A Book(ish) Life: Karis Rogerson

How to keep up a writing practice after finishing grad school

Hello, friends! Today I’m thrilled to welcome a pre-published friend of mine: Karis Rogerson, who is a brilliant writer and a recent graduate of VCFA. She’s sharing some tips for carving out a writing practice after school ends - advice, I think, that is applicable to all of us. Read on for her wise words!

I graduated from my two-year MFA in January 2024. It took about six months for the burn-out to catch up to me — but rest assured, it sure did catch up.

The first thing to internalize when it comes to planning how you’re going to maintain a writing practice after finishing a degree in it is that there will come a time when you simply have to take a break. Some people feel that way immediately upon graduation, falling into a writing slump within days of walking the stage. Others, like me, have a bit of momentum to carry them through the immediate aftermath. But eventually, everyone has to pause.

This isn’t because of any failure to prepare or anything like that. It’s just that creative writing programs, especially at the MFA or PhD levels, are…incredibly intense. There’s a lot of work jam-packed into a couple of years. Something about having an end date for the experience makes it feel possible to keep going and push through, to keep working, to make the time and the sacrifices required of you.

And then, suddenly, you’re on the other side of the degree. Time expands in front of you endlessly, but so do other commitments. While I was doing my MFA, I devoted myself most week nights and weekend days to my school work. That was time that I set aside to read and write, with occasional days off for book events or, even more rarely, socializing with friends at dinners or for birthdays.

It wasn’t easy to do so, but knowing that I was working toward my degree and that I had to make sacrifices assuaged some of my guilt about it. But then I’d graduated, and I no longer had to spend 25 hours a week on my craft, and suddenly spending a Friday night at home reading and writing seemed less studious, more loser-like.

I know this is compounded for writers with different life situations than mine. I work full-time, but don’t have a partner or children to take care of. I don’t live near family and am not a caretaker for anyone. I imagine that being a writer with a full-time job, a partner, kids, family nearby, a social life, requires an amount of juggling I haven’t had to face yet.

The second thing to know about continuing your writing practice after you graduate is that it’s okay if you spend less time with books than you did while you were in school. To call back to what I said earlier, grad school is an intensive period that’s meant to stretch you and, in another way, compress you — force you to hone in on something and devote hours and hours to it until you’ve come as close to mastering it as you can. It’s genuinely not possible to keep up that amount of intensity indefinitely.

I no longer spend 25 hours a week on my reading and writing. Hardly! Instead, I’ve made more reasonable goals for myself; most importantly, I give myself grace and days off, times when I go out for drinks with friends, or hop on a FaceTime with someone I haven’t seen in a while, or even just lay in bed and watch TV.

The truth is, keeping up your writing practice after you finish a graduate degree — it’s going to be hard. It’s going to require sacrifices, just like it did during school. So while you plan to take breaks, take your work seriously, and give yourself grace for days you can’t sit down to write, you should also give yourself permission to make those sacrifices.

Maybe it means saying no to drinks one week, or asking your partner to do the dishes so you can stay in the zone. Maybe it means the laundry doesn’t get done as quickly. It might be uncomfortable, to make space for creativity without the external validation of a deadline or a grade. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

Making time to write can be tough, no matter what your life circumstances are. It’s easy to fall into guilt-tripping when a period of intense productivity ends, but life is cyclical. If your well is empty and you need to take time to refill it, rest easy in the knowledge that it will eventually be full again. Your creativity isn’t going to leave you. Not even if you take a years-long break. It’s yours, forever.

About Karis

Karis Rogerson is a writer, reader, and podcaster who was born in South Carolina, raised in Italy, schooled in Germany and Kentucky, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her work fiction is represented by Eric Smith, and she's written nonfiction pieces of all stripes for various websites since 2015. She has an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from VCFA. You can find her weekly newsletter at karisrogerson.substack.com, follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/karisselizabeth/, and listen to her podcast The Write Way of Life on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.