HOW TO GO TO SCHOOL
Friends, I am getting very bored of saying, “I told you so.” First ABBA, now this.
Today, four newspapers reported that many people were stung by jellyfish during the New York City Triathlon. Specifically, Lion’s Mane jellyfish, which can be up to eight feet in the body, and have been known to have tentacles 120 feet long.
Hold on. Let me look at my list of “last things I want to hear” and see where that is . . .
6. The Cloverfield monster is here to see you. And he’s brought flowers! Oh wait, those aren’t flowers. That’s a fistful of screaming, half-dead people. Nevermind.
5. I bought you a Vespa, but then I got hungry and I ate it.
4. Sir Ian McKellen has been cast as the lead in High School Musical 4 as Troy’s long-lost twin brother, Felix.*
Oh, here we go.
3. New York, your small island home, is surrounded by eight-foot-wide jellyfish.
I guess it’s not that much of a problem now because it’s not like I swim the East River very often, and by often, I mean ever in my life. But the jellyfish are getting closer. I think it is only a matter of time before they get Metrocards and start showing up on the subway, cleverly hidden behind copies of The New York Post or Twilight.
So, rather than dwell on that . . . let’s talk about going to school for writing. This came into my mind because I just looked higher up on this list and noticed this:
37. I am majoring in creative writing as my undergraduate degree!
I get a lot of notes asking me what I think of this, and I am happy to tell you.
I think it’s a bad idea.
Meg Cabot has been saying this for years, and just today, Justine Larbalestier wrote a great blog about this very subject, which says almost everything I am thinking. She talks about the importance of having a broad background with skills in several subjects, about the fact that most writers have some other job aside from writing, about the fact that many great writers never studied writing as a major. Let me EXPAND on this a bit, because I have A LOT of thoughts on this matter and it will keep me from thinking about THE COMING JELLYFISH INVASION.
“But Maureen!” some of you will say (clearly the people who have read my bio). “Weren’t you a writing major?”
I was, so I feel I can talk about this subject as someone who knows. I did not one, but TWO degrees in writing, one undergraduate, and one graduate. Neither was in “Creative Writing.”
My undergraduate degree is in technical writing and rhetoric. Rhetoric is a tough, sensible, ancient approach to making words work for you and figuring out WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. There were also additional classes in research technique, editing, layout . . .
“Creative writing,” as a term, makes me quake inside. I don’t know what it means. It’s like getting a handful of jello. I guess it’s workshops in writing fiction . . . but who knows? It could mean ANYTHING. Maybe it trains you to play Wordwang:
I think my big objection is the word “creative” in the name. I feel like I have the same problem with this as I do with muses . . . that there’s this idea that writing is all about traipsing around and being weird and “inspired” all the time, and that somehow the best training involves making word clouds and collages and listing fifty adjectives that describe the inner you.
That’s fun and fine and I am ALL FOR BEING WEIRD, just not as a class. Or, maybe one class. But not as a major. No one can teach you how to be creative.
Maybe this is just me. I am the byproduct of a Marine/engineer and a nursing professor, and there is something in me that demands A SYSTEM! RESULTS! LOGIC!
I guess one of my big fears is that you will end up in a department run by writers. I mean, that’s great if your teacher is, say, Nabokov, and less great if your teacher is, say, me. I don’t want to be a part of any department that would have me as a professor . . . unless it’s the Department of Swedish Disco or Fear Studies or something.
Another problem . . . when I have to write all the time, the last thing I want to do is write. This is true of almost every writer I know. We all love writing, but when someone makes you do it, it kind of sucks. However, I did loads of writing in trigonometry! If I had been a math major, I would have written about twelve books by the time I graduated. In retrospect, I see this is a GENIUS IDEA and encourage you all to think about it!
The question of a graduate degree in writing is a bit different, but not a lot. I speak as someone with an MFA in writing. I went to an Ivy League school, had amazing professors and classmates, got great feedback, and generally have nothing but good things to say about the experience, and I’m STILL not sure if it’s something I’d recommend.
Let’s face it . . . at least in the United States, an MFA is a costly thing, and it takes two or three years to complete. Know what you’re getting into. Don’t do it with the expectation that the degree itself is worth it, that those three letters will open any doors. They won’t. The MFA is entirely non-functional for any practical purpose.
If you’re getting an MFA in writing, do it to pump the most out of the experience as you possibly can. Go to a place you feel strongly about—a place with writers in the faculty you want to know and learn from. Do it only with the expectation that you hope to get a bit better, that you’re going to focus, that you mean business. Speaking of business . . . go to every single workshop the program offers about the business of writing. (Writing programs in New York will often bring in editors, agents, and other publishing professionals to talk about real-life experience. Go to these events and take notes!)
If you’re uncertain, if you don’t really care that much, if you’re in any way just doing it to go to grad school . . . take your $50,000, or $80,000, or $100,000, get a lot of books, and go to the beach and write for a year. That’s presuming you have $50,000, or $80,000, or $100,000. Most people don’t, and end up borrowing it from one of the Loan Giants who own too many of us already.
