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I’ve almost completed my first year at my MFA (dab). I couldn’t have gotten through without the learnings I’ve gained from writing on Substack. So, as a thank you to the community and my subscribers, I want to offer something in return: The collected wisdom of my time so far.

This wisdom isn’t just about Fiction or even Creative Writing. The more I learn, the more I see that everything I do is intimately connected. Teaching, writing, motorcycle riding, working out, project management…it’s all part of the human experience. What’s specific to my realm might just reach across to yours; while this wisdom is primarily for writers, all this stuff may prove useful for any and all human beings with minds and souls.

Also, if you read this, you are instantly an MFA candidate. Congratulations!

Everything comes down to Character whether or not you’re crafting a sprawling space opera, dealing with difficult coworkers, or riding the bus wondering what your place is in the world. I am specifically talking about human Character, which I think boils out to two other elements: Internality and Behavior.

Thanks to all the smarty-pants writers here in my MFA, I’ve started using this word “Internality” (Is it a real word because MFA students and teachers use it? I MFA and therefore, I am?) almost every day. As I write and live I now ask myself: How do I get at this character’s internal state? How do I understand my own internality? How can I better share and access the internal mindsets of those around me?

It’s everyone’s responsibility to understand human behavior—theirs and others’. It’s a writer’s responsibility to present that behavior in delicious ways, even if your characters aren’t human. This is a strange lesson, as I’ve spent so much of my creative life trying to capture things outside human experience…But the only things that interest bring me back to humanity and exploring it.

Of course, “Character is Everything” is an ongoing experiment. I have failed often, recently. I just wrote a script for a screenwriting class that was technically correct, but came out awful because I missed the mark on both Internality and Behavior. The script left my readers with the kinds of questions one doesn’t want to hear: “Why would he say this?” “Is this line even necessary?” Worse yet, it was funny even though I had no intention of making it funny. This is a lesson for writing as much a living; we get Character wrong all the time. We assume we know someone and then have our whole world flipped around when someone reveals something about their Character.

If there’s one takeaway I want to leave you with, it’s this: Boldly fail with Character.

“Write what you know” is one piece of writing advice that’s parroted so often, and I can actually get behind it. For writers and not, this just means using your life experience to create and inspire truth. Doing anything less with your life might be the worst thing you could do to the world. I teach an English 101 class right now and we have very clear learning outcomes. The essential two are these:

Demonstrate rhetorical awareness in all modes of communication

Develop a reflective, recursive, and collaborative writing process

In trying to reach these outcomes, I first teach something called Rhetorical Context. I do this for two reasons: One, so they stay on task and don’t meander. Two, so they don’t overshare with their peers. Not every environment is right for every kind of information. But it doesn’t mean we can’t be ourselves. I want to approach this topic delicately. Many (white, male) writers have abused their privileges of mind to speak for others or even live out terrible fantasies. How do we know this? Well, they end up in scandals. They die and the skeletons barge out of their closets screaming.

That said, I think everyone needs to be free to open themselves up. We see it time and time again: someone who has strong beliefs but no real-life community becomes radicalized. Someone abused or attacked becomes an abuser. These cycles do not end unless we’re willing to build connections for healing. With writing, specifically, this means exploring all of our human experiences and—if the situation is right—sharing these things.

This means writing about what I see in the world: men are actively supporting the patriarchy and trying to take power away from women, how our government is constantly attacking people who are already at risk of losing hope or their lives, how God was not there for my loved ones when they needed him, how difficult and wonderful relationships are, how sex shouldn’t be so taboo, how people should just be allowed to be themselves, how our loneliness epidemic is entirely solvable, how suburbia is probably one of the worst inventions in human history…

For you, this could mean anything. If you grew up in a home where domestic violence was normal, what might that be like to share? If you’re looking around your city and you see a huge need that’s going unfilled, talk about it! If you grew up, like me, wealthy with easy living, what is it like to see the world through your eyes? I will caveat this with one guiding idea: consider your audience. While the world might be used to the rough draft thoughts from someone who just woke up with a Very Important Opinion, it doesn’t mean that you should share that. My favorite word from the second learning outcome above is “Recursive”. This means returning to start, revising, and following an internal system of understanding. In other words, do I know the shape of the ideas I’m trying to deliver? No? Time to revise and adjust. Just saying what I want to say without shaping it is tantamount to shouting. And the world has enough noise as it is.

