Hi, this is me, taking a moment out of my busy day packing to comment on the latest controversy in the young adult community.

Grady Hendrix and Katie Crouch have done something unique even in the world of blogging in this slate.com article, which is to disparage the worlds of commercial and literary writing in one breath. I doubt this was their intention, but take a look at this paragraph:

Katie, having come out of an M.F.A. background where the rule was that good writing requires rumination, pain, and the slow loss of your best years, fought the craziness at first. But readers in Y.A. don’t care about rumination. They don’t want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase that evokes the exact color of the shag carpeting in your living room when your dad walked out on your mom one autumn afternoon in 1973. They want you to tell a story. In Y.A. you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight. When kids like one book, they want the next one. Now. You need to deliver.

So, see, they’re implying that readers of young adult literature don’t care about quality of prose. But they’re also implying that, LOL, literary writing is this sort of overwrought practice where you focus on trifling matters to the detriment of the story.

People are getting all up in a tweet about this, sending Ms. Crouch suggestions for lit-styled YA. That’s not a wrong-headed idea, because I’d say that this article shows a certain ignorance about the many writers who do care about quality of prose. Like my buddy Kirsten Hubbard, or Patrick Ness, or Meg Rosoff, all of whom, I’m sure, are quite capable of crafting a transcendent description of the Berber in their parents’ dens.

But I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had here, one buried beneath the breezy tone. Namely, there are differences between approaches to writing in the young adult and MFA writing worlds. I know, because I was once an MFA student, too, and now write for teens.

• Length of time expected to produce a book – In my graduate program, writers were expected to produce one hundred and twenty pages (a novella, incomplete novel, or several short stories) over two years. In the young adult writing world, book contracts dictate that writers produce roughly one book a year. In the MFA world, if a book isn’t working, you’re expected to revise it until it does—for years, maybe. In the YA world, if a book isn’t working, you’re expected to write another.
• Focus on the economics of the writing life—Most young adult writers I know (myself included) are aiming for the golden ring of “being a full time writer.” That means that you are contracted to write enough books, and are bringing in enough royalties from your backlist that you don’t need to do anything else to pay a living wage. In contrast, most of my cohort from my MFA program has focused their career life on teaching, taking on adjunct positions in the hopes that they might one day get a tenure track job that will let them teach creative writing classes, write, and take sabbaticals every few years for research purposes. This lifestyle, it’s hoped, is financially supportive enough that writers can take their time to produce books of high quality.

These are very real, practical differences between these two writing worlds, and of course they result in a variety of differences in actual books. For even those writers of impeccable prose ability in YA, there’s likely some focus on producing books that they’re sure will sell. Intrinsically, they have to consider the needs of their audience in order to earn a living.

In the literary world, these audience needs are largely considered secondary. Esteem is important; thematics are important; depth is important. But I’ve seen the primacy of audience demands within commercial writing dismissed. The writer is considered the authority, above and beyond the reader.

I think both models have their problems.

In the young adult world, it’s not unusual to meet writers who have been incredibly taxed by deadlines, absolutely exhausted by the demand that they produce and produce and produce after their first book sells. There’s a lot of insecurity around writing “fast enough.” Some authors draft in weeks, revise in a few small handfuls of months, and while I envy this, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t encountered a few books that felt rushed. The inevitable sophomore slump of trilogies—when the second book in a series is subpar because it was the first produced under a deadline after the writer might have taken years to polish the first—is a side-effect. Crouch and Hendrix are wrong that readers don’t notice these things. Teenagers are astute. A casual perusal of goodreads should have disabused them of any notion otherwise. The truth is, even commercial art takes some time to do well, and writers deserve the space to do their books justice without running themselves absolutely ragged.

