In my last post, I talked about why I started DIY MFA and how to create your own do-it-yourself, MFA-style education. Today, I wanted to take a few moments to share the story of how DIY MFA got started. As you’ll find, the month of September has a special significance to DIY MFA. Of course, I realize that building a business is quite different from writing a book, but I think some aspects of my process in building DIY MFA can certainly apply to writing.
Getting the Idea
It all started at graduation. I had completed my traditional MFA and was sitting in an uncomfortable wooden pew in a West Village church waiting to get my diploma. After two years of workshopping and dedicating myself to the craft, I expected that the skies would part, light would stream in through the stained glass, angel choirs would sing down from the heavens and a voice would whisper from on high: “You are now a writer.”
You see, I thought that in order to be a writer, I needed someone else to give me permission. What I didn’t realize until much later was that I had already given myself permission, and that was far more important than what anyone else said.
As I sat in that creaky wooden pew, my mind ran over all the things I had learned and accomplished in those two years of graduate school. I was so happy and grateful to have had the opportunity, but then my thoughts turned to my writing friends outside the MFA, talented writers who didn’t have the chance to go back to school. A wave of sadness flooded over me and I thought to myself: maybe I could share some of what I learned in the MFA program with them.
As I thought about this, I began to realize that a lot of the things I learned in the MFA program are things I could have learned on my own. For example, the program provided me with a workshop, but I already had a wonderful critique group full of talented writers who gave me valuable feedback. In the MFA program, I also took literature courses where I studied books in my chosen area of writing, but I was already doing that on my own by building a personalized reading list of books relating to my work-in-progress. The MFA also required that we attend readings and lectures by visiting authors, but I regularly went to readings at bookstores and attended conferences as well. In other words, all the things that the MFA provided I had already been doing in some capacity on my own.
That’s when a wild idea hit me: What if there was a do-it-yourself version of an MFA?
That night, I did what any self-respecting writer would do when they got a wacky idea: I went home and blogged about it. Now at the time, I had a teeny-tiny blog with 12 followers (one of whom was my mother), and I wrote up a post essentially asking: If there was a DIY version of an MFA in writing, would you do it? Given the microscopic size of my audience, I expected that blog post to fizzle out in the ether.
But that’s not what happened.
The next morning, I awoke to dozens of emails in my inbox and a bunch of comments on that blog post, all saying “YES! I’d totally do it!” So, that’s when I realized I’d hit a nerve. I’d landed on an idea that resonated with people.
Finding the Market
As writers, we often have lots of different ideas, some of them awesome and some of them not-so-great. One of the best ways to build our creative muscle is not to get too precious with one idea and instead focus on generating lots of them. Think of ideas like subways in NYC, there’s always another one coming. With DIY MFA, I knew from the get-go that there was interest in my idea, but that wasn’t true for many of the other ideas I’d had before.
What I didn’t share as part of this story were all the failed business ideas I had leading up to DIY MFA. There were many of them. For instance, did you know that at one point I had a jewelry-making business? I was fairly successful with it and even had some pieces on consignment in a Madison Avenue boutique. The trouble was, I liked using high quality materials, which were expensive, and it meant that to make any real profit, the markup had to be pretty high. Given the high-end nature of the product, it was difficult to find the right customers. I ended up pivoting my jewelry making to more of a hobby and using my skills to create gifts for friends and family instead of trying to sell my work.
There was also a time when I had a knitting blog, thinking maybe I could be the next Stephanie Pearl-Mcphee. The problem was, I couldn’t knit fast enough to post with any real frequency and a blog without regular content just flounders. Then there was that phase in the early 2000s when I thought I might want to pursue graphic design as a freelance business. I got a gig doing pro bono work for a nonprofit, which helped me build up my portfolio, but I had no idea how to grow the business past that point. Fun fact: those graphic design skills have come in handy at DIY MFA because I do a lot of the graphics for the site.
The truth is, I had tons of creative business ideas, many of which I tested and then decided not to pursue. It was only when I came up with DIY MFA that I realized I had hit on something that people wanted.
As writers, we have to remember that publishing is a business, and that in order for a book to be successful, there have to be readers interested in it. This means that you have to have a clear idea in your mind of who your readers will be. Perhaps the biggest mistake I originally made when I tried out all those other business ideas is that I focused on creating what I wanted and I didn’t stop to think whether other people would want it, too. So, think about your readers, even as you’re working on that very first draft.
Keep in mind, though, you don’t want to chase the market. Don’t write about vampires just because that’s what’s hot at the moment. Remember that it takes 2-3 years for a book to get to market (unless you indie pub) so what’s hot right now may not even be a thing when your book comes out. That said, if you love vampires and that’s your jam, write the story that’s in your heart. After all, you’re going to have to read and revise your story dozens of times before you publish, so you might as well write something you love.