Is it possible to “Be Yourself” while filtering or censoring yourself within a “Rhetorical Context?” Yes. Absolutely. I can prove it. You do this all the time when driving (or walking or riding a bicycle, etc). You have the way you do things. Other people have the way they do things. If you barrel through your life only doing things the way you want, what occurs? Being yourself in relationship to the world around you is a much truer and kinder version of being yourself. Some might call it conformity. I call it Differentiation.

Perhaps a better way to communicate this is with more questions: Who is the person you are in your most trusted, non-judgmental environment? Are you someone who cusses more? Who spends more time polishing your emails? Who does the dishes even when no one else does? Can you still be that person, doing things the way you do, without hurting others? Can’t you do that with your creativity?

This process of being (and writing as) yourself is a process. It’s a becoming. It’s Liberative. It’s not supposed to be Perfect from the first time or any time. Try this: What three words can you aspire to be?

My goal is to be a Kind, Fun, and Receptive soul. If I can be those in any given context, then I’m very happy.

I have often felt chained by the prior decisions my past self made. And sometimes those decisions are not easily undone. And besides my internal mindset and external behavior, the only other things I can affect are my Time and Place. I can spend time where I wish or change the setting of where I spend that time. But I can’t really change both at once. Time will always move no matter where I am. A place, once I’m there, will continue to be how it was after I leave. Even riding my motorcycle, I am constantly moving through different spaces and environs, but I can’t physically change what I’m doing while riding (for survival reasons). The illusion of our digital age is that we can control both. We “can” be doing anything, anytime, anywhere. But really, we’re still people in bodies doing only one thing well or multiple things poorly.

Creatively, the same seems to be the same. If you fuck with time (making it sticky, flowy, or irregular like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf), then you must keep characters in one place. Readers (and all people) need something to latch on to. Inversely, fucking with setting requires that time be consistent (unless you’re going for a span of abstraction). What happens when you mess with time and setting in reality and in stories? You lose continuity, causality, and plot. We can only make relationships with ideas that are somewhat salient or concrete. If nothing is concrete, always changing, patternless, then there is no reasoning. Aesthetics and vibes can be an experience on their own, I will say. But in terms of telling a story, or making meaning from the stories of our lives, we need something to anchor us.

If you’re lost, find your anchor. If you’re stuck, change your environment or change the things that you spend your time on. Accepting the power you do have and exercising it will deliver patterns and ideas and change; both for your creative ideas and for your daily living.

This wisdom goes two ways: inward and outward. We live in an age of information gluttony. There is little room in our minds. There is also little room in other people’s minds. All of us are running around with no extra space to make relationships between each other and all our information. This is antithetical to Character; We’re not empty voids with infinite space. We’re relational, creative, emotional beings. We’re more like mushrooms than whirlpools; our neurons grow and connect and share energy.

A a teacher, I’m learning this lesson every day. My college students do not have minds starving for my experience and wisdom. They are their own beings with their own wisdom. It’s my job to create the environment of learning, where a mixture of work, group activity, and awkward silence might give some of them the chance to make their own connections. What this requires of me is to set aside my objectives for them. My ego, pride, and ideas on “good writing” come last. Even grammar is not as important as their own learning. Oddly, it seems like I am helping them learn how to teach themselves. I am inviting them to a party of their own learning, where they might make a playground of their minds. We all need sandboxes to play in, but even sandboxes have boundaries. When creativity meets structure, ideas grow.