Many people wonder, does the MFA improve your chance of getting a book deal? It improves your chances if it makes your writing stronger. Otherwise, it makes zero difference. Editors don’t read your resume, they read your writing. They normally don’t know or care about your education, unless your education has some bearing on what you’re doing. For example, if you submit a book called How To Do Plastic Surgery At Home Using Simple Household Items Such As Corkscrews And Staplers . . . an editor might care to know that you are a board-certified plastic surgeon with a medical degree. They might also want to know if you are certifiably insane.
I have yet to meet an editor who cared ONE IOTA if I had an MFA or not. In fact, I think it would have been of much more interest if I had a degree in almost ANYTHING ELSE, since my bio reads like this: “Maureen studied writing, and then she studied more writing, and now she is writing. She spends most of her time sitting down.”
It would be so much better if my bio said something like: “Maureen is a former professional trampolinist who released three techno albums in Belgium before doing advanced work in science, specifically with little squishy cells that do totally awesome stuff, like wobble in time to music. She is currently at work searching for a new kind of triangle. She lives on a penguin farm.”**
Now, THAT’S an interesting author! No MFA in sight!
We idiots with the writing degrees have to dredge our backgrounds to pad out these stupid bios we have to write. We have to write bios because teachers make you write book reports. (Also, they won’t let me put my recipe for taco soup on the back flap of my books, under my photo.) It’s a good thing I worked in theater for so long, because I have a few stories about working with tigers and smoke machines and putting out fires to fill a paragraph or two. My Ivy League MFA is a footnote.
In any case, I’m not sure you should be taking academic advice from me. I wouldn’t. But those are my thoughts, if you wanted them. I guess the bottom line is that I think we just need more environmental scientists because this jellyfish thing is clearly getting out of hand. So please major in something like that because it is SERIOUSLY FREAKING ME OUT. (It doesn’t help that I am actually going away for a few days to a beach.)
Today’s random commenter Suite Scarlett winner is Haley!
In reading your comments, I saw many excellent questions and points, and I still have to talk to you about MAMMA MIA, which I have now seen. And yes, it was BEAUTIFUL. But clearly I needed to talk about this today . . . so if you could just let me know what I should discuss in my next post, that would be great. And, of course, there is another book to give away!
* actually, I think this is a misprint from my list of “things I totally want to hear”
**which I obviously am and have and did and am but let’s not get off the subject
Posted: Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 @ 3:29 am
Categories: Justine Larbalestier, jellyfish, writing.
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April 30th, 2010 at 11:37 am
I completely agree! I decided that instead of looking for a creative writing course for college, I’d study English. I’m now finishing my first year studying English, Religion and Education. The amount you can learn about people studying Religion and Education is amazing! (and of course, that’s important if you plan on having characters in your book(s)…)
April 30th, 2010 at 11:41 am
As a once(and future) aspiring writer and current librarian, I have to agree with a lot of what you say about the creative writing degree. In undergrad, I was an English major with a concentration in “Creative Writing”. That concentration made up roughly 5 classes that otherwise would have been more literature. I once had aspirations for an MFA in creative writing, because writing was all I had ever thought about doing. Around graduation time, reality set in that being a writer isn’t a job you can just…get. I still needed a job, so I went back to school for my MLIS. But after four years of writing papers and short stories and poems and plays, I felt like I had nothing left to write. Now I work as a children’s librarian with aspirations of working on my writing. I haven’t quite gotten there yet, but it is something I am determined to get back to. I don’t regret my choice of concentration, but I can’t imagine if more of my classes had been writing focused. If all you love is stories and words and you can’t imagine anything else, be an English major. You’ll be a better writer for it.
April 30th, 2010 at 11:45 am
Whew, good thing I do a thousand other things other than write. My bio will read something like: “Elizabeth has an A.S. in Multimedia/Web Authoring, dropped out of university, and is currently writing book reviews and designing websites for a living. She likes heavy metal and cheeseburgers.”
I knew getting a B.A. or B.S. would just be a waste of time!
April 30th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I’m doing a double major in Communication and Creative Writing. Actually, the way my university works is that you can major in English and then do a concentration in Literature or some kind of writing. So, really, it just means taking a writing workshop class each semester. Which, for me, is beneficial. If I have a class where I have to FINISH a piece of writing, then I’m much more likely to actually get something accomplished. Not all of the things I produce will be perfect or “creative,” maybe, but I’m at least getting it out there. So I think double majoring might be a good idea for people who want to get feedback on their writing but not get overloaded with being creative. Communication is a much broader, more marketable degree, I think.
Basically, I think a creative writing degree is the wrong way to go if you think that it will automatically make you better. You have to see it as a way of improving yourself by challenging yourself to write and publish your work by letting others read it. That’s how I look at it, anyway.
