[flickr id=”6187190675″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]

I was catching up with my friend Kurt, who did Semester in LA, then spent the summer in his native Kansas City. After we ate some pork chops and ran through our inside jokes, we moved on to the “how’s the writing going?” portion of the convo.

I said, “I wrote a lot this summer, but I feel like I’ve done a little work on a lot of things. I wish I had finished more pieces. I want more results.”

And Kurt said, “That’s good, though. We should be leaving grad school with a body of work, not a couple of polished stories.”

It made me feel a better. Sure, we come to grad school with a 200-page thesis hanging over our heads, but school isn’t focused exclusively on that one project. We’re constantly creating new material, with opportunities to rewrite every few weeks. By the end of each semester, I’ve got a couple of semi-polished stories, and a handful of first drafts. They have multiplied over the years. Now, I’ve got a few published pieces, a couple that I am currently submitting, a handful of works in progress and, perhaps most importantly, a vault of material to pull from in the future.

This is good. I’ll be done with school in May, and I won’t have classes to go to every week to keep me motivated. That’s when I’ll begin dipping into my bank of first drafts for things to work on. As I’m rewriting something that I started in class in 2009, inspiration for a new piece is bound to strike. That’s the thing about writing, it’s like the Old Testament in the Bible: writing begats writing, begats writing, begats writing… To keep writing, you have to…keep writing.

[flickr id=”6187707962″ thumbnail=”medium_640″ overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]

Then again, there’s a fine line between “building a body of work” and being “the writer who never does a second draft.” Yes, you want to have a few stories in the quiver, but you don’t want to move on too quickly when you’ve got that Old Testament momentum. Your teachers are showing you how to generate material, but also offering guidance on second drafts, third drafts, rewrites, thousandth drafts, and publishing, and they won’t be there to help you once you graduate.

A big problem is that there is no instant gratification for writers. Writing a story takes a long time, and the publishing process can take even longer. I’ve got two stories that have been haunting me since I started at Columbia three years ago. I’ve worked on them in class, done countless drafts, rewritten them from memory and showed them to friends for advice, and they still don’t feel right. If they ever get published, the most satisfying thing will be knowing that I can stop worrying about tweaking them. Then, I’ve got a story that I worked on for six months, that was then accepted for a book. A year and a half later, that book is yet to come out.

It goes to show that, in writing, things take forever. Sometimes, a first draft has to sit in your hard drive for two years before you look at it again, and that’s OK. It’s part of your body of work, and returning to it should be part of your process as a writer.

WEEK LINKS:

Adam Drent is just wrapping up his MFA at Columbia, and has found a unique way of publishing his stories: as MP3s. Visit his site HugePop.com to hear him read his Bedtime Stories.