Long, long ago in a writing program far, far away, an idiot and his idiot story were dragged into the red-hot torture seat, the one with the spikes beside the jeroboam of leeches and the bucket of acid. Of course that’s how it was. Of course the idiot was me.
But you realize that. What you don’t realize is a famous two-book wonder guest-taught there for a semester and said we practiced the “Zen-inquisition” method. We did. Another, perhaps less famous but no less horrified and intimidated guest-teacher called the program “butch.” It was. Did they expect anything else? I, for one, had come to welcome the abuse.
Here was my story. Here was the inquisition chair. Here was my twerpy classmate, wasting two years of his trust fund, whose signature workshop comment was, “Maybe if the writer understood dialogue, this scene would have worked,” gleefully pumping the bellows, getting the iron good and hot.
Our professor had just offered his customary start-of-workshop invocation, “What are you people actually doing here?” It was an opening which always made him chuckle as if he were coming up with it for the first time. He slid my 20-page manuscript out and looked at it. He didn’t read it. He didn’t page through it to review his margin comments and line edits. There were no margin comments and line edits. There was only the slab of paper before him like a fish he had to eat.
When the most dateable girl in the program, the one who could do no wrong in any workshop run by this professor, summoned her opaque critique face, I knew it was on. For the next 90 minutes, I’d be receiving what a friend of mine liked to call, “The Royal Rubdown.” The Dirty Dissection. The Opprobrious Ordeal. Yes. I’d be put to the question. Confess! Confess! Only, I wouldn’t be allowed to speak. So others would confess for me. Maybe if the writer knew how to use dramatic tension, this scene would have worked.
But I lived. Over time, the torture chair, the emotional thumbscrews, the medieval chirurgeoning, the uncompromising imposition of the MFA workshop style made us hard. My inquisitors splashed the acid, but I was laughing on the inside—as I knew my colleagues would be when they were dragged into the chair. Everyone got their moment, their opportunity to laugh on the inside.
The professor would often ask the person being workshopped whether he wouldn’t be better served somewhere far away, doing something else, as if a rational, self-aware person would clearly find that the most reasonable option. But getting MFAed in fiction seemed to indicate a priori that we were neither rational nor self-aware.
Then he’d grin. And that was the worst. There was no warmth in that grin. I invited the grounding effect of the leeches when that happened. A light dash of acid. Perhaps a few degrees hotter on the chair spikes to bring me down to earth from that terrible unamused grin.
To be fair, he was powerfully hung over much of the time. And so were we. To be even more fair, he was an excellent fiction writer. But so were we. In the hindsight of years, I’ve slowly come to realize that we were all talented, all good, all had the guiding star that causes people to choose art instead of a fulfilling career in pesticide sales or human resource management. The creative heroin. It’s a helluva drug. But at the time, most of us were convinced we were talentless pretenders. After thinking about it, I’ve come to believe our professor felt that about himself, too.
But whatever. It was what it was. It was what it wasn’t. And it was highly traumatic both ways. Maybe if the writer knew how to be vulnerable in front of a room of nervous, competitive, somewhat Stockholm-syndromed mean girls, the MFA could have worked. Because it didn’t. It couldn’t. All it was was time and space.
Time to write. A small space carved out for creative development. For years, I’ve written about that as something extremely valuable in itself. But the shops? The Royal Rubdowns? None of us learned anything from those except how to nurse deep psychic wounds for months or how to angrily reject an entire room of one’s peers without uttering a word in self-defense.
I was mostly in group two, the Angry Rejectors. Too weird to vanish from sight, too macho (butch?) to take it like a freshly paddled schoolboy. When my twerpy classmate smirked and said to the table had the writer known, when the ingenue of the century pulled up her workshop face and mumbled passive-aggressive things people invariably asked her to repeat, when a catty status-anxious colleague pounced in retaliation for some imagined slight in some dingy classroom at some earlier time, I laughed on the inside and thought, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Because that’s all it was. An opinion from the netherworld of the MFA Industrial Complex expressing itself through insecure 24-year-old mouths. The training we were getting was speaking through us. Later, we’d have to untrain, deprogram, and write essays about it in order to produce fiction that didn’t function like literary Xanax.
Now we’re all Substacking in Virgina Slims’ kitchen: you’ve come a long way, baby. We have. But it’s hella hot in here. We can take the heat. We suffered on the inquisition chair all those years ago. We’ve got the callused backsides to prove it. Thick skin? Child, you have no idea. Still, not everybody’s like that. Not everybody can withstand the rubdown.
On Substack, in particular, the kitchen gets hot and some people can’t take it. Virginia has every burner dialed up to high in mixed writerly company: school kids, college “aspiring writers,” YA stylesheet laborers, pulp-noir-weird tale imitators, journalists on the grift, journalists off the grift, metaphysical embodiments of the grift as yet to be classified by traditional western science, bricks through the Overton Window, MFA convalescents, Andrew Tates, your cousin who’s deeply into novels about werewolf dungeon explorers, The New Yorker having its usual case of slick-magazine FOMO. Even Margaret Atwood. But we don’t talk about Margaret Atwood.
What we talk about is whether so-and-so’s writing is any good. We talk about it constantly, sometimes behind a self-deprecating façade, but it’s there all the time: so-and-so is a talentless hack; so-and-so is a brilliant savant; so-and-so bores me; I want to have so-and-so’s babies; I hope so-and-so self-immolates; I’m taking midnight dictation from my cat so don’t blame me; well, this reads like your cat wrote it—no it was my hamster he’s the literary one. All things around, about, beneath, in the middle, in spite of, in lust and torment and longing of and for writing. Because Substack started and remains, to a certain extent, a writer’s platform, which, in turn, implies a certain degree of inquisitorial distress.
Substack, connect me with other writers and creatives. “Be careful what you wish for,” says Virginia as she flips a pancake over a three-inch gas flame. Just know what you’re asking. Because not everybody welcomes the inquisition chair. Not everyone’s ready for the Royal Rub-a-Dub-Dub and maybe if this writer understood what Substack is for, she wouldn’t be lonely and ignored and unloved and scorned and her writing wouldn’t suck like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s wind tunnel on a Thursday. Maybe. And people with my background will often shrug and say, “If you can’t take the heat . . . ”
But no. That heat was never productive, never did what it was supposed to do. It only caused pathological levels of anxiety that got in the way, that we had to transcend later in order to keep writing. See, Virginia isn’t actually one of us. She’s an agent of the system. She’s keeping the burners up to keep the algorithm at a rolling boil. You’ve come a long way in spite of the heat, baby.
So when I see a kid posting her first short story—which is probably just fine and might even be a work of art—I’m not going to let the Substack Industrial Complex speak through my mouth. It won’t be knives out. It’ll be: “Good for you. Keep going. Don’t read the comments. Use the block button. Don’t compare yourself to other writers. And put your time in as regularly as you can.” Because art, like life, is ultimately an expression of love. And somewhere, there’s a star in the East glittering just for you. Pack your bags right now and get going. You need to follow it.