The MFA Tic and the Salon Breath


The MFA Tic and the Salon Breath

One night in Paris, I sat in a smoky café where the conversations spilled like jazz. Everyone interrupted each other, ideas circled back on themselves, and the air was thick with wine and argument. Nothing was neat, nothing was efficient, yet I left that night with my mind alive, haunted, changed.

That is what I mean by Salon writing.

I have written more than seventy screenplays and ghosted nearly as many. That experience shapes how I read contemporary fiction. When I open many of today’s MFA-trained novels, I feel as if I am reading film treatments. The stories are tight, efficient, and cinematic in their forward drive. Sentences are short and polished, arcs are predictable, dialogue snaps like television writing, and description is pared down until it could belong to anyone, anywhere.

These are the tics of the MFA style:

1. Clipped sentences dominate. Short, declarative, tidy lines with little variation in rhythm.

2. Minimal description. Atmosphere, smell, and texture are sacrificed for speed.

3. “Show, don’t tell” as law. Interior thought and commentary are cut in favor of external action.

4. Clean arcs, predictable shape. Stories resolve into neat structures, often indistinguishable from screenplays.

5. Fear of digression. Tangents and repetitions are trimmed as “indulgent.”

6. Workshop polish. Pages emerge gleaming and neat, but the rough edge of lived life is lost.

And here is what Salon writing does instead:

1. Varied rhythm. Long, wandering sentences sit beside fragments, echoing the cadences of thought.

2. Atmosphere and texture. Description is not a luxury but the body of the work.

3. Telling as well as showing. Reflection, philosophy, and commentary are central to the experience.

4. Open form. Stories resist neatness and closure, allowing life’s raggedness to remain.

5. Embrace of digression. Tangents, contradictions, and repetitions are essential to the depth of meaning.

6. Living texture. The page is not polished into uniformity but layered like conversation, sometimes uneven, sometimes luminous.

Why editors shy away from Salon writing

Editors have grown wary of Salon writing for understandable reasons. It is harder to shape, harder to sell, and harder to defend in a market that prizes speed and clarity. The MFA style delivers books that are clean, efficient, and easy to move through editorial pipelines. Salon writing, with its layered sentences, shifting rhythms, philosophical tangents, and historical allusions, resists such packaging.

Why agents and editors miss Salon writing

Most agents and editors today are highly skilled at recognizing the MFA style. They know how to spot clean prose, clear arcs, and dialogue that crackles with workshop precision. They know how to package this work because it matches what the industry has been producing for decades.

But when they encounter a manuscript in the Salon tradition, many do not know what they are looking at. They mistake digression for lack of control, complexity of rhythm for sloppiness, philosophical reflection for indulgence, and intellectual density for pretension. In truth, these are not flaws but the very qualities that define the tradition.

This is not a failure of intelligence but of training. MFA programs have created a standard lens, and the industry has adopted it wholesale. What falls outside that lens is often invisible, or worse, misjudged.

Why the shift toward MFA style happened

The dominance of MFA programs in the United States over the past fifty years institutionalized one way of writing. Workshops emphasize craft over contemplation, clarity over complexity, polish over resonance. This has produced generations of writers whose primary training is to eliminate risk in prose. The rise of the MFA style also dovetailed with publishing’s increasing focus on marketability: novels that resemble film treatments are easier to sell in a culture saturated with screens.

Great MFA-style writers

There are writers who thrive within this pared-down model because they have the artistry to make it sing. Among them:

• Raymond Carver

• Tobias Wolff

• Jhumpa Lahiri

• Denis Johnson

• George Saunders

• Elizabeth Strout

• Cormac McCarthy (though he bends it toward the biblical)

• Colson Whitehead (in his leaner works)

These writers demonstrate the MFA style at its highest level. Their sentences cut with precision, their minimalism holds weight, their arcs feel inevitable rather than mechanical. But they are exceptions, not the rule. For every writer of this caliber, there are dozens whose work feels shaped more by workshop rules than by artistic necessity.

The choice before us

Too often, editors dismiss Salon manuscripts as indulgent or undisciplined, when in fact they are reaching for something older and slower, something that dares to reflect the true rhythms of thought and life. MFA polish and Salon expansiveness both have their place, but when one becomes the default, literature narrows.

Why this matters now

The dominance of the MFA style coincided with the rise of a culture obsessed with speed. Screens, notifications, and streaming have trained us to skim, swipe, and move on. Yet many readers are resisting this. They want more than novels that feel like action-adventure movies in prose. They are looking for books that reward lingering, rereading, and returning.

Salon writing is converting readers because it offers precisely what the market has forgotten: complexity, atmosphere, and the intellectual companionship of a voice that dares to think on the page. These readers are not asking for escape but for depth, not for distraction but for presence.

