I've Got to Be Free - Guest Post By Margaret McNellis
Queen sang it best when they belted about being free, but sometimes this is a lesson many writers (including yours truly) can forget.
In June 2017, I entered the Mountainview MFA fiction program with the knowledge of what I wanted to write for my thesis. The final submitted thesis, due in two years, would have to sit between 25,000 and 75,000 words, and I planned on the latter. I had lit my own proverbial fire under my own butt.
I also labored under the notion that everything I wrote had to be stellar out of the gates.
The Gates Open
My first semester mentor struck a compromise with me: I would be allowed to use half of each submission to work on my book, so long as the other half was an exercise chosen by her or a short story.
In my first letter to my mentor, I wrote, “In its first draft, I hated this story.” Wow. This was a comment I made about my own story. I went on to describe how feedback from my peers and a second draft from scratch made it something I started to like…a little.
A month later, I was having fun experimenting and letting go of the need to write perfectly from the start. I expressed to my mentor, “I loved these exercises. I cannot praise their merit enough!”
Nowadays, I almost never use exclamation points.
I continued on, and at the end of the semester, my mentor wrote this in my evaluation: “I urge Margaret to…continue to experiment with her work...” There were other comments in there, but they’re not crucial to this discussion.
In looking back on my first semester in the program, what I learned most was the value of freedom in writing.
The End of the First Lap
My first semester was over by early November, with the next slated to start in early January. Yes, some of that time was devoted to reading work by my peers in preparation for our January workshops, but I also produced about 150 pages for my thesis.
By the time I started my second semester, I’d removed all those pages from my Scrivener file. There was nothing wrong with them, but they were all background work really. Space for me to get to know my characters better. To get to know the 17th century better. To get to know how all of the social, economic, and political gears turned together like ballast pulleys backstage, moving the set to go along with my characters’ journeys.
During my second semester, I worked almost exclusively one chapter. I wrote it four different ways:
Epistolary format (letters between characters)
With a modern voice (despite the 17th-century setting)
From my protagonist’s daughter’s point-of-view
As though the story were being played out on an internet forum (with some contemporary characters and their own problems)
I had fun with each of these methods, but my second-semester mentor and I decided together that the tone worked best the way I’d had it. I wasn’t upset to have spent five months and 120 pages devoted to words that would never make it into the book. I considered it a success, to experiment, to play, to let go a little.
Taking the Lead
Between my second and third semesters, much changed, including the fact that I bumped up the setting to the mid-18th century. This was mostly due to research and time constraints; while in school and commuting three hours each way to teach, I didn’t have the time to conduct the sort of research a 17th-century story required.
But I ended up writing solely in the point of view of my protagonist’s sister for much of my third semester.
Mid-semester, my mentor at the time and I decided my point-of-view character was too young. I made her older, and also switched from third- to first-person point-of-view.
All the while, the story kept developing and growing. By the time I reached the end of my third semester, I had almost half a book. With the winter break, I kept working on it and added about 100 pages more before my first deadline of my final semester: the first half of the story.
I worked with the same mentor my third and fourth semesters. Together, we talked about my characters’ internal and external heroes’ journeys. I worked on subtext and theme. I fleshed out symbols. I completed the novel.
But the amount of feedback was so great that I felt overwhelmed. I ended up submitting, for my final thesis, the first 30,000 or so words from that novel. In those pages, I tried a structural change to switch to shorter chapters.
After I learned that my thesis and the work I’d put in passed muster and my degree would indeed be conferred, my mentor suggested he though the writing was more elegant when I wrote in third person and with longer chapters.
Crossing the Finish Line
Changing the point-of-view and the structure would, I knew, require a rewrite. My mentor suggested I hold off on that; a copy of my final thesis was due for archiving in the university library within two weeks. I made a few minor changes and then submitted my pages to the archivist.
Almost a year passed before I started that rewrite. For months, I didn’t intend to ever do it. I was going to pick apart that novel, like a raven who found discarded carrion, for other stories. But something made me return to it.
I’m still in the midst of drafting what I suppose is the third or fourth draft. Honestly, I’ve lost count…and does it really matter how many times I write and rewrite it? The answer isn’t in a number of fresh rewrites or editing rounds (I couldn’t even begin to estimate this number), but in the quality of the work.
I’m rewriting it with chapters that allow me to take my time. In third-person. With three point-of-view characters because that’s what it needs right now.
Will this be the final version that I edit and revise until it sparkles enough to query? Maybe, maybe not. But no one is breathing down my back with deadlines, so it will be whatever it needs to be to make the story its best, to make my writing its best.
Breaking Free
I needed mentors in my corner to push and support my play with my creative writing. I’m in the MFA program again, this time for creative nonfiction. This time, I’m playing without being directed to do so.
In this, my first semester, I’ve written narrative essays, political essays, historical essays, and now I’m working on some nature writing which also includes poetry.
I challenge other writers to ask themselves what’s stopping them from playing as they work. Because I learned to play, I found a story I want to tell. I found my voice as a writer. I found out that I have the fortitude (or stubbornness maybe) to keep working on a story from so many different angles until I land on the right approach. I learned about writing in different structures. I learned how to make setting a character, then not a character. I learned more about applying the hero’s journey.
If you’ve never broken free, try it. Put on some Queen. Bust through the gates and lap every competitor: self-doubt, stress, self-imposed deadlines, unproductive expectations. Lap them all and stick your nose out to cross the finish line…and then keep going.
