See Jon’s comment above.

I don’t know a lot about low-res programs, but my sense has always been that they might be MORE conducive to novel-writing than residential programs: because there aren’t weekly workshops, because a novel probably needs to be drafted in solitude, then brought to the table for discussion. But your observation about available writing time is also quite relevant!

To me, the key difference between the forms, which I think is implicit in Harbach’s piece, has to do with community. When you sit down to write, you’re on your own. But if you’re working on stories, you can write a story in a week and turn it in for a workshop and get something out of the workshop. You can build a community of regular reading and discussion around stories, which can be manufactured and read relatively quickly. (Not to say they always are, just that it’s possible.) That community doesn’t have to be an MFA program or a literary journal or an English department, but it often is.

Whereas with a novel you’re on your own for much longer — maybe not 10 years, as in Harbach’s case, but long enough. I don’t see how you could get something out of workshopping a first chapter that you wrote in a week. Without a draft, or at least significant time to assemble a coherent vision, it seems like communal input does more harm than good. At least, that’s my experience; everyone I know who ever workshopped a chapter of an unfinished book eventually abandoned said book — and usually not long after the workshop.

I was really intrigued by your analysis of Downton Abbey’s opening, the reason being that the opening is so staged. There seems to be a fair amount of staging to do in a novel, but you can’t stage anything unless the material is there to begin with.

I’m actually a student in a cultural studies MA far, far away in Romania, a country where there’s only one Creative Writing Master’s that I know of. I’ve never actually had any connection with it and it’s been put on standby anyway due to some sort of conundrum with the Law of Education. Which makes me, I suppose, pretty much self-taught in the art of writing, with a very helpful friend, who is also an editor, mentoring me for a short while a few years back.

Nowadays when it comes to writing there’s just me and the keyboard and a bunch of people on the sidelines seeing what I do and cheering me on. And now there’s your blog which I ran into when I was trying to find out what it is that you do when you enter a creative writing program. I keep reading because it gives me an inkling of the outside writing world. I feel encouraged to know that problems like “short story” vs. “novel” are not mine alone.

I won’t answer your survey in the form since I’m really not the target for them. But a few of them I feel I can answer.

“The best way to learn how to write fiction is develop some level of mastery over the short story before moving on to novels.”

False and true. It depends on where you are, what you’re trying to write and what ‘some level of mastery’ means.

If you’re where I was a few years back and are absolutely terrible with style, I think short stories are the best way to go. They’re easier to throw into the rubbish bin when you realize they’re rubbish and you never want to see them again. With novels the despair you feel when you throw them away is much greater. Even if you just want to rewrite, not entirely abandon, with novels things can get messy and painful.

On the other hand, if you’re at the point right after that, if style is not your biggest issue and you feel daring, doing something like NaNoWriMo can help because you realize what writing a novel means and you learn a lot when you look back and think, “Oh, if only I’d [insert something sensible here]“. Although I think NaNo has its drawbacks as well…

But I don’t think achieving perfection in short stories is necessary to become a perfect novel writer. The forms are too different. You might never be able to bottle essences or, conversely, to hold too many plots and details together. You might even be, horror of horrors, too average for anybody to ever remembr a single thing you wrote in one of those forms. It doesn’t mean you fail at both.

“It is unreasonable to expect an MFA student to complete a publishable novel during an MFA program.”

I think it depends on the writer and the novel. Sometimes you get a Susanna Clarke who needs 10 years to write a complex alternate universe tome-sized novel, at other times you get a speed-writer who can do things fast and well and is going for something decently easy. Those two are not the same thing and you can’t expect the first kind of writer to complete a publishable novel, while I think you really can and maybe should demand it of the second kind.

“In the program I attend or attended, workshops prepared me for thesis work. ”

I’m not going to answer this. But I’ll comment on it. I really wish people who wanted to write any sort of thing intended for publication, fiction or non-fiction, casual or academic, would take at least a semester-long creative writing class. Creative writing by default makes you pay attention to what words you use, what your sentences look like, how readable what you write is. Those things transfer over into anything you write and sometimes you need them.

Those were my two cents. I’m sorry for the length of my reply and even sorrier if you didn’t want my opinion at all

Sarshi.