The Myth of the Lone Author
When I walked into my small MFA writing workshop for the first time, I was terrified of working with people; later, working at a community literary arts center, becoming a part of that community felt dangerous, too. What if my individuality was compromised; what if I was brainwashed; what if I lost track of my “voice” (whatever it was)? What if they didn’t like me or, even worse, didn’t like my writing?
I’ve never been a joiner. As a college student, I was obsessed by Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and bought myself a leather-bound used copy to tote around as a devotional, as if to assure myself that I didn’t need ANYBODY. I was fine. Really.
There is something quaint in the American insistence on the idea of self-reliance, despite all logic. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” We privilege individuality above all.
Herman Melville, though he admired Emerson’s willingness to think deeply, had intense criticisms of Emerson, “His gross and astonishing errors and illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.” In “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s Self-Reliance,” Benjamin Anastas says the essay’s lasting effect has been twofold, “It has been the swagger of a man’s walk that makes his measure, and Americans’ right to love ourselves before any other that trumps all.”
There was a time that I thought books were written by going off alone to a cabin in the woods. I pictured myself at a desk with a view of the Bitterroot valley and some coffee in a jar, and I think, in this fantasy of me the novelist, I was also a man. It took interacting with a ton of other writers to realize one does not learn to do a thing alone in one’s head. Why did I think that I should be able to, without any training or fellowship or mentorship, write fiction? Oh right: self-reliance. Luckily, I was desperate enough to learn how to write stories that I sought help from continuing ed classes, summer workshops, and an MFA program. But the lone writer mythos persists.
A recent article in The Atlantic looks at the published novels of MFA and non-MFA writers, assessing differences in diction (word choice), sentence structure, and gender representation. They found no discernible difference, though they revealed a clear bias by referring to MFA writing programs as “the meat-grinder.” They did find that all published American novels focus on male experience, and that there is a uniformity of grammar that they interpret to represent a lack of ethnic diversity. But their source pool of non-MFA books has already been whitened by its origin, the New York Times book reviews, famously low on diversity of review subjects.
The article, like so many attempts to evaluate effective creative writing, emphasizes the output of an individual: words she puts on a page. The fundamental assumption is that what the individual writer produces takes precedence over any other measurement. And yes, ultimately, she was alone in a room putting those words down. But what about, through writing education, the people she meets, or the time she takes to be a sucky writer, or the workshop experience itself? The feat of writing a book, at least the first book, is so great for some — emotionally as well as socially — that an MFA program may be necessary to get over the barriers of lack of entitlement, social pressures, and other good, old-fashioned fears that keep one from doing the thing they hope to do most, such as writing a book. Or, as has been documented by Junot Diaz and many other writers, the MFA could silence a young writer by critiquing her stories for not being “literary” or white or male enough.
I received my MFA from a good program, with its strengths and weaknesses like any program. Last summer, I rented a cabin with three women who I once studied with. We write, variously, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and our lives are divergent: mom or not, waitress or marketing director, with a decade of age span. They are also some of my closest friends. This summer weekend may not be discernible in my novel’s content, but this fellowship has been the most important contribution to finishing a novel. The same goes for friends I’ve made at summer writing programs, mentors I’ve discovered in both venues, and the people involved in the literary arts centers I’ve worked in.
Only recently have I learned to rely on others, and to hope that others will rely on me. I learned this, in part, in writing workshops. Books may be written in solitude, but the means of creating them is rarely the sole province of an individual. None of us can write by self-reliance alone.
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Laura Scott’s writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Okey-Panky, No Tokens, Tin House’s Flash Friday, Monkeybicycle, and other publications. She serves as managing editor for Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince (McSweeney’s/Verso 2017), and is one of OneRoom’s novel writing coaches. Find out more here↓