Meanwhile, because of a flooded job market, not to mention the state of academia today (hint: it’s pretty terrible), MFA students of my generation are likely to have to work longer and harder to actually get that tenure track job, and they’re likely to be poorer while they’re working toward that goal. Years of compromised income (have you ever looked at a TA stipend? You might need a magnifying glass) and sometimes onerous debt load leaves many MFA graduates vulnerable to the James Freys of the world, who will promise some money—any money, very very little money—for any monkey who can write reasonably well. And because these students are desperate and no one’s told them why this is a bad idea, they take them up on these offers! I think that MFA programs are absolutely obligated to protect their students from sharks like Frey, and the way to do that is to begin talking about the financials of writing. Book contracts. Query letters. Agents. The truth is, the ability to write without ever caring about income from their words is a luxury that many students don’t have today. It’s time that MFA programs begin embracing Yog’s Law, an adage that’s been repeated in sci-fi circles for years: money flows toward the writer.

Neither the world of academic writing or the world of commercial writing is absolutely flawed—both have their strengths too, of course, be it beautiful prose or meaningful messages or addictive stories or entertaining ideas or passionate readerships. But, buried beneath a sea of condescension, I think Crouch and Hendrix are onto something: these are very different conceptions of the writer’s life, and I think most truly successful writers will ultimately have to craft a career that’s actually a bit of both.

Up at the Book Lantern blog, I have a guest post that answers the immortal question, “Should I get an MFA?”

There were good things about my time spent in my MFA program. I had a fairly relaxed schedule, wrote quite a bit, and made many good friends there. My professors were caring and dedicated and always well-intentioned. And I had the opportunity to take other classes at the University, including critical coursework in young adult literature and science fiction.

But I can’t deny the conflict I felt as I became increasingly dedicated to both YA and genre, as I spent my  summers trying to learn how to write speculative fiction even as I was told that I wouldn’t be able to take fiction workshops unless I refrained from embracing these speculative elements in my workshopped writing.

I should probably note here that I’m talking fairly broadly about MFA programs here; I know that there are a small number of programs focused specifically on writing for children (Hollins is one) and at least one writing program (an MPW, if I recall correctly, at a school whose name has escaped me) focused on commercial writing including genre writing. But from everything I know about MFAs, these are the exceptions, rather than the rule, and so it feels fair to give writers interested in writing YA a head’s up that this may not be the path they’re looking for.

The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel by Justin Taylor
Recommended

I, too, knew Gainesville.

I went to Gainesville because I was ISO a change: at 22, I’d been living in New Jersey my entire life, and living in my mother’s house since my senior year of college and though I liked the money I saved, I wanted more. And so I applied to graduate school, and in every case sought out the kind of crunchy little college town I’d always dreamed about, places with exotic, foreign names. Eugene. Madison. Gainesville.

I thought I might stop wearing deodorant there. I thought I might drop acid at last or maybe stay up until dawn talking about poetry with poets. I thought I might write long, cryptic letters to my long-distance boyfriend and be the kind of person I’d hoped I’d grown into when I was sixteen.

What did I find in Gainesville? Some of that, and none of that. Gainesville was Spanish moss, sure, and termite swarms and burritos and dancing to Laid by James in a house with a name. Gainesville was Blue Highway Pizza and Payne’s Prairie and bottle rockets. Gainesville was babysitting a baby named Bug and many, many coffee klatches.

But it was also awkwardness. All those nights I did not dance. Realizing I wasn’t a true poet, whatever that was. Feeling shy and out of my skin.

And eventually Gainesville was a job where I wore clothes I hated, where I felt just as numb as I did when I lived at my mom’s house. Eventually, Gainesville was calling the cops on the kids downstairs who played their accordions at 3 a.m. on a weeknight, damn it. Gainesville, for everything it was, was also getting older.

Sometimes I think I should have gone to Gainesville, or a place like Gainesville, when I was younger—just out of high school, maybe, when I was filled with magic and light and potential, when I had not yet hardened.

And Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy makes me think I might be right.

I found in his pages Gainesville—my Gainesville, the very specific, very strange geography (it’s like an island, really. An island in a sea of mosquitos and deep south), the colors and the smells. The churches on University. The houses that are always, for some reason, named after fish. He talks of a Fishgut; I knew a Screaming Marlin and a Shrimpfest. This was my Gainesville, too.

But Taylor’s Gainesville is also a place I never knew. A place of transcendental threesomes. A place of dropping out. A place where the consciousness is nearly collective, because even in Taylor’s prose it jumps from person to person but this makes utter sense, even though I never knew this to happen in my Gainesville because I was still, utterly, irrevocably myself.

