Kate Moss University… Yes, Seriously

On March 1st, I started Kate Moss University (or KMU as my friends have started calling it).

I’ll give you a few minutes to laugh at me, then we can talk about why.

Done? Great. Let’s talk about the thought behind the admittedly rather bizarre idea.

I’m a writer. Like many writers, I want to write a novel. Actually, I’ve already written one. It was bad. I want to write a good one. But I never seem to find the time. It’s such a monumental task when you approach it. It’s also one of those deeply personal, deeply important things that are terrifying to fail at. It matters to me. That makes it a daunting task to work on. When I have free time, it’s much easier to spend it doing laundry or riding my bike or having coffee with a friend than to sit down and face that fear of failure. As a result, I haven’t made much progress in the year since I finished my last novel.

I was contemplating this problem at the end of February. I’ve been very successful in some other areas of life, especially school and business, and I was trying to think about what made me successful in those areas to see if there were some principles I could apply to my writing life to increase my chances of success. I quickly realized that the primary difference between the task of writing a decent fiction novel and my other goals was one of incremental achievement.When you write a novel, the task and the ultimate goal are the same. There are no real, meaningful benchmarks along the way. I can break the task into mini goals (5,000 page, 50,000 page, etc.), but at the end of the day, every time I sit down to write I am keenly aware that the purpose of the exercise is to contribute to my novel.

This is in direct contrast to both school and work, where you have a variety of assignments, clients, and tasks that each have a purpose and that taken collectively equip you to achieve your ultimate goal. When I am working on a client’s project, my primary goals are to complete the project well, learn the necessary information to do a good job, etc. My secondary career-related goals of being good at my job, getting promoted, earning more responsibility, etc. slip into the background. They ensure that I am diligent in pursuing the primary goals of the project, but they are not the primary goals themselves. The same is true of school. When I complete an assignment, my goal is to achieve the objectives of the assignment. This contributes to my overarching goal of learning necessary skills, getting a good GPA, etc., but allows me to contribute to those larger goals in incremental achievements rather than being immobilized by the important and inherently vague goal of “learning necessary skills.”

I started brainstorming a way to map my real writing goal – to write a decent novel – onto the incremental achievement framework I had used effectively in my academic and professional lives. The result was Kate Moss University. There’s something about the creative mind that functions well with many constraints rather than few. We all think we want freedom, but the blank page is one of the most intimidating forces in a writer’s life. I can spend days wrestling with where to start the open-ended task of writing a novel, but if you tell me write a five page story about a secret agent, a lizard, a coffee plantation, and a colony of killer bees, I’ll be off and running almost before I’ve finished reading the assignment.

With this thought in mind, I designed my degree–a Master’s in Fictional Studies. It’s a four year program made up of classes that will either strengthen specific writing skills, allow me to write chunks of my novel, or equip me with non-writing skills that are valuable to writers (social media, business, etc.). Here’s the tentative class schedule as it stands today:

All classes are three credits unless they have a (1) next to them. The (1) credit classes are the fluffy ones designed to stretch me creatively or pick up smaller “nice to have” skills.

I also made a course description for each of my first semester classes. This includes a textbook (yes, I found a textbook for each), assignments, and a final project for each. Then I put together a comprehensive syllabus that broke down my assignments by week for each class.

I’m about three weeks in and it’s been a little bit difficult transitioning back into “school” mode. Luckily all of my assignments are awesome or it would be hard to do them without a teacher there to impose the discipline of a deadline. I really like this idea. It doesn’t scare me the way the thought of just running right into another novel does. But it doesn’t feel like a detour either. It feels like I’m playing to my strengths to help me reach my goal. And that’s a pretty amazing feeling.

So what do you think? Am I crazy? A genius? Both? Maybe just a little Type A?

I’d say that I’m open to new students, but I can’t imagine any of you are crazy enough and/or loved school enough to be interested.

I’d love to hear your suggestions on ways to improve my curriculum or help impose my internal deadlines more firmly. Maybe I’ll post my assignments for your review. That would keep me on my toes…

Also, I’m accepting mascot ideas. It should probably be writing-related because the only degree available is in fictional studies. On the other hand, the “fighting books” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.

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