Category Archives: On Writing

MFA vs. NYC vs. N-E-T

A few weeks ago, I learned something relatively innocuous. I learned that one of friend-quaintances is working on an MFA.

I have plenty of friends who are writers. I have friends (and foes) who are working journalists, who write things for millions of readers. In spite of knowing these friends are more “famous” than I am, it hasn’t really caused me to feel jealous.

But this felt different.

It’s difficult to explain, but I felt … not jealous, but kind of pained. Dejected? Weird? Sad? I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it felt weird to find out that someone I thought I knew would post that they were working on a novel.

And then — because I’m self-absorbed and unattractive, and prone to doing all sorts of ridiculous things — I wondered if any of her characters were inspired by me.

… probably not.

I do all of my writing online, with all of my material being self-hosted(ish) and self-published. I post fun stuff over here on my personal site and I post my serious stuff on Medium, so I’ve generally shrugged at the MFA vs. NYC debates — especially in the current era. We live in a time where journalists and writers are having to work at building an online presence, in spite of their hard work elsewhere. Journalists, novelists, poets, and artists are forced to become influencers and content creators if they want to continue “staying relevant,” “building their brand,” or … you know … possibly getting paid a living wage.

That last one seems more critical than the other two.

I often encourage writing for the sake of writing, even without a degree or fancy credentials or 200,000 followers.

People ought to be paid for their creative efforts, of course, but I don’t think people need to feel as if their writing is somehow less valuable because they’re a blogger without a degree, or a hobbyist, or a newbie.

Even the folks who will never get an MFA, who will never set foot inside a publishing company, who will never have a professional byline — all of these folks should keep writing.

Not under pressure or under duress — and not without recognition and compensation (of some sort). Write poems for your partner, if they’ll appreciate them. Share your work with friends and/or family. Maybe you can only share your work with Internet friends — but that can be freeing and helpful, too. It’s a way of building community, of sharing your skills, of participating in the world.

My hope is that all writers — hobbyists, professionals, people who are somewhere in between — will keep writing until we can figure out a more sustainable model for everyone to get a fair shake at things.

CBO (Chief Blogging Officer)

I was a teenager in the days before Vine — right before Vine, I should say. Vine was a big thing when I was a young college student. (I remember trying to film Vines at Bonnaroo, which was another experience that defined that stage in my life. Both of those things shaped the bulk of my personality back in 2013.)

We had Vine, sure, but we didn’t have lots of ways to watch what other people were up to. We could read blogs or Facebook posts, but the world of vlogging? That was definitely more of a niche thing. I’m sure there were vloggers, but the world hadn’t yet pivoted-to-video. At that point, we couldn’t even post videos on Instagram.

We watched MTV, if we wanted to see real-life eccentricity. (“Eccentricity” covers a lot of territory: the delightfully-eccentric good, the cringeworthy bad, and the maddeningly wild.)

MTV even came to my super-country high school to audition someone for True Life or Made, or one of those reality shows. They decided not to film at our school. I don’t know if they couldn’t find anything worth filming, or if something else happened. But we didn’t miss our turn in the spotlight. A couple years later, a television crew from another country came to our school to film a specific club, because said club won a national championship. That was a cool experience.)

There were other shows that appealed to our desire to watch people do bizarre things. We didn’t have ice cream so good, but we had trashy television. We watched things like To Catch A Predator and Jerry Springer. Two of my high school classmates even acted on appeared on an episode of Jerry.

I didn’t go with them, so I never got my beads.

We also watched a lot of YouTube skits. In the era before people filmed their beauty hauls, their skincare routines, and their video game play-throughs, people filmed annoying skits and posted them online. Two of my friends and I even got together to plan a bunch of silly YouTube skits, which we wrote scripts for, but never filmed or posted. And that’s a shame, because both of these friends are artists. One of them is a professional photographer, so the videos would’ve been high-quality. But I know I’m not a natural-born performer, so … I’m glad there isn’t video evidence of my bad acting.

The kids who visited Jerry? They were stars! They got beads!

This was back around 2010, 2011, 2012. We didn’t have Vine. We didn’t have TikTok. We didn’t have Twitch.

