Apologies from your LRW Professor, the Part-Time Creative Writing MFA Student DOWNLOAD PDF

Dear students:

I hope you experienced productive summers and are enjoying your second year of law school. As you begin submitting law clerk applications for next summer, I encourage you to revisit the memoranda and briefs that you completed in my legal writing class last year. With revision, they would make appropriate writing samples to accompany your applications. I’m sorry that I’m not on campus to help you polish your written work product. I’ve decided to use my sabbatical year to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.

And it’s kicking my ass.

After trudging in circles in your metaphoric shoes for a bit, I realize that I owe you an apology. These novice writing boots we share are exciting to slip into. I had anticipated that they would also be uncomfortable. But this uncomfortable? Now that they are rubbing my heels raw, I must say I’m sorry. Transitioning to a new discipline is no joke. The writing tasks you completed for my class were complex and frustrating. They required you to take risks and to make yourself vulnerable. I’m sorry that I was not more sympathetic to your struggle.

Recently I’ve been thinking that much of my instruction probably felt useless to at least some of you. You were novice legal writers placed in my care, and I made an effort to guide you.  I gave you instructions, explanations, and examples. I answered your questions. I offered you templates. I shared my high expectations with you, and then I sent you on your way. I stocked your pantry with all the ingredients I would ever want to incorporate into a recipe, and so I expected you to serve me a five-star meal. You all missed the mark by a few stars, and I was not shy about telling you so. My blunt criticism grew from my desire to see you succeed. 

But did you hear it that way? I doubt it.

Could I have been more realistic? More patient with you beginners? Those are rhetorical questions; please, don’t answer.

I don’t have a great track record confronting unfamiliar and strenuous demands. In college, I spent about a month—maybe two—rowing crew in the novice eight. I was undersized and overwhelmed. Five a.m. is not my best time of day; out on the water, I was cold, tired, and, obviously, full of excuses. I quit. My coach didn’t try to stop me, either. That’s probably because I didn’t display enough strength, endurance, or—more importantly—discipline and grit to prove that I had real potential.

You know, the discipline and grit I lectured you about? The resilience I required of you?  I didn’t have it. I feel hypocritical reflecting on how eagerly I turned my back on crew because it was hard. And it wasn’t even legal-writing hard. 

That’s not all. I continue to protect myself from failure with respect to other endeavors.  In mountain biking, I am a perpetual beginner; fear of falling stunts my improvement. I brake when I should accelerate, and—at least so far—I’ve been unable to override that instinct. So I don’t practice very often. It’s just too exhausting. In tennis, I have plateaued, unwilling to fight through the barriers to improvement. My reaction time and legs are not going to get me to that ball, I think, and so I don’t even try. My gear is in great shape, but my downhill cornering and my serve are not.

Legal writing was never especially hard for me. It was time consuming and taxing, but it was also enjoyable and intuitive. Even when I was a first-year law student, legal writing clicked.  My ability to organize a legal argument far surpassed my ability to organize my office or my sock drawer. Concision and precision came naturally. Topic sentences and transitions automatically populated my documents. My attention to detail was high, and my knowledge of grammar and punctuation was solid. So while some aspects of the first year of law school tested me, my legal writing class and assignments provided a safe and comfortable escape from the curricular requirements that made me sweat.

I have digressed. Creative writing allows that in a way that legal writing does not. Creative writing permits me to wander, while legal writing demands that I focus. And creative writers get to ask readers to make leaps and connect dots, while legal writers can leave none of that to chance. “Do the hard work, so your reader doesn’t have to,” you probably heard me say. “Hold your reader’s hand; lead her through your logic.” Did you understand what I meant? Did you know how to apply that advice? I thought you should, but now I see that those soundbites may have left you more puzzled than prepared.

As a creative writing graduate student, satisfying reader expectations remains important, but I’m afforded new freedoms that allow for playful experimentation. Abandon chronology.  Replace seamless logic with collage. Permit—no, invite—competing interpretations of my written ideas. I’ll share a secret: I am considering writing an essay entirely in the passive voice, complete with nominalizations and other surplus language that I am accustomed to excising from your writing and my own. “Show, don’t tell,” right? What better way to show the reader the challenges all those writing choices create than to lean hard on them, mocking their lack of utility while causing readers to pull out their hair at the roots? I could, but won’t need to, insert a signpost or other obvious transition for you when I finally return to the topic of this letter: how I may have shortchanged you in class. I’m learning a new set of rules, rules that represent a fairly dramatic shift from the legal writing fundamentals that I insisted you follow.

Exploring this new landscape is liberating and exciting, but it’s also terrifying. (Is that how you felt, too? Terrified? I was striving to cultivate in you heightened curiosity and a strong work ethic, not terror. If I created terror where it could have been avoided, I am so sorry.) In creative writing, with many of my default rules obviated, my templates obsolete, my instincts calibrated for a different discipline, I question every single writing decision I make, annihilating my productivity. My inner editor appears before I put my fingertips on my keyboard; and once I start moving, the foreign terrain drops like a trap door beneath me. I do see the holes I keep falling into, and so I try to jump over them, but each time I leap forward, I twist my ankle. 

No, really. I have literally sprained my ankle three times this year because I have been lost in thought, brainstorming essays while walking. Writing is powerful; it can also be dangerous.

Many of you must have felt the same way in my class. While I told you that writing and polishing predictive and persuasive legal analysis was challenging, I forgot the bitter taste and gritty texture of your writing struggle until now, as I am eating it. I feel a bit like I do when I start down an unfamiliar trail on my mountain bike. I ride my brakes hard, disrupting my own momentum and stability. I worry so deeply about nicking a tree with my handlebars that I cause that very mishap. Did I ever tell you to stop overthinking things? How’d that go for you, because I tell myself the same thing, yet I am overthinking myself into collisions with trees.

