Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• My end-of-year process for taking stock and evaluating my progress.
• Why you need to understand your natural tendencies before setting goals.
• The importance of giving each year a theme or name.
• How to use that yearly theme to course-correct or keep yourself on track

Link to Episode 485

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 485: Lesson 10 – Embrace the Journey appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• The importance of dreaming big but executing through small “baby steps.”
• How goal setting is a lot like climbing a mountain.
• The “plant the flag” moment, what it is and why it matters.
• Why it’s essential to reverse-engineer the action steps toward your goals.

Link to Episode 484

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 484: Lesson 9 – Take Baby Steps appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• Why it’s so important for writers to talk about and track money.
• The two “magic numbers” of publishing, what they are and why they matter.
• Five essential questions to think strategically about IP. 
• The trifecta of success, and how to consider ROI (return on investment).

Link to Episode 483

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 483: Lesson 8 – Track the Money appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• The importance of a practice-based approach in writing.
• Different types of practice, and why “deliberate practice” is most effective.
• The four essential components of a writing practice and why they matter.
• Why it’s important to iterate on your practice to make sure it’s working for you.

Link to Episode 482

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 482: Lesson 7 – Practice, Practice, Practice appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• How finding balance is not about rigidly compartmentalizing your life.
• What it means to “honor your reality” and how it relates to balance.
• Why we should be wary of blanket advice and shouldn’t follow any advice too rigidly.
• Why it’s so important for us to acknowledge and honor our real-life constraints.

Link to Episode 481

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 481: Lesson 6 – Balance is Fallacy appeared first on DIY MFA.

For folks who may not be familiar, let’s define what DIY MFA means. We all know that DIY stands for “do-it-yourself” but what about the MFA part? No, it’s not short for “mafia,” though we do get that a lot. Actually, MFA is the abbreviation for “Master of Fine Arts” which is the graduate degree most frequently offered for creative writing.

Why would you DIY your MFA?

I got a traditional MFA myself, and while I absolutely loved my graduate school experience, I also recognized that I was in a very privileged position to be able to get that degree. At the time, I was married with no kids and lawyer-hubby was working at a big, fancy law firm, so it was okay for me to take two years off work and go back to school. We also lived in NYC, where there are dozens of schools with traditional MFA programs right in our backyard. I could go back to school without having to move.

Today’s Gabriela (by the way) would never be able to do that. Between running DIY MFA full-time and having two kiddos, ages 10 and 12, there is no way I would ever be able to go back to school at this stage in my life. I’m grateful that I had that opportunity at the time and I loved every minute of it, but I also recognize that the traditional MFA is not feasible for everyone.

DIY MFA grew out of this realization that while traditional graduate programs are wonderful and can serve some people very well, they are by no means the best fit for every writer. What I discovered in developing DIY MFA is that there are many writers out there who want the rigor of a graduate education, but the logistics are just not in their favor.

For some, it might be a matter of geography. Many writers don’t have a school with a writing program within commuting distance. Or it might have to do with the time commitment and other logistics. For a lot of writers, day jobs and family responsibilities need to take precedence, and they have to fit their writing around all these things.

For others it might come down to the type of writing they want to do. Most traditional MFA programs emphasize literary fiction, so folks writing children’s books or genre fiction would be out of luck. Yes, there are some rare programs that offer genre or writing for children concentrations, but they are few and far between.

And, of course, there is the matter of tuition. While there are some schools that offer fully-funded MFA programs, it’s certainly not true of all programs by any stretch. And if you were to pay full freight for some of these schools it could end up costing you $80,000+ per year. Unlike medical school or law school, where there’s a clear career pathway after graduation and odds are reasonable that you might be able to recoup that tuition, things in the writing space are quite a bit fuzzier. You might get a great book deal, or you might work for years and years and never pay back those loans.

With tuition rates increasing faster than inflation and the tricky state of publishing (what with the advent of AI), now more than ever, writers need a do-it-yourself education option. We need ways to build that academic rigor into our lives without the major time commitment and the ridiculous costs. DIY MFA offers many workshops and courses to help writers deepen their knowledge of the craft, but today I wanted to make the fundamentals available to everyone and walk you through—step by step—how to DIY your MFA.

How to DIY Your MFA

This is a topic I get asked to speak on all the time and it’s one of my favorite things to discuss. I love giving writers the tools they need to succeed and my favorite thing is seeing my fellow word nerds reach their goals. This is why I started DIY MFA, after all.

So, how do you do it? How do you DIY your MFA?

The key is understanding DIY MFA’s three-pronged approach. There are three pillars of DIY MFA and these are: (1) write with focus, (2) read with purpose, and (3) build your community. If you’re going to DIY your MFA, you need to build all three components into your author life.

I developed this framework after studying many different traditional MFA programs. I visited several MFA websites and looked at how they laid out their curricula and what courses they required of their students. From all this research, a pattern emerged. There were three elements that kept coming up again and again, and these were writing, reading, and community.

From this, I deduced that in order to create a DIY version of the traditional MFA you needed to have these three things. First and foremost, you need to write and practice your craft. Second (and equally important) you need to learn how to read with a writer’s eye. Finally, you also need to engage with your community, both that of fellow writers as well as your readers.

Write with Focus

Writing with focus means writing with an end-goal in mind. Sure, it’s great to noodle around and try out different ideas, but sooner or later you need to decide on a project, then knuckle down and write it. Finishing projects is probably one of the most important skills a writer will need to develop.

When you write with focus, you also take the time to study the craft and improve your skills. Lately, I’ve been revisiting the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, who I interviewed for DIY MFA Radio some time ago. In this book, they talk about how to use deliberate practice in order to improve your skills. Just as a top athlete or accomplished musician needs to practice in order to reach a level of excellence, so too is it with writing. If we want to reach a higher level with our writing, we need to practice.

