Why I'm Dropping Out Of The MFA

MFA musings # 1,347

Fiction is having a nervous breakdown, and it's beautiful. ¹

This is my last semester in my MFA program. Not because I'm failing. Not because I can't afford it. Because the real writing isn't happening in classrooms anymore.

Students care more about passing than writing. They sit in workshops, nodding at each other's pristine sentences trying to perfect prose pretending it’s literature but it’s exposition that all sounds the same.

Nine courses in, and they're making me take marketing classes. I have an MBA. I have a full portfolio of client results. But apparently I need to learn how to write a business plan and resume for my novel.

Meanwhile, published authors and no-names are making real money directly from readers on Substack. ²

I'm not saying I'm better than this or that I know it all, I'm saying the work that matters is happening somewhere else.

The Machine Is Broken

The MFA machine keeps pumping out identical voices. Workshop darlings who write beautiful sentences about nothing. Students worry more about pleasing professors than creating something that matters. They've turned fiction into a product you can manufacture if you follow the right steps.

Step one: Write what you know. Step two: Make it literary. Step three: Submit to journals no one reads. Step four: Apply for teaching jobs. Step five: Repeat until dead.

Meanwhile, big media is hemorrhaging writers to Substack. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times are all watching their talent walk away. Why? Because people are done with perfection. Done with prose that sounds like it was focus-grouped. And most literary fiction reeks of workshop notes.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life has 170,000 current readers on Goodreads. Sally Rooney's Normal People has 72,000. These books aren't pretty, they're brutal. Yanagihara writes trauma like a confession booth. Rooney writes millennial sex like its an addiction and Ottessa Moshfegh creates protagonists so disgusting you can't stop watching.

These aren't just books. They're beautiful, necessary car crashes.

Publishing knows this. They're hunting for the next My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Books that don't trend, they transgress. Editors want the next Great American Breakdown, not the next Great American Novel.

But they're looking in the wrong place.

The Real Revolution

The revolution is happening on Substack. Chuck Palahniuk shares industry isights and offers contests for his subscribers to get published. George Saunders teaches creative writing.³ Moshfegh uses it as her only social media. These aren't side hustles, they're revolutions.

Direct income. Creative control. Nobody deciding what goes out and when.

Traditional publishing is scrambling to catch up. But these writers already evolved. They're building reader relationships without asking permission from MFA committees or journal editors who think experimental fiction peaked in 1987.

What I'm Writing Instead

My novel Safe Words for the Damned lives where literary fiction meets erotic transgression. It's psychological fiction stripped down to bone. Transgressive minimalism that admits it wants to cut deep.

I write about control and collapse. About people who use power as identity and submission as revelation. About masculinity in freefall and the cost of never breaking character.

It's for readers who devour My Dark Vanessa, Big Swiss, A Certain Hunger. Readers who don't want redemption, they want recognition. They're tired of literature that treats men like problems to be solved instead of humans to be understood.

My readers don't need happy endings. They need honest ones.

Why This Matters

I don't write from academia. I write from survival. Marine. Air traffic controller. Single father. Three jobs where perfection is mandatory and intimacy is poison.⁴ I know what happens when the performance cracks.

That fracture is my territory.

The MFA appears to care more about empty promises and numbers than it does about writing. It wants us to workshop everything until it's smooth and meaningless. But readers don't want just another writer, they want honesty. They want writers willing to try something different instead of hiding behind beautiful metaphors .

The Future Is Here

The future belongs to writers who know the best literature doesn't make you a better person, it makes you feel less alone in being exactly who you are.

Substack, small press, major imprint, doesn't matter. I know my shelf. Right next to books that tell truth when truth hurts. Especially when truth hurts.

That's not just where my book belongs. That's why it matters.

1. This started as an assignment about the literary ecosystem. I was supposed to analyze current trends and position my work within them. But writing it, I realized I’m done with the MFA.

2. Yes, I realize it's easier to make money if you have a big name. I'm simply saying if all these authors are here, that tells you something is happening.

3. Saunders has 300,000 subscribers. Even at 1% conversion to paid ($5/month), that's $15K monthly. His Substack probably earns more than most MFA professor salaries.

4. Yes, I see the irony of using academic footnotes to critique academia. Sometimes you have to burn the house down with its own matches.