Contemporary writers leaning into Salon style

Across genres, there are authors today whose success proves that Salon writing can thrive. They win prizes, build loyal audiences, and remind us that readers hunger for more than cinematic efficiency.

• W. G. Sebald – Austerlitz

• Olga Tokarczuk – Flights, The Books of Jacob (Nobel Prize)

• Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle

• Rachel Cusk – Outline trilogy

• Ben Lerner – 10:04

• Valeria Luiselli – Lost Children Archive

• Annie Ernaux – The Years (Nobel Prize)

• Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping, Gilead (Pulitzer)

• Colm Tóibín – The Magician

• Teju Cole – Open City

Prize recognition

Major prizes increasingly validate this return to Salon sensibilities. The Nobel Prizes to Tokarczuk and Ernaux, the Booker Prizes awarded to Tokarczuk and Ben Okri (The Famished Road), the acclaim for Knausgaard and Sebald, the Pulitzer for Marilynne Robinson, the Women’s Prize for Rachel Cusk — all show that when Salon writing is done well, it does not merely survive but flourishes.

The future

Fiction should not only hook like a headline. It should wound, linger, intoxicate, and refuse to be shaken off. Salon writing is not indulgence. It is necessity. It is the antidote to a literary culture that has confused clarity with depth, and neatness with truth.

For editors and agents

When you encounter a manuscript that seems unruly, with sentences that wander, paragraphs that sprawl, and pages that resist easy summary, pause before you reject it. Ask yourself: is this lack of polish, or is it the deliberate rhythm of another tradition?

Look for the following signs:

• Does the prose move with music, varying between long cadences and sudden fragments?

• Does the narrative invite digression, layering history, philosophy, or memory into the story?

• Does the text create atmosphere so rich that the setting feels as alive as the characters?

• Does the voice challenge you to slow down, to dwell, to reread?

If so, you may be looking at Salon writing. Do not flatten it into MFA neatness. Recognize it for what it is: a lineage as old as Montaigne and Proust, as alive today in Tokarczuk, Sebald, Ernaux, and Robinson.

Readers are already hungry for this kind of work. Your task is not to make it conform but to champion it.

 

Check out more of my essays at https://scottdodgson.substack.com and join the discussion.


 

Comments

Post a Comment

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Popular posts from this blog

The Art of Crossing: Transitions in Salon Writing

Image
Please Visit My Website The Art of Crossing: Transitions in Salon Writing Transition is one of the least discussed arts of fiction. We talk endlessly about beginnings and endings, character, dialogue, point of view, exposition, structure, pace, all the things a novel is supposed to do while it is going somewhere. Transition gets treated as connective tissue, a little carpentry between rooms, something the writer should accomplish quietly enough that nobody notices the hammer. I have come to think almost the opposite is true, particularly in the kind of novel I think of as a salon novel. The transition is often where the deepest work is being done. It is the place where one time becomes another, where one consciousness admits another consciousness, where history enters the present without knocking, where a landscape suddenly ceases to be scenery and becomes memory. It is not simply how the writer gets from here to there. Sometimes it is the moment we discover that here and there have be...
Read more

The Novel as Poor Theater

Image
The Novel as Poor Theater A return to Grotowski, and the idea that stripped means can yield spiritual amplitude when presence is strong enough. There is a kind of novel that behaves like a well-funded theatrical production. It comes furnished, as if the writer feared an empty room. It has scenery, machinery, a lighting plan, costume changes, marked entrances and exits, a sound design, a publicity department, and a plot that behaves like stage management. Everything arrives on cue. Every emotion has been anticipated. Every silence has been filled before the reader can inhabit it. Much of contemporary fiction has moved in this direction because it distrusts emptiness, distrusts patience, and distrusts the reader’s ability to remain present unless something is happening in the most obvious dramatic sense. It wants propulsion because it no longer trusts attention. It wants escalation because it no longer trusts pressure. It wants event because it no longer believes that a sentence, if inha...
Read more

The Intimacy Of Mind

Image
Author's Note: This essay, like many of the essays I write, came out of the actual business of writing a novel. I rarely know in advance what the deeper argument of a book is going to be. I find it by following the characters, by noticing what keeps returning, by listening when a scene begins to mean more than I intended. Sometimes I stop because a character has done something I do not quite understand. Sometimes an image keeps appearing, or an old question comes back wearing different clothes. Then I begin writing around it, not to explain the novel so much as to understand what the novel may already know. These essays grow out of that process. They are part reflection, part excavation, part conversation with the work itself. The novel changes the essay, the essay sometimes changes the novel, and both keep moving toward questions I did not know I was asking when I began.Romantic intellectual intimacy occurs when desire is not simply for the other person, but for continued access t...
Read more