Every Writer Tells One Story. I didn’t graduate from a fancy MFA…
By: Vivian Mcinerny
Tags: Writing Life, Write, Writing Tips, Writing Prompts

Testing a writing theory learned at an MFA program

Photo by Vivian McInerny

I didn’t graduate from a fancy MFA program. My dirty little secret is I never went to college. OK, not so secret now but it still feels a little dirty, like I am the unwashed, unkempt, uneducated, ragtag relation in a family of polished prose professionals. Who would never use cheap alliterations like that.

I might have enjoyed being sequestered away in an ivy-covered institution, with like-minded spirits. We aspiring writers would form tight emotional bonds, help each other grow, and celebrate, without jealousy, our successes. Wise and kind and impressively published professors dressed in slightly tatty tweed, would help each of us recognize and realize our individual potential. And after graduation, our colleagues would land positions at publishing houses and important literary journals and request our submissions.

And we’d all write happily ever after. Maybe it just looks that way from the outside.

Although I skipped a formal education, I harbored a vague dream of being a writer. (Back then, I thought of the life of a writer like that, in romantic italics.) Because I also liked to pay rent and eat, I started freelancing feature articles for regional publications. This eventually led to a full-time staff position at a daily newspaper. I never covered hard news. I wrote feature stories for the living, style, and Sunday magazine sections, and enjoyed discovering and framing stories about the lives of others.

When I met people who’d attended those prestigious writing programs at fancy schools, I always wanted to know what they’d learned about being a real writer. One said she’d been taught that every writer had only one theme, a single emotional touchstone that they would spend the rest of their lives writing about. She wasn’t sure she bought the idea.

But I sensed some truth in my bones. Most my career, I’d written happy fluffy stories. Yet I realized that the stories I took most satisfaction in were almost always those that touched on the theme of childhood grief; an interview with teenage prostitutes; a story about two homeless girls landing on their feet; a profile of a delightfully quirky historian who’d spent his teens on his deathbed until the invention of antibiotics; and my rare first-person essays about my brother’s death. I suspected that my way of dealing with what felt at times like overwhelming sadness was to focus on others or to churn out fun and frivolous stories.

A lot of writers believe in waiting for the muse. Years in a newsroom facing deadlines showed me the power of moving my fingers across the keyboard, even when I didn’t yet know what I was trying to say. Ideas emerged from the act of doing. Even so, when I took a fiction writing class, I was skeptical about a timed writing assignment. I did it anyway. And it worked for me. I wrote a more honest bit of writing, a scrap that became a rough draft that eventually became a published short story. It may be worth trying when you feel stumped.

Set your phone or tell your intelligent cloud-based personal assistant device to set a timer for five minutes.

Think of a stranger you saw today at a coffee shop, on the street, on the bus, and if you don’t get out much, refer to a picture online. (Write for five minutes.) Consider a place that evokes emotion in you. (Write for five minutes.) Recall an object, maybe from your childhood, that holds meaning for you (Write for five minutes.) Give that object to that person in that place. (Write for thirty minutes.) You might just get a first draft of something interesting.

Vivian McInerny is a journalist and fiction writer. Her short stories are published in 805 Lit+Art, Dunes Review, The Cardiff Review and others. Her first children’s book is forthcoming 2020 with Versify, a new imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.