For this final leg of my MFA at NYU, I’m taking Jonathan Safran Foer’s workshop. This is an incredible opportunity for me; he is one of my absolute favorite writers.

We’ve only had one class so far, but I can already tell it’s going to be an amazing semester. He talked about his thoughts on the purpose of workshop: that he doesn’t think it should necessarily be about trying to incrementally improve a piece of writing; he thinks it should be more about giving us energy and inspiration to write, helping us to keep writing.

Jonathan said that the most important thing about trying to become a successful writer is that you can’t stop writing. You have to find the energy to keep going, to keep writing. This is something that I think all of us already knew. But also it’s something that all of us often forget.

He talked about how so many people think the point of workshop is to take a piece of work that’s already at 93% and try to bring it up to 97%. But he wants us to focus more on the question of necessity: did this piece of work need to have been written? Could you imagine someone one day saying, “this is my favorite story of all time?” And if you can’t imagine it — why are you writing it?