Testing the Concept
After getting all those positive and encouraging messages about DIY MFA, I realized I needed to test the concept. Specifically, I wanted to test two things:
- Did I have enough to say on the subject?
- Did I really have an audience?
After thinking about it, I realized that the best way to test these two things was to pose a blogging challenge. Back in 2010, it was the heyday of blogging and there were all sorts of blogging challenges on the internet. I figured I would do a blogging challenge… on myself. The idea was simple, I would blog about DIY MFA every single day for an entire month. I figured by the end of the month, I’d have a pretty clear answer to each of the two questions above. Either I would have run out of things to say, or I’d still be brimming with ideas. And either I’d have gained a bigger audience, or my existing followers—all twelve of them—would have abandoned me.
I decided to run this DIY MFA challenge in the month of September because it was back-to-school time and that somehow felt fitting. Also, it gave me the whole summer (between graduation, when I first had the idea to September 1) to collect my thoughts and map out my posts. This way I could hit the ground running as soon as September rolled around.
Here’s what happened: I got to the end of September and I still had ideas for DIY MFA. In fact, 14 years later, I’m still coming up with new courses and workshops so clearly I have a lot to say on the subject. Not only that, my small group of twelve followers grew to four hundred, just in that one month. Now, that might not seem like a lot in today’s influencer-driven world, but at the time, gaining four hundred blog followers was a big deal, and it showed me there was an audience for my concept.
We writers often don’t test our concepts nearly enough. We often commit to a long project like a novel and we don’t take time to test and see if the concept lands with our audience, or if we have the stamina to see it through. Sure, many of us want nothing more than to hide away in our writing space and focus all our energy on creating The Big Project. But that does us no good if the project doesn’t have legs. This is why it’s so important to test our concepts.
One way to do this is to focus on writing short form work for a while and trying to get that work published. We have several members of our word nerd community who have chosen to focus on short form work and have had excellent success publishing their stories, essays, or poetry. The great thing about short form work is that you can start and finish a project in a much shorter span of time, and you can get feedback on it by submitting it for publication and seeing if it resonates.
For folks who are working on long form work like novels or memoirs, another way to test the concept is to take some aspect of your project and see if you can adapt it to a shorter piece. For example, if you’re writing a novel, what if you wrote a short story about one of the supporting characters? Or if you’re writing a memoir, how about taking an anecdote that doesn’t fit the memoir’s theme and making it into an essay? The idea is to try to test the market for your concept before you’ve committed a ton of time to writing that longer piece.
If your writing stamina is the thing in question, the best way to test it is with a challenge. Every November writers around the world dive headfirst into a new novel project and write with abandon until they hit 50K words. But you don’t have to wait until November to pose a similar challenge for yourself. Give yourself a word count goal and a window of time to see if you can stick to it. Maybe your goal is writing 2,000 words per day, 5 days per week for two weeks straight. Or maybe it’s writing 500 words every single day for a month, rain or shine. Come up with your own version of the challenge and use it to help you see if you have the stamina to get through a long project.
Developing the Structure
Structure is a huge factor, both in terms of developing a business idea and in writing a book. As I’ve shared on previous occasions, DIY MFA comprises three pillars: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, and Build Your Community. But it wasn’t always this streamlined. In fact, that first month when I did the blogging series, I had something like ten different subcategories of DIY MFA. These categories were: productivity, motivation, creativity, craft, workshops, reading, literary analysis, conferences, platform, and publishing. When I did that first blogging series, I posted about all these different topics, assigning different themes to different days of the week, even doubling up some of the topics to make them fit the weekly schedule.
It was a mess.
And it took me a little while to put that mess in order. It was in 2012, when I decided to rebuild the website and have it professionally designed, that my web developer said we only had room across the header for three topics. Somehow I had to take those ten things and cram them down into three. Plus, I had to make them sound catchy so they’d look good on the website.
What I realized was that those ten topics could be grouped together into larger buckets of writing, reading, and community. Once I made that discovery, the solution was simple. Our header would be Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community, and those would be the three pillars of DIY MFA. Once I had those pillars figured out, the rest of the DIY MFA structure quickly fell into place.
Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants), sooner or later you have to think about structure. For plotters, structure comes into play early in the process, before they even start writing. For pantsers, on the other hand, structure often happens as part of the revision process. Personally, I recommend a “plantser” approach, where you write by the seat of your pants for a while (maybe 10K-20K words), and then you pause and take stock of what you have. Extract an outline by mapping out what you’ve already written, then figure out how to fill in the gaps. Then, when you get back to writing, you’ll have a direction for where you want your story to go.
So, there you have it: the background of how DIY MFA came to be, along with some insights you can apply to your own creative life. Remember, ideas by themselves are not all that useful. Instead, you have to test the ideas and see if there’s an audience for them. Once you’ve tested a concept, you also have to give it structure, so that it can take shape and become something great.
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.