Finally, it’s important to track your progress, because you can’t modify what you can’t measure. Many writers make a note of their word counts every time they write. Other writers might track the amount of time they spend writing. I find that word count and time are both good measures of writing progress, but they apply to different situations. Word count is best for measuring how much progress you make when first drafting a manuscript, whereas time might be a better measure if you’re in the revision process.

Read with Purpose

One of the first things I recommend to people when they ask me about how to read like a writer is I tell them to build a reading list. Just as a professor puts together a syllabus with all the books you need to read in a given semester, you need to do the same thing if you’re going to DIY your MFA. The key is understanding what kinds of books to put on your list.

When putting together a reading list, I like to think of the 4Cs: comps, contextual books, contemporary books, and classics. Comps are books similar to the one you’re writing. Imagine your book sitting on a bookstore shelf; the comps are the books on the shelf next to it. Contextual books are your research, books you read in order to inform your writing. Contemporary books are any books in your genre published within the past two years. These books do not need to be similar to your current project. Finally, classics are self-explanatory, but these are books that have stood the test of time. A good reading list is like a well-balanced diet and should include a couple of books from each of these categories.

Once you’ve selected your books, you need to practice reading them with a writer’s eye. This means not just considering what the book is about or why the author wrote it, but also focusing on how the writer crafts the story. The key to reading like a writer is to ask yourself two questions: (1) How did the writer achieve this effect? and (2) How can I do that in my own work?

Build Your Community

Finally, we come to the community piece of the puzzle. To build your community, you need to consider three different groups of people with whom you need to connect: fellow writers, your readers, and the industry as a whole. In other words, it boils down to 3Ps: peers, platform, and publishing.

When it comes to connecting with your peers, you want to consider many different questions. Do you want feedback on your writing? If so, maybe a workshop or critique group might be your best bet. How will you build support and accountability into your writing life? To do this, you may want to surround yourself with writer friends, be it via social media, a writing class, or some other type of community. Finally, do you have advisors to whom you can go for help? All writers need advisors of some kind, whether it be a mentor you admire from afar or someone you work with closely.

Building your platform is a subject that comes a little bit later in a writer’s development, but it’s good to have it on your radar so you know what’s coming down the line. Remember that as you build your platform, you want to develop an audience of readers, not necessarily of fellow writers (though writers can be readers, too!). This means that as you develop your platform, you need to do so in a way that attracts the ideal readers for your book.

Finally, at some point, you will want to get your writing out in the world, and to do that you will need to publish. There are a lot of experts out there helping writers get published, but not all are of the same high caliber. One expert whose work I highly recommend is Jane Friedman. She has two newsletters, one called Electric Speed (free) where she shares digital resources for creative people, and the other called The Hot Sheet (paid) where she reports on the publishing industry. I read both, and highly recommend them.

Putting It All Together

So, you’ve got plans to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. Now what? How do you know if you’re “doing it right”? The truth is, there’s no one right way to DIY your MFA. There are just two guidelines I can offer you:

1. Make sure all three elements are present in your writing life at any given time.
2. Be flexible and allow for ebb and flow between the three elements.

The way I like to think of the writing life is as a pie, where writing, reading, and community each make up a slice. You could have a perfectly balanced pie with each element taking up one third, or you can vary the sizes of the slices. Personally, I like my DIY MFA pie to look like the diagram below, where half of the pie is dedicated to writing and the other half is split evenly between reading and community.

This pie isn’t static, though. For example, if I were at a conference, the community slice would probably take up 90% of my pie, and the last 10% might be split evenly between writing and reading. The key is that all three elements are represented in some capacity, and the pie proportions can shift depending on what’s happening in my author life at that moment.

HOMEWORK: Try this experiment for one or two weeks. At the end of each day, draw a pie that represents what you did that day as part of your writing life. Over the course of a couple of weeks, you’ll start to see a pattern and you’ll get a sense for your writing life’s natural balance.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: How to DIY Your MFA appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• Why so many people in publishing (and other fields) hold on to a scarcity mindset.
• How scarcity can serve as a safety net for writers who harbor self-doubt.
• The way an abundance mindset can set us up for writing success.
• The importance of equity in abundance, and making sure all writers can shine. 

Link to Episode 480

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 480: Lesson 5 – Choose Abundance Over Scarcity appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• Why complacency is the enemy of personal and professional growth.
• The growing pains that come from failing better and why failure is so hard.
• How I embraced failure for an entire year, and how it helped me grow DIY MFA.
• The malleable nature of comfort zones, and why we must keep challenging ourselves.

Link to Episode 479

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 479: Lesson 4 – Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• Two competing philosophies on failure from Yoda and Samuel Beckett.
• How these two highly-quotable figures are actually not all that different from each other.
• What it really means to make a commitment to the work and to your writing.
• Why it’s so important to embrace imperfection and accept potential failure.

Link to Episode 478

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 478: Lesson 3 – Embrace the Power of Iteration appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you gotten the DIY MFA Starter Kit yet? This is a two week email series full of worksheets to help you DIY your MFA, so you can get the “knowledge without the college.” You’ll learn more about how to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. You’ll also receive Writer Fuel, our newsletter full of words of wisdom and resources to help you keep the momentum going in your writing. And you’ll be the first to hear about other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! You can sign up with your email at diymfa.com/join.

In this episode I discuss:

• How acting “as if” is not the same as “fake it ‘til you make it.”
• Ways in which acting “as if” helped me build DIY MFA and this podcast.
• Why it’s important to be completely truthful when you act “as if.”
• How when you step forward with confidence, eventually your mindset catches up.

Link to Episode 477

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 477: Lesson 2 – Act “As If” appeared first on DIY MFA.