Please do give "Wishing is Not a Strategy: Ben Tanzer on Hope, Diligence and the Writing Life" here, enjoy some excerpt below, most definitely consider joining us on April 30th, and if you have any questions please give me a shout as well, because I'd be thrilled to connect.
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I was in class the other night, and a professor called me a "diligent" writer.
Before I continue, let's note that, yes, I'm a student again. I'm pursuing a very part-time Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA). I'm not sure I'll ever finish this degree, though if I do I hope it will lead to some interesting teaching and training opportunities down the road.
Opportunities, such as faculty positions, I do not qualify for now.
In this way, I'm playing the long game. I'm also actively seeking to ensure there is a long game and I'm doing everything I can to identify and pursue the action steps necessary along the way to be in a position to ensure that happens---or at least I'm thinking strategically about what I need to do in case I find myself in a position to pursue something I want when I want it.
I'm sure this doesn't sound very sexy or romantic.
You want to write, I want to write, we all want to write, and want to be published too. We want to lead lives as writers and what does this have to do with any of that?
Hear me out.
I wanted to enroll in a MFA program for years. Decades really. When I last attended graduate school, I was pursuing a degree and a career in social work. I got that degree and I got that career, and I feel blessed that I did.
Which is to say, I came up with a plan, I pursued it, and despite the opportunities that have not emerged, and the failures, and firings, that happened along the way, I have a fulfilling career, doing impactful work, and I've succeeded more often than not.
What I haven't done is wished for these things to happen, I've made them happen, and to quote Dr. Chan Hellmann, who I'll return to in a moment, I've had to make them happen, as do you, because "Wishing is not a strategy."
"Being diligent, treating writing like work, scheduling it, setting goals, never approaching it as precious or expendable... has allowed me to write and has opened doors to being published even when those other things were going on."
I share this not because I want to flex, though if doing so encourages you to enroll in my Writing Workshops workshop "Introducing the Power of Hope to Our Writing Process," then I'm happy to flex. No, I'm sharing this because I wanted to enroll in an MFA program from almost the moment I finished my graduate studies in social work.
I'd never written a sentence until after that program, and when I started writing a year to two later, all I wanted was to go back to school for an MFA, a degree I'd never heard of until I started writing, which was after my other Masters, and now here we are. The thing is, there was my career, ambition, children, not enough time, my personal writing practice, which I'll return to that in a moment as well, and the cost of enrolling in a program, all of which felt daunting, and I began to wish that some way to work it out would just find me.
This lasted for the next 25 years, and reader, nothing found me and it didn't work out.
Until now.