All of that stuff is new. And I see this evolution as a good thing, because … I’ve decided I’m going to try get ahead of the curve. I’m going to turn my focus to the Generation Alpha and Generation Beta demographics. But first, I need to convince them that ✨blogging✨ is cool. Blogging is it, baby!

When we bring back the pre-Ice Road Truckers Weather Channel, just to have something vaporwave-y vintage to vibe to, we also need to bring back Blogspot-style blogging. The general vibe of that era, from 1999 to 2009, was fascinating. Those were the original years of realizing things. And I want to revisit that era. I want to convince everyone that blogging is the next big sphere of influenceability.

I want to stumble upon a Bulgarian math teacher’s music blog. I want to scroll through an uptight Mormon woman’s recipes. And I want to read about what’s happening to a random design student in Toronto, or Berlin, or Lagos.

I don’t want memes or filters or trends. I want to read confessionals, I want to read workplace/classroom gossip, and I want to read poorly-written poetry. I just … I just want to read someone’s diary.

I want to stare into your blog, baby. Is that too much to ask?!

What I Post — And Where I Post It

SUBSTACK: This is where I post posted my random musings. (I’m Doyle Harcavy.) It’s like a written podcast — news-y stuff and current trends and observations. It’s also a bit like pages from a diary — I sprinkle in details about my own reactions to current events.

MEDIUM: This is where I post essays about being a young woman, about living in the South, and about family history.

THREADS and BLUESKY: Quippy stuff. These are half-formed thoughts.

SUBSTACK NOTES: Too long to be a Thread, too short to be in the newsletter — that’s where these thoughts go. I’m probably not going to be using Substack in 2024, though.

TIKTOK: I’ve posted a few video essays — but only very short ones. I tend to stick to a three-to-five minute framework. Like I’m in a public speaking class.

WATTPAD: I used to post poems on Wattpad — and on AO3. Roses are red, violets are blue, be glad that I don’t inflict my poems on you.

JAMAIS MAYVILLE: This is where I post silly little thoughts, silly big thoughts, and a little bit of everything.

A-Fiction

After spending the past year writing essays on Medium and newsletters on Substack, I’ve accepted that I’m more of a non-fiction writer/essayist/blogger/ex-journalist than an author of fiction.

I’ve tried writing fiction. I think anyone who enjoys writing for the sake of writing — or storytelling for the sake of storytelling — has made up a character or two. Or they’ve built a secret world, or drawn up a fake map, or imagined a new place.

And I’m not just talking about fantasy writers — I’m talking about folks who write romance, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, and dozens of other genres and sub-genres. Inventing fake people, fake colleges, fake bands, fake music festivals, fake contests, fake romances, and fake countries is pretty fun — and it’s common across the genres.

Having said that, I have such a tough time writing fiction, because I often fall back on my real life for inspiration. I can write about stuff I don’t know about. (I love doing research — and I’ve always worked in research-heavy fields, so I know where to find good sources.) But I like to write about real people and real memories and real places.

Lately, I’ve spent time working on a … short story? A novella? I don’t even know what I want it to be — I don’t want to overwrite it, so I imagine it will be fairly short.

Even though I don’t know how much I’m going to write, or how I want to end it, I know that what I’m writing is a love letter to three separate, imperfect parts of the South: the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, the river-lined wedge of western Kentucky, and the wide-open Llano Estacado, in western Texas.

I’ve written before about another part of the country my family hailed from — the Chesapeake and Outer Banks areas. I wrote a bit about these parts of the world in Alameda and Sabrita, two short stories I wrote back in my early twenties. That was a while ago, when I was first getting my footing as a writer. (I’m still getting my footing, all things being equal.)

But this new story — Old Granddad — has the flavors of the other places my family has called home.

Speaking broadly, I come from a part of the country that’s been a land of growth and a land of cutting-down. Black and Indigenous people, poor people, working-class folks, and women and children have faced adversity — and triumphed against it — in this place: the South.