His book made me miss Gainesville. But it made me miss a Gainesville I never knew.

His book is also not my kind of book, not anymore, and I have Gainesville to thank for that, too, in a way. In Gainesville people asked me what I was reading and I got nervous (the truth? Licensed novels and books about aliens). Now I’m a literary hedonist; I read what thrills me and make no excuses. And Taylor’s book is the kind of storytelling that frustrates me. I mean, I get it. These kids start a cult and wait for the messiah, and you’d be a fool if you thought the messiah ever showed or, worse, if you thought you’d get to see the climax. That is the climax. The not seeing. I get that.

And usually, I’d be gruff about it. Do not want, I’d say. Give me satisfaction; give me story. Give me that thing I never found in Gainesville. But the truth is that here, I’d be sad if the story went any other way. This book is the quintessential Gainesville novel, and to be quintessentially Gainesville, it can’t give us what we want. Because for some people places like Gainesville are like the Jerusalem we speak of at Passover. Though we always say we’ll get there next year, when we finally do, it kind of has to leave you wanting.

I suspect this book will be important. I hope this book will be important to seniors in high school in the way that, say, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was once to me. Because, in the same way that I wanted to go find myself in the desert, I think they might pack it up and decide to go find Gainesville. And they’ll be young and full of hope, poised to find something—maybe meaning—in a place where it eluded me.

Of course, they probably won’t. It is Gainesville, after all.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher and netgalley.com

View all my reviews

It was a rainy day when we first arrived in Gainesville, only that’s an understatement, as “rainy” is always an understatement for August in Florida–just miles before we crossed the state line from Georgia into Gainesville the air seemed to shift, becoming heady, humid, and then it started falling in silver sheets. August 7th, 2007. We turned onto Gainesville’s only cobblestone street and slowed to a stop in front of a house I’d never seen before and we ran out, cat carrier in one hand, into the soaking storm to sit on the porch and wait for the landlady to let us in.

A summer later, my first living alone in a second-story apartment that I called my “tree house,” I began writing fiction. The story wormed its way into my head on my walks home from my summer classes, and then it germinated during afternoon naps and then I’d pull myself from sleep-sticky sheets to write while the world outside turned pale and shivery with the force of wind and rainfall.

This is what I’ll miss best about Gainesville: the August storms, the feeling of tension in the air, the thunderheads mounting in the sky above. I won’t miss the heat that comes on minutes after the storm ends. I won’t miss the humidity, thick as the air in a foggy bathroom. Or the bugs or the way all my spices turned into solid lumps in the cabinets. I won’t miss sunburn or two showers a day or the zits and heat rashes that I get here and nowhere else. But I’ll miss this about Gainesville summers: I’ll miss the rain.

And the restaurants, and the greenness, and how in spring I’d be sure, sometimes, that I lived in paradise. The bluepink sky overhead. The interminable clouds. The lizards fucking in the fronds. The graffiti and the overgrown lawns–the unexpected, wild places.

This was the setting where I grew from a girl to a woman. This was where I missed Jordan for two years, a world of painful goodbyes, like my heart was being squeezed out through my throat. This was where I changed from a sparkler–slight, fleeting, trembling–to a signal flare, searing up into the star-splattered sky, leaving white-gray smoke in my wake. This was where I wrote hundreds of poems, a handful of stories, uncountable letters, and four novels. This was where I learned the value of female friendships, of coffee talk. This is where I learned that my heart still was tender. This was where I was first, truly married. This was the hard, strange, beautiful place where I became harder, stranger, and more beautiful. This was the last place I’ll ever pull myself into a closet to cry.

On Wednesday morning, our belongings packed into a Budget van, we’ll leave. For new places, new adventures. In August of 2007, I wrote in my journal that leaving New Jersey was like being skinned alive. Gainesville taught me that we have nothing to fear of new beginnings. Before coming here, I had some vague philosophy that everything works out in the end. Gainesville is where I learned that this was true.

Thank you, my pretty, little city. And farewell.