Project 2004: I Don't Want to Play Anymore

When I announced I created my own curriculum for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I promised I would keep you up to date on how it was for me (in case you want to give it a try yourself). The honest version is... most of it was boring.

Self-Paced MFA Curriculum (1997-Style) | Project 2004

Free self-paced MFA in fiction, modeled on a 1997 university program. Session 1 curriculum, reading list, 9-week schedule. No paywall, no cohort.

Kristin McTiernanKristin McTiernan

I don't mean that in the "my attention span is shot" way (even though it is). I mean boring in the specific, tedious sense of covering ground I've already covered. I majored in English Literature as an undergrad and I've been editing fiction professionally for years. Not to mention publishing my own. So when the Burroway textbook walked me through showing versus telling and the fundamentals of scene construction, I was basically sitting through a lecture I could've taught myself.

But I did the work anyway, which is the whole premise of a structured program. You don't get to skip the parts that feel beneath you, or make you pine for TikTok slop. Discipline is the only thing that separates people who talk about improving their craft from people who actually do it. So I read the damn chapters and did the writing exercises.

I apologize if that's an underwhelming update but what's true for me may not be true for you, especially if you didn't major in English.

The thing is, even the boring parts keep revealing truths I'd forgotten, plus fun literary references that remind me of what it felt like to be erudite and well-read. The experience also made me more excited for Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners in the second semester. O'Connor's thinking on the relationship between belief and fiction connects directly to the kind of moral criticism I'm doing on this site and on the YouTube channel. So I doubt that will bore me.

Of course Project 2004 has always been about more than the MFA. The original idea was that the older version of things was frequently better than what replaced it, and that hypothesis keeps getting proven everywhere I look. Including places I wasn't expecting.

Everything Sucks on Purpose

I've been watching a lot of Zac Rios on YouTube lately. If you haven't found him, he compiles TikToks by theme, and two themes keep coming back because his audience can't get enough of them: the abysmal build quality of new vehicles and the equally abysmal build quality of new homes.

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