras.” I still wound up spending the equivalent of a full day each week reading the course materials, attending two lectures, and preparing my three discussion sections, but one day out of five spent on teaching ain’t bad, and that’s pretty close to the “ten hours per week” stipulated in my contract. I have just gotten back my teaching evaluations from this semester, and I am happy to report that they were just as good as they were last semester, maybe even a little better.
However, rather than use the time I freed up for my novel, I sank it into my coursework. I signed up for a literature seminar taught by the most notoriously demanding professor in the English department, and at the eleventh hour I secured a coveted spot in a creative nonfiction workshop. This was in addition to my fiction workshop and the undergraduate sections I teach. And while a four-class course load is standard for my MFA program, this particular combination raised eyebrows whenever I mentioned it to my classmates. Most students—at least the second- or third-years in my program—arrange to have a lighter course load by taking at least one class of “directed reading” or “thesis hours” or enrolling in at least one less-demanding course. I was a bit like the person who goes to an all-you-can-eat buffet, fills up on the richest foods, and leaves with a stomach ache. But I was suffering from a bit of FOMO. Neither of these courses would be taught again while I am in the program. It was now or never.
Of course, everything has its trade-offs. Because I was constantly scrambling to keep up with the extreme reading list in my literature class (at least one long novel and 10–12 critical essays per week) and the extra critiques in my nonfiction workshop, I had no time to write my novel. By contrast, my officemate began the semester with the exact same schedule I did but dropped both the literature seminar and the nonfiction workshop after the first week. Well, folks, she managed to write an average of 2,000–5,000 words per day during the semester. She is a rockstar! But the funny thing is, I came out of the term with projects I am just as proud of.
In my creative nonfiction workshop, I drafted two long personal essays of about 9,000 words each. I had been meaning to write these specific essays for years, but I could never find the right entry points or else I found the subject matter was so emotionally fraught that I would always give up. However, the lessons I learned from my professor about the structure of nonfiction essays helped me find the right form for my stories, and the strict deadlines forced me to push through my discomfort and put words on the page. Both essays were well-received in my workshop, and one of them I am preparing to put out on submission later this summer, at my professor’s encouragement.
In my literature class—a class on eco-criticism and the Global South titled “Southern Ecologies”—the reading was so challenging and the ideas so complex that I often felt like I was drinking from a fire hose. But it was all so relevant to my own fiction projects that I never minded the twenty-plus hours I devoted to the course each week. Everything I read gave me new ideas I needed to consider in my writing, which often focuses on the natural world and is frequently set in the U.S. South. In fact, I now realize that if I had finished my novel without taking into consideration the ideas I learned in this class—ideas about eco-criticism and post-colonialism—it would have suffered from some embarrassing blindspots. Additionally, this course had a “creative option,” so for my final seminar paper I was able to submit a 25-page short story, and the story I submitted was so exciting for me, I think I might try to expand it into a novella one day.
Remarkably, even though these choices put a real time crunch on my creative output, they created some positive, residual effects on my fiction. Because I didn’t have the time to draft two long short stories for my fiction workshop as I normally would, I was forced to write “short.” For my first critique, I submitted one 3,000-word story and two 1,000-word pieces of flash. Writing short really stretched me. Typically, my short stories run about 25-pages long and, before this semester, I had never managed to write a story that was less than 6,000 words. But writing short pieces forced me to narrow the timeline of my stories, and conversely this exploded the lyricism of my writing. Now, I have several very short pieces I can submit to a much wider variety of literary magazines.
The time crunch also forced me to pull out of mothballs an old short story—one I liked but thought was hopelessly “broken”—and bring it to my classmates for my second critique, to see if it could be salvaged. Much to my surprise, they thought there was a lot of good material in the story and suggested I scrap the elaborate framing device to help that good material shine through—something I had never considered. As Neidy has said before, a writing workshop is best suited to helping a writer figure out how to tear apart and rebuild a story. It’s less good at giving you tacit approval for a story you are already well satisfied with.
So what do I have to show for my semester? Two essays, three short stories, and two pieces of flash totalling 121 pages of manuscript, or about the equivalent of a master’s thesis. So even though I didn’t draft the novel I had anticipated, I’m proud of what I did produce.
Looking ahead I will always aim to spend the first two hours of each workday writing toward my novel, but if my writing takes me elsewhere as it did this semester, I’m not going to beat myself up. I continue to hope that my teaching responsibilities will lift as I become a more experienced teacher, and I’m planning a much lighter course load next fall—I may even drop a class.
In the meantime, I’m going to spend the first week of my summer break taking a “word fast,” an intentional abstention from reading and writing, in an attempt to rest my severely overtaxed brain. Then I’m going to spend a week at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where I hope to get gassed up to focus the rest of my summer on redrafting my novel. (Look for future Kernels about both of these later this summer.) That is, unless that novella idea just won’t leave me alone…
My kernel of advice: Be flexible with your writing goals. Sometimes less writing time can force you to write more creatively.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Sarah wound down from a busy semester by reading two collections of short stories from two of her favorite authors. “Yport,” the final story in Lauren Groff’s collection Florida, was a masterful example of how to thread several ideas through one very long short story. And pretty much every story in Tessa Hadley’s collection Bad Dreams and Other Stories was a reminder of how much a story can do when the author attempts to write about only a very narrow slice of experience.
Natalia is barely meeting her reading goals and not meeting her writing goals. But she is trying to forgive herself about the impromptu naps she takes in the late afternoons and get back on the writing wagon. In the meantime she is finding plenty of inspiration from the city as the sun stays out more.
This week Neidy read Luster by Raven Leilani. She was excited to read a book by a local-to-her author, as Leilani grew up near where Neidy currently lives. She also started listening to Those Who Wait by Haley Cass. Neidy highly recommends reading/listening to books in different genres in close succession (Luster is literary fiction while Those Who Wait is romance) because it illustrates the universal truths of good writing.
Shelby devoured All Fours by Miranda July. It’s weird and compelling and asks big life questions. Afterwards, she started a short story collection by a notable author, but the stories felt commonplace to her, so she moved on to the next book in her TBR pile: First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger. She’s halfway through the essay collection and can’t recommend it enough! Dancyger examines female friendships, weaving together her personal stories with cultural touch points. Her friendships are filled with grief, love, intensity, yearning, and a passionate commingling that’s so unique to those formative teenage years.