And so this relates to many things. Mushrooms, writing, college classrooms, and more. I have to wonder if I’m so used to filling up my mind and time with stuff that I don’t really think about what space I’m creating for my own learning and living. My pursuits and fixations don’t always behoove my ability to make connections, which means that focusing and working are hard too.

This might just be a messy diatribe on our digital age. But it seems to matter to everything. Here’s what I wish for myself: Invite things into my world that help me grow; cut out the rest.

What is the point of it all? I am always wondering. Where are all my decisions leading? I wish I knew. I know what I want them to lead me to. But what I want changes all the time. I’m beginning to think that goals matter less than doing what seems right in the moment—not just what feels right. I’m talking about passion tempered by experience.

What does it mean to live without outcomes? This might terrify and confuse everyone. I’m not even sure how it works.

When I was working on my first novel, I was so hell-bent on it being the thing to make me a famous author that when it didn’t happen I was crushed. It was in this crushed state I saw things more clearly. My goal was unrealistic. It was a self-serving fantasy that got in the way of loving the work of writing a novel. It was selfish and gratuitous in that way too. My dream only served to massage my ego. Living for one shape of a dream doesn’t give room for life to evolve or change into something better. To those of you who already live flexibly, this is probably obvious. To those of us who hold too tightly to the things in our head, here’s another thought that’s helped me: “I didn’t get what I wanted. I got something better.”

To what end do we do anything? What is the purpose or finish line?

Who knows?

Walk the road and see where your hard work and luck takes you.

I’m always telling my students to use their conclusion to not only tie things together, but to deliver something memorable and actionable. So, here’s my attempt:

Explore character. Go to your dark places. Use your weird in everything. Mess (fuck) with time and place. Create spaces for invitational relationships. Let go of your outcomes.

And keep writing (and living)!

YOU ARE NOW AN MFA CANDIDATE

Welcome to Realms!

If you like sci-fi, fantasy, and occasional diatribes on writing and living, subscribe today to get the next post conveniently in your inbox!

Subscribe

I’ve almost completed my first year at my MFA (dab). I couldn’t have gotten through without the learnings I’ve gained from writing on Substack. So, as a thank you to the community and my subscribers, I want to offer something in return: The collected wisdom of my time so far.

This wisdom isn’t just about Fiction or even Creative Writing. The more I learn, the more I see that everything I do is intimately connected. Teaching, writing, motorcycle riding, working out, project management…it’s all part of the human experience. What’s specific to my realm might just reach across to yours; while this wisdom is primarily for writers, all this stuff may prove useful for any and all human beings with minds and souls.

Also, if you read this, you are instantly an MFA candidate. Congratulations!

Everything comes down to Character whether or not you’re crafting a sprawling space opera, dealing with difficult coworkers, or riding the bus wondering what your place is in the world. I am specifically talking about human Character, which I think boils out to two other elements: Internality and Behavior.

Thanks to all the smarty-pants writers here in my MFA, I’ve started using this word “Internality” (Is it a real word because MFA students and teachers use it? I MFA and therefore, I am?) almost every day. As I write and live I now ask myself: How do I get at this character’s internal state? How do I understand my own internality? How can I better share and access the internal mindsets of those around me?

It’s everyone’s responsibility to understand human behavior—theirs and others’. It’s a writer’s responsibility to present that behavior in delicious ways, even if your characters aren’t human. This is a strange lesson, as I’ve spent so much of my creative life trying to capture things outside human experience…But the only things that interest bring me back to humanity and exploring it.

Of course, “Character is Everything” is an ongoing experiment. I have failed often, recently. I just wrote a script for a screenwriting class that was technically correct, but came out awful because I missed the mark on both Internality and Behavior. The script left my readers with the kinds of questions one doesn’t want to hear: “Why would he say this?” “Is this line even necessary?” Worse yet, it was funny even though I had no intention of making it funny. This is a lesson for writing as much a living; we get Character wrong all the time. We assume we know someone and then have our whole world flipped around when someone reveals something about their Character.

