The Portable MFA in Creative Writing

I'm a graduate, or maybe I should say survivor, of what was considered a prestiguous MFA program, and I can truthfully say that not only would The Portable MFA in Creative Writing have helped me then, but it certainly would have proved invaluable if I had decided to forego the MFA experience and write on my own in a cabin by a lake in Ontario. I knew Tim Tomlinson in a former lifetime and I'm happy to see that he has become a wise, helpful guide in leading readers through the section on fiction writing in The Portable MFA. There definitely is a craft to fiction writing, which goes along with a writer's innate ability, and Tim approaches the subject as one who could almost be considered a friend trying to offer sincere advice from experience, experience which includes years of teaching. Likewise, Charles Salzberg comes off as a natural born teacher in offering practical advice about the craft of magazine writing. As you read his insights, you can't help but feel that Salzberg is a three-dimensional person and extremely dedicated teacher who wants what's best for each individual reader, There are many good books on the craft of writing but I rank The Portable MFA certainly up within the top five. I am not a poet or a playwright but the sections on these disciplines in The Portable MFA are also interesting and enlightening. In short, this book is a great investment for both beginning writers, as well as experienced writers with many publications to their credit. One can always learn new things and The Portable MFA refreshed my creative drive and also prompted me to see truths I knew from a new perspective well worth many, many times more than the cost of this great book.

I've read most of the classic writing texts and would rank The Portable MFA with the very best. It's smart, succinct, well-concieved, and sprinkled with doable exercises that actually prove useful (a first, in my experience). Tim Tomlinson's fiction section alone is worth the price, but there are lessons to be gleaned from each of the forms discussed by these excellent writers. To paraphrase somebody-or-other: It's an MFA without the boring parts.

Just finished THE PORTABLE MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING by NEW YORK WRITERS WORKSHOP. It impresses me as a book for the pros, not the academics. No dull jargon, no preposterous theory, just the straight dope on writing in five different forms. Since I'm primarily a poet, I spent the most time with Rita Gabis's section -- it's like Mary Oliver's POETRY HANDBOOK meets THE ARTIST'S WAY. You can't read this book without developing the habit of writing, and in the ten-to-twelve days that I've had my copy, I've seen my work improve. This book is indispensable.

This book has it all: how to write fiction, how to write plays, how to write for magazines... It's the best single source on writing that I've found so far (and I've read almost all of them).

I found The Portable MFA incredibly useful, not only because it provides useful tips that any writer (I myself am a fiction writer just out of college) can apply to his work but it also made me want to write and be a part of the writing world. The fiction chapter (again, that's my personal genre of interest) wove personal opinion, literary anecdote, and practical info all together so impressively. My own favorite lesson was about flashbacks and the potential drawback in their tendency to be used for explanation, esp when writing a memoiresque piece (there's a separate chapter on personal essay and memoir but there is of course a lot of overlap) - so many writers, including myself, write to be understood, to share, to have others point and say, 'Yes,that is just how I feel,' but the danger is that we write for catharsis not for storytelling - that we write when we should simply be visiting a therapist. The flashback is a tell-tale sign that I'm sinking into the pitfall, though it does have its merits. Also, appreciated the comments about peppering description into a heavily-dialogued passage in order to ground the characters in space and time. I know some of my dialogue can drift into the abstract void otherwise. Overall, it's a fun read and an encouraging experience - just what you'd expect from an MFA program.