If anyone knows me well, they understand I have never considered myself to be a conformist. I go against typical societal expectations, using intuition as my guide. This is not how I walk into situations, but it’s typically how I leave them. As a first year MFA student, I entered my program arms wide. I looked closely and fairly into who everyone was and what types of writing brought us together. I wasn’t sure how my own writing would be received.

Within months, I quickly began to realize I did not fit the mold of the content, form, voice, or structure of the writing coming into workshops. In my first-year mind, I wondered if there was something I needed to fundamentally change about my work because I wasn’t “fitting in.” Was I doing something wrong? In the end, I knew conforming was going to be a poor and temporary band aid on something that would later, become an asset- grounding myself into my writing identity.

One way to define your writing identity is in workshop. Workshops are at the heart of most creative writing programs. We type out drafts of writing and send it out to our peers to read and critique. This pedagogical format was elating to say the most, as it showed me what suggestions I was willing to implement for later drafts. These comments (both positive and negative) are also dependent on the quality of the person delivering them, which can be for better or for worse. Workshops tend to (in my experience) operate in a vacuum, where your peers view your writing in the way they would like it to be, in the way they would write it. Sometimes this is helpful if you are struggling with an idea or draft that needs a complete overhaul, but uninformed feedback can also gradually begin to negatively morph the fundamental aspects of your writing that you had previously celebrated. I learned what aspects of my writing I loved, what I needed to improve on, and what made me stand out from the crowd. In all respects, it wasn’t a bad thing, but I refused to alter my core values. Overall, the pushback of not fitting in helped me decide what kind of writer I wanted to be.

I believe to succeed in a creative writing program, (and in the field in general,) you need to think outside the box of what everyone (and their mother,) is writing. To do this, one needs to understand what makes their content uniquely theirs. Is it the structure, the historical research, the characters? Whatever it may be, refuse to give it up. This is not to say one should refuse to evolve and block out all feedback, but it does mean thinking critically about the quality of feedback you are being given. Just because everyone around you got into the same MFA program does not mean you need to clone yourself into their image. Don’t follow the sheep off the cliff. Be the sheep who refused to jump, peering over the ledge in your own unique identity.

Until next time,

Lena N. Gemmer