If there’s one takeaway I want to leave you with, it’s this: Boldly fail with Character.

“Write what you know” is one piece of writing advice that’s parroted so often, and I can actually get behind it. For writers and not, this just means using your life experience to create and inspire truth. Doing anything less with your life might be the worst thing you could do to the world. I teach an English 101 class right now and we have very clear learning outcomes. The essential two are these:

Demonstrate rhetorical awareness in all modes of communication

Develop a reflective, recursive, and collaborative writing process

In trying to reach these outcomes, I first teach something called Rhetorical Context. I do this for two reasons: One, so they stay on task and don’t meander. Two, so they don’t overshare with their peers. Not every environment is right for every kind of information. But it doesn’t mean we can’t be ourselves. I want to approach this topic delicately. Many (white, male) writers have abused their privileges of mind to speak for others or even live out terrible fantasies. How do we know this? Well, they end up in scandals. They die and the skeletons barge out of their closets screaming.

That said, I think everyone needs to be free to open themselves up. We see it time and time again: someone who has strong beliefs but no real-life community becomes radicalized. Someone abused or attacked becomes an abuser. These cycles do not end unless we’re willing to build connections for healing. With writing, specifically, this means exploring all of our human experiences and—if the situation is right—sharing these things.

This means writing about what I see in the world: men are actively supporting the patriarchy and trying to take power away from women, how our government is constantly attacking people who are already at risk of losing hope or their lives, how God was not there for my loved ones when they needed him, how difficult and wonderful relationships are, how sex shouldn’t be so taboo, how people should just be allowed to be themselves, how our loneliness epidemic is entirely solvable, how suburbia is probably one of the worst inventions in human history…

For you, this could mean anything. If you grew up in a home where domestic violence was normal, what might that be like to share? If you’re looking around your city and you see a huge need that’s going unfilled, talk about it! If you grew up, like me, wealthy with easy living, what is it like to see the world through your eyes? I will caveat this with one guiding idea: consider your audience. While the world might be used to the rough draft thoughts from someone who just woke up with a Very Important Opinion, it doesn’t mean that you should share that. My favorite word from the second learning outcome above is “Recursive”. This means returning to start, revising, and following an internal system of understanding. In other words, do I know the shape of the ideas I’m trying to deliver? No? Time to revise and adjust. Just saying what I want to say without shaping it is tantamount to shouting. And the world has enough noise as it is.

Is it possible to “Be Yourself” while filtering or censoring yourself within a “Rhetorical Context?” Yes. Absolutely. I can prove it. You do this all the time when driving (or walking or riding a bicycle, etc). You have the way you do things. Other people have the way they do things. If you barrel through your life only doing things the way you want, what occurs? Being yourself in relationship to the world around you is a much truer and kinder version of being yourself. Some might call it conformity. I call it Differentiation.

Perhaps a better way to communicate this is with more questions: Who is the person you are in your most trusted, non-judgmental environment? Are you someone who cusses more? Who spends more time polishing your emails? Who does the dishes even when no one else does? Can you still be that person, doing things the way you do, without hurting others? Can’t you do that with your creativity?

This process of being (and writing as) yourself is a process. It’s a becoming. It’s Liberative. It’s not supposed to be Perfect from the first time or any time. Try this: What three words can you aspire to be?

My goal is to be a Kind, Fun, and Receptive soul. If I can be those in any given context, then I’m very happy.

I have often felt chained by the prior decisions my past self made. And sometimes those decisions are not easily undone. And besides my internal mindset and external behavior, the only other things I can affect are my Time and Place. I can spend time where I wish or change the setting of where I spend that time. But I can’t really change both at once. Time will always move no matter where I am. A place, once I’m there, will continue to be how it was after I leave. Even riding my motorcycle, I am constantly moving through different spaces and environs, but I can’t physically change what I’m doing while riding (for survival reasons). The illusion of our digital age is that we can control both. We “can” be doing anything, anytime, anywhere. But really, we’re still people in bodies doing only one thing well or multiple things poorly.