I have not touched my mountain bike since my last fall. Meanwhile, in my class, after your paper score was low because you jumbled your analysis, omitted a key judicial decision, or ran out of time to proofread, you kept going. That is exceptional. It’s been easy for me to walk away from the discomforts I face as a novice—to quit the crew team and to stick to comfortably cruising wide paths on my bike. In my legal writing class, you didn’t get to walk away, and you didn’t get to park yourself indefinitely in easy terrain. You had to push yourself through the self-doubt and pain. And you did.

Now that I am pushing through this writing, editing, feedback-receiving, revising discomfort like you did last year, I’m wondering: with my creative writing novice experience to build on, how can I make your classroom successors’ journey smoother?

I think I’ll tell more stories, and many of them will have no obvious connection to legal writing. Just as fiction can be a more effective vehicle than non-fiction for communicating important truths, stories from outside the world of legal writing—or outside the law in general—can convey critical lessons that help students strengthen their legal writing skills and develop healthy writing habits. Explaining and modeling best practices only got us so far. My refined approach will include more normalizing through storytelling. I’ll talk about falling off my bike after hitting a tree; about quitting the crew and roller derby teams (yes, I tried that too, also very briefly); and about staring down a blank screen as a creative writing deadline looms. I used to question my legal writing colleague who spent class time showing students video footage of the perfect wave. (You know who you are. Please accept my apologies for doubting your technique.) Why? Now I think I might show my own students footage of a roller skater achieving a state of flow on the Venice boardwalk. It’s a powerful metaphor for writing, so why not?

Also, I’m going to stop presenting the four-part Flowers paradigm as gospel. Remember that wisdom I shared with you, over and over and over again? Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge? I presented Flowers and her cast of characters as the formula for efficient writing, even though the paradigm offers me limited utility. It is a useful starting point for thinking about process and efficiency—an idealized version of what remains a messy, non-linear process for me no matter how hard I try to tame it. I can be more honest about that going forward. Flowers may be a tool, but it’s not a guaranteed cure for writer’s block, procrastination, or any other ailment.  Because the process paradigm I preach neither magically improves my efficiency nor represents my true process, I suspect that it was not especially useful for some of you, either. Not one of you ever disclosed that to me; you are all far too polite. Flowers gave us a shared vocabulary in our discussions: “Send your judge away; bring back your madman!” But I’m not sure that, as I presented it, it offered us much more than a cute conversation code.

Facing impending deadlines on novel assignments has been a useful reminder for me of the paralyzing concerns that students confront when wading into the waters of an unfamiliar discipline. I have long understood that a student’s delay in getting moving is not necessarily a sign of diligence deficiency; rather, it is often perfectionism that leads to procrastination.  Students, including myself, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking, or really fretting, about an assignment, without placing any words on a page. To manage the silencing effect of perfectionism, I have suggested madman freewriting—brainstorming without judgment or self-censorship. We discussed how seemingly far-fetched ideas may beget a winning argument, and so I instructed you to turn off your judge. She has no role in this endeavor until we reach the end of a long process. Send her packing for now.

It’s nice enough advice in theory. But in practice? Please. I’ve been jogging and sprinting, and I’ve concluded that I cannot outrun my inner judge. Nor can I change my path to escape her critical gaze. She is behind my back, on my shoulder, and in my head. She is loud.  She is insistent. She is silencing me. Now what? Inviting my madman in, giving her time and unimpeded access to my keyboard, has only gotten me so far. No sooner are my ideas on the page than I begin to attack them. That self-sabotage makes progress slow and painful. I plan to be honest with my future students about this. I am with them in this struggle.

Finally, I commit to enhancing the individualized feedback I deliver. I know that I drowned many of you with written comments, offering so much feedback that defeat sometimes eclipsed your drive. I imagine you feel like I do when my tennis teacher tells me to remember all the things we’ve been working on—swing low to high, keep my eye on the ball, stay light on my feet, and loosen my grip—then instructs me to relax and not think so hard. One can only implement so many pieces of advice at a time. My new feedback approach must prioritize, well, prioritizing.

It must also offer more genuine encouragement to keep moving in a positive direction.  My MFA program has reminded me of the value of customized, open-minded, and encouraging reactions from mentors and peer readers; they have sometimes found promising nuggets buried in drafts that I am ready to toss. I’ve developed some habits to save time while evaluating, scoring, and offering constructive criticism on forty or so versions of the same analysis, each submitted with an anonymous number rather than a student-writer’s name. I sometimes have given “positive” comments that have offered about as much value to your learning as a marshmallow can contribute to your daily nutrition. “Meeting the legal reader’s expectations requires hard work. You’re getting there; keep pushing yourself,” I have suggested. “But how?” you might have wondered. “In what way?” 

Or I have written, “I see your effort.” Sometimes I have seen the effort, but other times that’s been a fib. That’s not fair. Going forward, I will always see the effort. Always. Even on a blank page. If the effort is not yielding dividends, I’ll say that instead. And if I think a student has given up, I’ll say that, too, and more. I’ll tell students not to quit the team. To get back on the bike. To pick up the racket. “This is tricky,” I’ll say. “Here, let me show you.”

In closing, again, I’m sorry that I’m not with you on campus to help you polish your writing samples, but I’m so glad to have joined you in the broad community of novice writers, struggling to adjust to the expectations of a new discipline. If you need me, I’ll be icing my ankle in front of my laptop while working to extinguish self-doubt and generate compelling fiction.  Above all, remember that you remain at the beginning of a long professional journey. You have much to learn, but you’ve already demonstrated your great potential to me.

Sending admiration for your resilience and my warm wishes,

Your Professor