The MFA Effect: How American Workshop Style Took Over the Literary World
I came to this realization the hard way. After publishing several novels, I struggled to find an agent willing to take on my most recent work. The responses were warm but consistent: the writing was too expansive, too slow to unfold, too dense for today’s market. I began to wonder if I was out of step, not with literature itself, but with the prevailing tastes shaped by MFA programs. It was then that a poet friend, David Rigsbee, said something that stayed with me: "A novelist must be a little dumb so the story can evolve slowly." That line clarified everything. My writing wasn’t economic enough because I wasn’t trying to be. I was trying to write novels that breathed, lingered, and refused to be skimmed. What I had been told was a weakness, I came to understand, was a deliberate choice.
My novels,The Bohemian Angels, Le Pécheur, The History of Water, and *L’Auteur *embody this approach. Each one resists the compact, highly curated polish of workshop fiction. The Bohemian Angels is a historical epic set against revolutionary Europe, written with the density and introspection that demands full immersion. Le Pécheur travels into the heart of moral ambiguity, fusing allegory with psychological realism. The History of Water blends speculative science with humanitarian tragedy and metaphysical inquiry. L’Auteur explores art, betrayal, and ambition through a lens deeply indebted to the spirit of European cinema, particularly the French New Wave. That movement’s insistence on fragmentation, improvisation, and philosophical interiority opened a door for me, helping me realize that I am, at heart, a European salon writer, one who favors conversation, reflection, and intellectual tension over clean narrative arcs. None of these books are designed to be consumed quickly. They require attention, openness, and time the very things today’s market seems less willing to grant.
In recent decades, the influence of American Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs has reshaped the landscape of contemporary fiction. What began as a pedagogical method to cultivate writers through community and craft has evolved into a dominant aesthetic force, one that now defines much of what is published, reviewed, and taught as literary fiction in the English-speaking world.
The MFA workshop, refined at institutions like Iowa Writers' Workshop, Columbia, and NYU, established a signature style: concise, image-driven, interior. Emphasizing "show, don’t tell," emotional restraint, and minimal exposition, this method has elevated short stories and novels that are tight in structure and subtle in sentiment. It rewards economy, thematic modesty, and tonal control. At its best, it produces fiction of luminous clarity. But this very refinement has also narrowed the range of what is published.
Writers outside this orbit, those favoring expansive prose, philosophical digression, moral and political weight, or stylistic flamboyance, often find themselves marginalized. Global styles, experimental narratives, and longer-form meditative fiction are too frequently passed over in favor of what might be called "MFA realism": smart, spare, domestic, often cautious. The success of this style is reinforced by a network of agents, editors, and review outlets educated within or adjacent to the MFA system.
What has emerged is a kind of homogenization. An "MFA voice" now signals craft competency but not always originality or vision. The result is a literary marketplace saturated with well-turned novels that read smoothly but rarely risk spiritual, intellectual, or structural upheaval. Aesthetic ambition is often mistaken for excess. And the long, demanding, beautifully messy novel, the kind that asks readers to dwell in sentences and ideas, is increasingly rare.
Yet, resistance is growing. Authors like Marlon James, Rachel Cusk, Olga Tokarczuk, and W.G. Sebald exemplify alternative modes: polyphonic, essayistic, digressive, politically daring. Many of these voices come from outside the U.S. or write deliberately against the constraints of MFA-encoded fiction.
The question isn't whether MFA programs have value. They do. But as publishers increasingly filter new work through the stylistic assumptions of these programs, it becomes vital to ask what gets excluded. Are we cultivating literature, or simply manufacturing craft?
In a world beset by crisis and complexity, we need novels that feel larger than their word counts, novels willing to be unwieldy, challenging, impolite. MFA-style fiction may dominate the shelves, but it is the outlier voice, the so-called "dumb" novelist who lets the story evolve slowly and organically, who might ultimately restore fiction to its proper ambition.
This means not only reimagining how we teach writing, but also how we publish it. The future of serious fiction depends on finding agents and publishers willing to champion work that does not conform to workshop norms, but instead dares to be strange, slow, ambitious, and alive. Only by nurturing the real novel, the patient novel, the novel that devours and renews, can we hope to escape the narrowing corridor of literary fashion.