What I’m Looking for in an MFA Application for Fiction
Woman working on a laptop
MFA applications are tough. Notoriously so. As the director of an MFA program, I see the odds every year. We’re a smaller, more regional program, and we still admit fewer than 10% of applicants. Other programs have even lower admittance rates. (Just down the road, the rumor is that Vanderbilt admits fewer than 2% of applicants!) Many writers apply to a dozen or more programs, often completely striking out during their first application round.
So it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that I receive a lot of emails asking for advice in applying. Here’s my best advice for applying in the genre of fiction, my area of expertise (and please keep in mind that this is only one person’s advice, and that this may not be the case for all application reviewers!):
The writing sample is the single most important document in your application. Full stop. Nothing else is as important as the fiction sample you send us. It is the first thing I look at when I open your applicant file, and I take that impression with me as I evaluate your other documents.
So what makes a writing sample stand out in a good way? First, let me say that, as with so much of the writing world, step number one is not standing out in a bad way. Are you following the submission guidelines? (Honestly, you’d be surprised by how many apps don’t.) Are you formatting the document correctly (double-spaced, normal font, page numbers)? Show that you can be a professional in this industry by following instructions and industry norms.
Second, I’m looking for a voice on the page, something that indicates the fiction is alive. Voice (and this aliveness) is hard to pin down, but what I’m asking here is does this feel like a story or a writing exercise? I have a lot of thoughts about voice that don’t fit here (another blog post one day?), but if you feel like your fiction doesn’t move, doesn’t crackle with life, one of the best exercises I know is to imagine the listener of your story. Francine Prose does a great job talking about this concept in READING LIKE A WRITER, Chapter 5: Narration. Here’s a short excerpt from that chapter:
“This hurdle describes itself as the question of voice and of who is telling the story … when in fact the truly problematic question is: Who is listening? On what occasion is the story being told, and why? Is the protagonist projecting this heartfelt confession out into the ozone, and if so, what is the proper tone to assume when the ozone is one’s audience?”
Give your fiction an audience of another character in the book, and suddenly your prose lines up nicely. (I’ve written more about this exercise here.)
I get some questions here about grammar, typos, etc. Typos are not an issue — one or two (or five!) mistakes in a 20-pp manuscript will not bother me. But grammar? If it looks like you are struggling to put a sentence together, that’s not a great sign. (And back to voice, here — if you’re deliberately breaking grammar rules, the reader wants to know that it’s intentional, a choice made by the author for character or setting reasons.)
The second most important thing is the statement of purpose (aka the letter of application). This is not a place to talk about your “passion for writing” — if you do this, you’ll only echo what every other generic application is saying. This is the place to talk about your story — how did you come to be a writer? Why are you applying for an MFA? What do you hope to accomplish in your MFA (and maybe even in your career)?
Why are you applying to our program? This is often a tough section to draft, and students often go through the program’s Faculty pages to name drop the writers on staff. This isn’t necessary, but if you genuinely want to work with someone (say my NYT-bestselling colleague, David Bell), it’s okay to tell us that and to tell us why. It’s less effective to be vague — it comes off as insincere, and again, it’s unnecessary. You can talk about the region, about the city, about anything specific to the program. It might help if you had a conversation with someone first — try to articulate why you’re applying to every program on your list. Is there an alum you admire? A genre focus? (At WKU, for example, we offer a concentration in screenwriting, one of the few funded screenwriting programs housed in an English department in the country).
Could be important: letters of recommendation. I’ve seen letters of recommendation make or break an application, but generally, these are less important to the committee than the first two documents. Where letters of rec come in is with graduate assistantships: if we’re offering this person a job teaching or in the writing center or as a tutor or any number of other things, can we trust them to be a good employee? To show up to their classes? To be okay in front of a classroom of freshmen?
One tip here: when you’re asking for letters of recommendation, ask your recommender if they can write a strong letter on your behalf. We get a lot of letters that demonstrate reservations on the part of the letter writer — that’s not a case that’s going to do you any good. If a letter writer can’t write strongly on your behalf, you should ask someone else. It shouldn’t feel like pressure but should just be part of the question.(And, incidentally, if you bring this up when you ask the person, and they hesitate, that’s a good thing that you find that out!)
Less important to not important at all: GPA, transcripts, GRE scores, if required. For me, these items are important for the graduate school, not MFA admissions. To explain, your application first goes to the graduate school, and they collect your file and make sure that you’re meeting all the minimum requirements stated in the application. Once the graduate school has vetted the application, I don’t even really care (and again, this is just my POV!) about your GPA. Lots of writers had low GPAs in undergrad. I will occasionally glance at the transcript to see what courses you’ve taken and with whom, but by this time, my mind is usually made up by reading your other documents first.
Okay, now for an unfortunate truth. There are more worthy applications than there are spots. We can usually eliminate a good 50% of the applications, but there is always some cluster at the top that is really competitive. And here’s where the subjective part of art comes in: once we get to the point where we have 10 deserving writers and 2 spots, I might select someone different than another person might select. Does that make sense? Every year, we turn down writers I would LOVE to work with. There just aren’t enough spots, and it’s the hardest part of this whole process.
But here’s what you can control:
Your sample. Make it somehow alive. Make your characters feel real and like they exist outside of your pages. Make them want something and do something because of that want.
Your letter. Make it specific. Tell us who you are, why you want to get your MFA, and why you want to get it at our program.
Good luck this application season, and let me know how it goes!