Creatively, the same seems to be the same. If you fuck with time (making it sticky, flowy, or irregular like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf), then you must keep characters in one place. Readers (and all people) need something to latch on to. Inversely, fucking with setting requires that time be consistent (unless you’re going for a span of abstraction). What happens when you mess with time and setting in reality and in stories? You lose continuity, causality, and plot. We can only make relationships with ideas that are somewhat salient or concrete. If nothing is concrete, always changing, patternless, then there is no reasoning. Aesthetics and vibes can be an experience on their own, I will say. But in terms of telling a story, or making meaning from the stories of our lives, we need something to anchor us.

If you’re lost, find your anchor. If you’re stuck, change your environment or change the things that you spend your time on. Accepting the power you do have and exercising it will deliver patterns and ideas and change; both for your creative ideas and for your daily living.

This wisdom goes two ways: inward and outward. We live in an age of information gluttony. There is little room in our minds. There is also little room in other people’s minds. All of us are running around with no extra space to make relationships between each other and all our information. This is antithetical to Character; We’re not empty voids with infinite space. We’re relational, creative, emotional beings. We’re more like mushrooms than whirlpools; our neurons grow and connect and share energy.

A a teacher, I’m learning this lesson every day. My college students do not have minds starving for my experience and wisdom. They are their own beings with their own wisdom. It’s my job to create the environment of learning, where a mixture of work, group activity, and awkward silence might give some of them the chance to make their own connections. What this requires of me is to set aside my objectives for them. My ego, pride, and ideas on “good writing” come last. Even grammar is not as important as their own learning. Oddly, it seems like I am helping them learn how to teach themselves. I am inviting them to a party of their own learning, where they might make a playground of their minds. We all need sandboxes to play in, but even sandboxes have boundaries. When creativity meets structure, ideas grow.

And so this relates to many things. Mushrooms, writing, college classrooms, and more. I have to wonder if I’m so used to filling up my mind and time with stuff that I don’t really think about what space I’m creating for my own learning and living. My pursuits and fixations don’t always behoove my ability to make connections, which means that focusing and working are hard too.

This might just be a messy diatribe on our digital age. But it seems to matter to everything. Here’s what I wish for myself: Invite things into my world that help me grow; cut out the rest.

What is the point of it all? I am always wondering. Where are all my decisions leading? I wish I knew. I know what I want them to lead me to. But what I want changes all the time. I’m beginning to think that goals matter less than doing what seems right in the moment—not just what feels right. I’m talking about passion tempered by experience.

What does it mean to live without outcomes? This might terrify and confuse everyone. I’m not even sure how it works.

When I was working on my first novel, I was so hell-bent on it being the thing to make me a famous author that when it didn’t happen I was crushed. It was in this crushed state I saw things more clearly. My goal was unrealistic. It was a self-serving fantasy that got in the way of loving the work of writing a novel. It was selfish and gratuitous in that way too. My dream only served to massage my ego. Living for one shape of a dream doesn’t give room for life to evolve or change into something better. To those of you who already live flexibly, this is probably obvious. To those of us who hold too tightly to the things in our head, here’s another thought that’s helped me: “I didn’t get what I wanted. I got something better.”

To what end do we do anything? What is the purpose or finish line?

Who knows?

Walk the road and see where your hard work and luck takes you.

I’m always telling my students to use their conclusion to not only tie things together, but to deliver something memorable and actionable. So, here’s my attempt:

Explore character. Go to your dark places. Use your weird in everything. Mess (fuck) with time and place. Create spaces for invitational relationships. Let go of your outcomes.

And keep writing (and living)!

YOU ARE NOW AN MFA CANDIDATE