The relevance of a degree in creative writing in contemporary times

nIn the United States, there are nearly 400 post-graduate programs in creative writing. 3000 to 4000 student writers graduate with an MFA or MA every year, and nearly 20,000 applications to these programs are sent out. This is not to mention the many thousands of American college students who major in creative writing or at least take a class or two before they graduate. Add to that all the hundreds of writing workshops, conferences, and retreats that are not connected to any academic institution. Aspiring American writers, needless to say, love to study the art of writing creatively.

The question, however, that people ask all the time is whether you can even teach the art. Weren’t there very good writers long before there were MFA programs? Does one really need to study it at school to do it well? What does a degree in creative writing actually offer you? I don’t believe there’s any one way to answer these questions to everyone’s satisfaction. I’ll just offer some practical ways to view the whole notion of studying the craft.

The primary mode of study in most creative programs is the workshop, where a student presents their writing to the class. The instructor leads the class in a roundtable critique of the work, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses and offering suggestions for improvement and expansion. For fiction writers, this workshop experience can be very beneficial, offering the student feedback on characterization, plotting, form, thematic development, and a host of other technical elements.

The feedback, when it’s effective, can also help the student think about their literary project overall: the overarching story they need to tell; the questions they should pursue in their work; the style and aesthetic they should be developing; the literary traditions they’re emulating and potentially transcending.

The experience can also be quite difficult, especially when the feedback is negative or confusing. It’s hard to listen to 12 different voices criticizing your work or giving you contradictory advice.

There’s also the risk of listening too closely to everyone’s advice and losing your own voice in the process. Sometimes, when writers try to please everyone in the workshop, their individual point of view gets diluted and the work can become generic, even in its competence.

At the end of the day, however, I think the risk is worth the reward for many student writers. I’ve been teaching fiction writing for 18 years, and what I always tell my students is that I only teach one kind of writing, and that is good writing.

And I define good writing, fundamentally, as the absence of bad writing, which exists in a much more objective way. Bad writing consists of all the mistakes that most writers make when they first begin writing. Mistakes in prose, characterization, structure, point of view, dialogue, etc.

My primary job as the teacher is to help my students recognize the bad writing in their work and to prune it of that bad writing so that they are then producing good writing.

Great writing is something else altogether. It’s subjective and magical and mysterious, and to a certain extent, some people are just born with the talent to produce it and no amount of instruction or effort can enable it in other people. I’m not sure I can teach great writing. I do think I can help students recognize it in others and in themselves. I can help them tap into the mysteries of their own humanity and try to translate those mysteries onto the page. I can help them aspire towards a level of artistic expression that is honest, meaningful, and uniquely their own. Ultimately, what good teachers do is teach their students how to teach themselves. Because at the end of the day you won’t really know how to write a novel until you go through all the struggles of writing one. And even then, it’s still a mystery. And for most people, it will never stop being difficult. This kind of support is what a creative writing degree can offer students. It is ultimately an opportunity for the student to take themselves seriously as a writer. To not be naïve about the process. To take it both seriously as an art but also practically as a craft and a profession. To gain a community of other writers who are pursuing the art just as seriously and passionately. To make life-long friends who will support them and help them grow artistically as well as personally. To see the world of publishing and all its positive and negative aspects. Very few other spaces in modern life offer this kind of opportunity.

The author is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts, Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing, University of Chicago