Lucky versus Fortunate: What Are the Odds of Entering an MFA Program in Creative Writing?

Sometimes, I debate whether I'm lucky to be where I am or fortunate. Some would say there's no difference, but I think there is. Luck - for MFA applications - would imply that there's no objective gauge for MFA candidate selections. Professional writers are often quoted regarding how many times their stories were rejected before the first was accepted. I remember that, for myself, there was a time when I believed that all I had to do for publication was to submit stories enough times to enough places, and that the eventually each story would find the "right" place. In the same way, I imagined that I would develop the "right" audience as well. I believed (as we all should, at some level) that my work was very good - I only needed to be "discovered" in order to meet with fame.

My experiences with the MFA process have convinced me that luck is far less important than I once thought. Yes, indeed, luck plays a role - think about "The Wizard of Oz," a wonderful movie which was unlucky enough to face off against "Gone with the Wind" at the Academy Awards. But it only comes in to play after you've cleared the preliminaries. Before you "get lucky," you have to be a good enough writer that your future professors are coming back to read your manuscripts a second time. When an MFA program has four hundred applicants for ten slots, you know that the review committee is just hoping for stories so brilliant - and so memorable - that they can just pick their ten writers and call it a day. But it's never that easy. Out of those four hundred applicants, you know that at least half are pretty good writers. A quarter of them are probably very good, the best writers in their undergraduate workshops (or perhaps the only writers at the office/teaching math/stationed overseas). Every writer of that top 25% knows how to write a sentence, structure a scene, build some tension. Given the varieties of life experience you'd see at this level, many of the stories submitted would be very memorable indeed.

But the selection committee can't take a hundred students. The program can only admit ten. They can only accept 2.5% of their applicant pool. Assuming a couple students get in somewhere else and a few make it in off waitlist (I was waitlisted after I applied, and then was fortunate enough to be acccepted), maybe 3% of the applicants will receive an invitation to our hypothetical program.

This sounds discouraging, I know. Thinking about it nearly prevented me from applying at all. If I could make you forget these numbers, I would, but that wouldn't be right. So instead, I want you to use these numbers to your advantage. By developing yourself as a writer and as a strong MFA candidate, you can nudge your way up into the level of those top twenty or thirty applicants. Not that this alone is enough, but pushing your way up to this level will make it tough for the selection committee to let you go. Once you're in the top ten percent of an applicant pool, luck begins to play a role. A professor who bonds with your work can sway the others, or that time you spent teaching English in Chile might convince them to err on the side of cultural experience.

Over this next series of articles, I'll discuss ways for you to maximize your writing and your experience to improve your chances in any applicant pool. Along the way, I'll discuss how my application experience went, and how it may well differ from the expriences you're likely to have.

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