At your daily office job, conceal that you're applying to graduate school. Conceal that you write at all. Your best piece so far--a story in the fashionable present tense, closely mirroring the style of a certain New Yorker-approved writer--happens to be about an arsonist. You can't imagine your colleagues reading your work and still believing you are sane. Do not consider the fact that this might also apply to readers of MFA applications.

Sign up for a writing workshop, where you will hear the valuable opinions of other writers just like you. In the week before your story is due, sharpen the dialogue in the scene where the arsonist meets his love interest. He finds her loitering around the abandoned mansion he plans to burn next, and discovers she's an arts-and-crafts geek who wants to salvage old wall paper. Add a few paragraphs to the climax, when he twitches and trembles and finally burns the house down.

At workshop, plaster an awkward smile on your face as the class settles down to eviscerate your story. First, some tepid compliments. Your description of the fire is good. Your description of the protagonist's fire-setting procedure is worryingly good.

But... The whole story is rather, ah, dramatic. Such things never happen in Raymond Carver stories. You are told to read some Raymond Carver and ponder his glorious subtlety. Talk proceeds to the ending. Half the class loves the current finale, where guy ends up with girl and they live criminally ever after. Half the class hates it. Any woman with a brain in her head would run the other way as soon as she discovers his hobby. All female characters must have brains in their heads, so as not to be misogynist.

At home the next day, flip through ten marked-up copies of your story, feeling overwhelmed by red ink. Decide to work on the ending. Since opinions are equally split, flip a coin. Heads: the characters should break up. Edit the story to reflect this.

Using The Creative Writing MFA Handbook, pick twelve schools and start filling out their application forms online. Prepare an Excel spreadsheet listing the different application materials and deadlines. Email your current workshop leader, a past mentor, and a college professor to ask for recommendations.

Labor over your story for two to three hours each night after work. Improve the description of the decrepit mansion on page three. Evaluate the logistics of how your characters get there. Start drafting a personal statement about how you spend so much time writing, and you've been published in a few online journals, and now, rationally, this is all you want to do.

Study for the GRE. On a sample math section--you were a music major, and haven't done math in over five years--you score 40%. Get a numbers-loving friend to tutor you. Struggle to remember the difference between exponents and fractions. When taking practice tests, try not to think about how you could be spending this time writing.

On the day of the test, bring a bottle of water and a vegetarian burrito from Qdoba, as there's no chance you'll do well if you're hungry. Enter the windowless room of cubicles feeling queasy. This is unusual for you. You've always been a good test taker. For the essay question, write that yes, democracy is the best form of government. Ace the verbal. Struggle through math. Despite feeling lightheaded, persevere through all four hours. Send your scores to your top choice programs: Michener, Iowa, Wisconsin, Cornell.

The next few days, feel sick whenever you take a bite of food until you are dizzy from not eating. Throw up whenever you do eat something. Miss a day of work, and then another. Feel frustrated that you are too tired to work on applications despite the extra time. Protest when your parents come to get you from your apartment, but fall asleep in their car in your dirty pajamas. By the time your urine turns orange and you haven't eaten anything for three days, your mother takes you to the emergency room where a blood test shows that you have mono. Cry as you realize that you have lost seven days of writing and will probably miss more.

It's now late November, and you can barely stay awake four hours a day. Spend one hour a day writing. Spend the rest of your awake time attempting to sip protein shakes. Hide upstairs when the relatives come over for Thanksgiving. Scramble to finish personal statements and critical essays while you hear everyone else talking and playing games.

In the first week of December, send an application a day, telling yourself that done is better than perfect. Over Christmas, complete the last round of edits, mail your Iowa application, and settle down to wait. Try not to think about graduate school during January and February. Despite your best efforts, fantasies float through your mind. You know most writers get rejected everywhere, but surely this will not happen to you. You'll probably get into Notre Dame or UMass, at the very least. When you actually dream about getting into Iowa, try to stop yourself from interpreting it as a sign. Imagine living among cornfields anyway and decide that fields are the perfect backdrop for writing.

Reassure yourself when you get your first rejection letter. Of course you weren't going to get into Michener, with its half-a-percent acceptance rate. When you're rejected from UMass, say you didn't want to go there anyway. When Cornell's form email pierces your heart, realize your parents wouldn't have wanted you to be in such an isolated place.

Count your remaining chances. Notre Dame has a five percent acceptance rate. Urbana-Champaign is a glorious fifteen percent. Surely you'll make that cut. When you get their rejection letter, say they're silly and throw it in the trash. Get rejected from Boston University three times: once in an email from the creative writing director, once in a generic Boston University email, and finally in a hard copy letter that arrives several weeks later.

Mope for a few weeks, then feel better when it gets warm at the end of spring. Declare that you're moving on. Sign up for a new writing class. Realize that you can now tell, without knowing beforehand, whether the author of a short story has an MFA. Decide this means you don't want one.

Come August, start to dream again. Imagine how nice it would be to spend all day writing. Pull out the old arson story. Think about Carver and realize the story is too dramatic. Delete the parts about fire and transform it into a simple love story, bad teacher meets good teacher. He likes her; she disrespects him. Feel proud that you have a strong female character, one who chooses men wisely and knows how to shun the chaff.

Bring the story to another workshop for ten more opinions. Now, your peers say, the woman is too strong. She shouldn't judge him for being bad at his job. It smacks of certain people who want to take away teacher tenure. Realize suddenly that your political views, valuing individual agency over animal-like dependence on environmental factors, might be hurting your chances. Realize that all intelligent and educated individuals believe that people are one hundred percent determined by their social environments, and will attack dissenters while at the same time extolling freedom of speech.

Replace the strong woman teacher with a plaid-wearing hipster who wants single-payer health care, is an unemployed computer programmer, and struggles with credit card debt. Her difficulty in finding a job is understood to not be her own or the current president's fault. Add a minority character and a drug-addicted prostitute to be safe. Rewrite the entire thing again.

Cry, and laugh, and cry, as you get pummeled by rejections once more. Stop writing for two weeks. Then one day, on the commute home from work, feel the beginnings of a story. You can see the characters, and the final scene. Take a scrap of paper from your purse to scribble the idea down. At home, realize that the story is nothing whatsoever resembling what is encouraged by MFA programs. Realize that you don't belong in the world of academia anyways. Realize that you don't care.

Keep writing, no matter what anyone says.