My own family eked out a living by doing just about every typical working-class job. From the earliest colonial years, my ancestors were sharecroppers — and at least one of my ancestors was an enslaved person of Congolese descent. These early ancestors of mine certainly didn’t have an easy time here in the South. But our family remained here for generations, making a living one way or another.

My great-grandmother was a sharecropper, a clothing factory seamstress, and a caregiver for her murdered brother’s children. Her daughter, my maternal grandmother, was a maid and a hairdresser. My maternal grandfather was a veteran, a cattle farmer, and a machinist. My paternal grandfather was a coal miner, a crane operator, and a logger.

His father — my great-grandfather — was a bit more carefree. He spent all day doing nothing, and then spent all night drinking and playing cards. He once sold a box of turnips weighted down with rocks, and the grocer bought it, so I can’t say he didn’t make at least one attempt to feed the family. But my paternal great-grandfather was the direct opposite of my maternal great-grandmother, who nearly broke her back working as hard as — if not harder than — any man in her family.

At the end of the day, my maternal great-grandmother and my grandfathers were probably the three hardest working people in our family. Their toiling was brutal — and they were underpaid, under-thanked, and under-rewarded. Their effort was all worth it, and they knew love and respect and support, but they never could be thanked fully and properly for all the sacrifices they made.

These two sides, paternal and maternal, met in me. I’m three parts hard-working, one part ready to take a break. (That’s thanks to my great-grandfather, who made recreation his life’s work.) I feel like I owe them all something that I can’t quite give them.

In some small way — to record bits and pieces of their stories, and to incorporate these stories in whatever I’m writing — I hope I can preserve their memory. FI may not be able to do a lot, but I want to try to do that.

I want them to live in, in stories, in recollections, in warm memories. They live on, in the writing and the reading, in the pictures, in the words.

Jesus Be An Editor

Around here, and on Twitter, I occasionally hear people say, “Jesus be a fence.”

Right now — to be brutally honest — I’m finding some members of my immediate family to be annoying, so I often find myself asking for Jesus to be a security fence between them and me.

Protect my mind and my fists, Lord. Inshallah it never comes to blows.

But I also find myself asking for divine intervention in other areas of my life.

Today, as I was alone with my thoughts, I started thinking about the folks who work in PR. These people go out and film things, and then they go back to their editing suites, and then they produce the final package. They’re responsible for the whole thing.

As I write and post things on Medium and Substack, I start to get excited. Not overwhelmed, not really, but jumpy. I have something that’s ninety-five percent complete — but then I start getting antsy.

I’ll be editing something, chopping over here and adding over there, and then I think, “Surely this is it. Surely I can go ahead and click Publish. Surely it’s done. But what if it isn’t? What if I need to go back and …?”

I start to wonder if I need a user’s manual, or at least a little guidance.

There are industry standards, I’m sure, in making advertisements and things of that nature. But what about personal essays, and blog posts, and newsletters? How will I know when I’ve met all the terms and conditions? How will I know?

Then I realize that it’s probably a good thing to have a little freedom. It gives me a chance to use my own voice and do my own thing, without having to be hyper-vigilant or punishing myself. I can just … exist.

And I’m pretty good at doing that.

I Am A Publisher

A while back, on another blog, I wrote about the Golden Age of Blogging.

Between 2004 and 2009, you could surf the web and find all sorts of blogs.

Mormon mommy blogs, with super short paragraphs and long, long photo dumps. Blogs run by German high schoolers, where they’d wax poetic about their favorite music — My Chemical Romance, Justice, Tokio Hotel. (Those were the usual suspects.) Blogs that were only created for a class project, only to be abandoned a few months later.

I actually enjoyed those the most. It was fascinating to find a three-to-six-month time frame preserved in amber like that. A digital scrapbook of sorts. I love it!

But … that was then. And this is now.

I have to say, I only got back into long(er) form writing when I started (1) posting essays on Medium, (2) blogging on WordPress again, and (3) writing a monthly Substack newsletter.

I do all of this for fun, by the way. Not for money. Although …

Where’s that Donate button? There’s got to be a Donate button or block or widget that I can insert on here and … Nah. I won’t do it.

This time.

