The Lottery

What is it about the writing community that makes it so neurotic when it comes to acceptance/rejection season for MFAs? This is something that we ("we" being those souls applying to MFAs) are all guilty of, myself completely included. You know what I'm talking about. The collective nervousness. The nail biting. The hundreds, maybe thousands, of posts on every tiny detail every single day. Does this community dynamic exist (and I'm asking earnestly here, because I do not know) in other graduate disciplines?

Consider: You're finishing high school. Your GPA is so and so, your SAT scores are so and so, your extracurriculars are so and so, and so forth. Very definite, objective. All the fields on the applications are filled out with little room for subjective information (maybe an essay at most), and at the end of the day, after you've sent all your applications to the half dozen schools of your choice (maybe two "safeties" and two "reaches"), you hear back in a couple months, and that is that. What I personally remember of my application experience as a high schooler was that it'd be nice to go to NYU, but that I'd settle for the other schools if they'd have me.

Now maybe you were a different kind of student. An achiever. Many of my friends were. I knew a couple students who had their hearts dead set on Northwestern or Harvard or whatever. But the vast majority of people treated the whole process as what it was: a numbers game. If you made the cutoff for this SAT score, and you were ranked this highly in your class, you'd probably make it into this school. Sure, there's always some measure of hand-wringing about the whole process -- hope is sometimes a tortuous thing -- but for the most part, everyone knew where they'd get accepted and where they'd get rejected.

What I realized the other day, was how much like the lottery the MFA acceptance process is. You just don't know. You may hit that jackpot and win the million dollar prize, but then, you may get nada, like everyone else. Now, I'm not talking about the faculty side of things. I'm sure when they read all of the manuscripts side by side it becomes exceedingly clear which are heads and shoulders above the others. Rather, I'm talking about the applicant. The writer. Is there any other profession where it is normal, even expected, to operate on an island? Without criticism or feedback or comparison? Or community? Even worse for the beginning writer, where all it would seem, at first, to be a proper writer would be to put pen to paper, and nothing else. But let's forget about the beginning writer for a moment. We all know how important community is to the writing process, right? We have our writing groups, our forums where we go to for advice, our friends, our family. Yet even then, I would argue that it is all too common to fall into that trap, where you put your head down and write -- in confinement -- for days and weeks without end.

This kind of isolation, which is so necessary for the act of writing, yet so contrary to the concepts of criticism and feedback in nearly every discipline (writing or not), is what makes acceptance season so difficult. It makes an already subjective process even more uncertain. You may know that your story has better movement than Jane Doe's story in workshop or crisper dialogue than John Smith's in your writing group -- but what is it against fifty stories? A hundred? You just don't know.