Anyway, I’m not here to give tips on how to make money by writing short little blog posts. I’m just here to say that I only got back into long form writing because of the downfall of Twitter.

Between 2009 and 2023, I wrote roughly 21,000 tweets, most of which I didn’t delete.

I look back now and laugh at this — but when I was 19 or 20, I realized that (like many others before me) I wanted to write a novel. I figured I needed to write around 75,000 words — so I was constantly doing math. 500 words a day, and I’ll be done in just a few months! 100 words a day, and … I can spread this out over the years, right?

No book materialized. Not even a novella. I will say, I kept a 200-word schedule up for about a month or so, which is impressive. I had a 700-day language-learning streak on Drops, which I also eventually quit keeping up with. But other than the streak on Drops, I would have to say that my regular attempts at writing …

Well, it gave me something to be proud of. I was proud that I kept chipping away at it. And I did churn out a lot of words — some of them were pretty good. But there were no novels, no novellas, and no short stories.

I repurposed some of the more colorful descriptions into poems, and I compiled those into a little chapbook. It sounds pretentious — and maybe it is. 🫠 I can see how it might seem pretentious, even though I genuinely love poems and poetry. Even the ol’ epic poetry. But I digress.

I never managed to produce a novel, despite my best attempts at word-counting.

Like counting calories, which can also feel like wasted effort.

When I saw, though, that I’d posted 21,000 tweets, I felt even sillier. There they were — my 75,000 words!

If each tweet were at least six words long — and I’d say many of mine were longer— then I’d have 126,000 words under my belt. A novel and a novella.

I realized — about a month ago, actually, when they were threatening to purge inactive accounts and the accounts of deceased users — that someday, all of those tweets would probably disappear.

So I immediately downloaded my archive and uploaded everything I could to the Internet Archive. It took about a day and a half, but it’s there now. It’s preserved.

Until someone goes after THAT website — Lord, don’t let him try to acquire the Internet Archive! Millions of pages will be taken down overnight. My chest is hurting at the thought of that happening. “OhhhhhhmyyyGodddd, nowayyyeeayyeeeayyyyyyaaaay!”

But … whew. I need to calm myself down right quick. Genuine terror struck my heart. Damn.

In any case, I may never publish a novel — although I am working on writing one. Just for me. Just for fun.

But even if I never publish a novel, I have “published” things online. Forget the quotation marks — we can just drop those. I don’t need to try to qualify what I’m saying here, because this is a blog entry, and not a scholarly paper. I can just be literal, without trying to write defensively.

The Internet has enabled all of us to be publishers. With just a single click, I am my own Simon & Schuster.

Now I am become the Big 1, publisher of words.

I have published tweets. I have published blog posts. I have published newsletters. I have published poems on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. I have published reviews on Letterboxd and Goodreads. And it only took one click to call myself a publisher.

Someone else is doing the hosting, I realize. But I am the writer, the editor, the marketing department, the sales department, and the publisher.

The sales department is being really lazy, by the way. One of them suggested adding a Donate button to the blog instead of actually trying to sell anything. Can you believe that?!

… I have to go now. I need to add publisher to my LinkedIn.

Thinking About Writing > Writing

With that title, I’m (only sort of) joking. Today, I’ve been thinking about all of the things I like to write about.

There are all of these familiar elements in the fiction I write and post elsewhere. I like to write about young women who feel lost, fatigued, or out-of-place in this world as it exists now, with its constrictions and social mores. I think these feelings are universal, outside of gender or ethnicity or lifestyle or … anything else, really.

I think it was Brandon Taylor who wrote about Banana Yoshimoto — if I remember correctly, it was one of his pieces. It was a review of one of Yoshimoto’s story collections. I’d just finished reading Kitchen, so I wanted to read more about the writer and her work.

The reviewer pointed out that for all of the lonely women her books are about, she always seems to retain a genuine warmth in her stories. Plenty of people write about lonely people — but I want to write about lonely or uncertain people who have still managed to carve out some time for fun, or pleasure, or enjoyment. Or satisfaction.

That’s what I’m looking for — the satisfying thing, whatever it is.