April 30th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I was led here by a friend who often retweets your blog posts, and this one caught my attention. Love it. I nearly went to school for creative writing, but didn’t. Though my ultimate major (media studies) didn’t get me the job I wanted (film director), it did provide a wide range of skills that can get me jobs that pay while I work on my writing. I doubt I’d be doing as well as I am had I gotten the nebulous creative writing degree. In fact, I took one creative writing course, and HATED it. I can’t imagine how many ways to kill myself I would have come up with by the end of a whole four years of classes like that.
tl;dr – Thanks for stepping up and pointing out the importance of having another set of skills!
April 30th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I think you have a lot of valid points about writing degrees, but I also think a writing degree is more than what you mentioned. I had peers and professors who could give thoughtful critiques and helped me learn a lot about crafting my writing. It wasn’t about sitting around and trying to be creative, but about looking at a scene or sentence and figuring out why it works or doesn’t work.
Yes, the creative stuff you do on your own, but the other stuff, the mechanics and crafting, you have to learn through experience.
I do agree, though, that you have to have some life experience to make a writing degree worthwhile, though (which is why I’ve held off on getting an MFA). To that end, I did what I could as an undergrad by supplementing my writing degree with classes on everything from Japanese history to grammar to the anthropology of religion. I think all writing majors should take some random classes just to broaden their experience.
Despite being pro-writing degrees, they are not for everyone. Among other things, I think you need to know what your goal is before you go in and to not expect to come out the other side a masterful writer. I’m more knowledgeable about myself as a writer, and a better writer than when I started, but mostly I learned a lot of editing skills and how to put together a publication, and well, now I’m an editor.
April 30th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
It’s refreshing to read someone who has an established writing career express feelings that I recently discovered myself. After spending four years at a “prestigious” art school – I shall not mention its name. The School of the Art Institute. Sneeze. Cough. – I am now discovering that such majors, or in my case focuses, do not guarantee success as a writer, painter, filmmaker but in fact can posses the potential to interrupt the creative process and really take the fun out of it.
But I guess you can say the same thing about the eighth and ninth shot of tequila.
Yet, I feel that this is something that each individual must evaluate for themselves. I know of many people who really needed the structured environment and that sense of pressure to produced work. Not saying that is a bad thing, it’s just a different method of working. For these individuals, creative writing classes and writing workshops were crucial. I guess I just wish I had discovered this before I was 130,000 in the hole. I can literally see India from here.
Any who, I think you’d make a great instructor. Thats all I’ve been trying to say.
Can we eat Jelly Fish? If so, here’s to ending world hunger!
April 30th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Awesome. So a BA in Literature followed by a Masters in Education, so I can teach chilluns about how cool books are, and be a super secret writer at night with an awesome pen name writing about awesomeness while also uncovering MJ’s conspiracy theories she has riddled throughout her books (They are there, I promise) is a good plan?
April 30th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
In my (admittedly limited) experience, one of the most hurtful things to someone’s writing is taking too much advice about it, or endlessly taking classes/reading books about writing itself. The best advice (and I’ve seen this echoed elsewhere) that I would give someone who wanted to write is to do as much READING as possible. And also, write. Different things work for different writers. Doing a lot of reading is, in my opinion, the best way to get a great grasp of language as a tool (as opposed to a class), and as you pointed out, creativity cannot be taught.
I guess the appeal of a creative writing class is just having a time-slot to do your creative fiction writing, and get credits for it. I understand this appeal; however, I doubt you’ll learn much from this class that you couldn’t have learned on your own from doing lots of reading and writing on your own.
It goes without saying that life experiences are also incredibly useful for writing about. If anything, they are the muses, the inspiration. Writing is not a thing unto and of itself, but rather a medium like any other through which life is filtered and through which human beings connect.
April 30th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
I DID get my degree in environmental science! So now I get to do a job I like (nuclear chemistry) and have a side-job that I like even more. Glad to hear someone say the writing degree isn’t necessary, or even preferred.
April 30th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
I have a B.S. in Mathematics, a reasonably useful degree. I took exactly one creative writing course in college. I wish I had taken more.
I agree that everyone who is considering it as a major needs to understand that it isn’t helpful in getting published or making money. But my advice for college boils down to this: Take classes where you are learning something. What the class is called or what shows up on your degree should be secondary, because that’s just ink on paper. The popcorn in your head, on the other hand, you live with every day. You should do some popping.
On an unrelated tangent, I like how this blog post is from 2008 and all the comments are from today. Wonder how we all got here!
May 1st, 2010 at 10:10 pm
“She lives on a penguin farm.”
… with her three cats, Simon, Peregrine, and Osmosis. She spends much of her time in front of a pixellated computer screen, worrying whether or not her publishing house’s style required or would have eliminated the comma after “Peregrine” in the previous sentence.
Her interests include taking a hammer to old 33 1/3 LPs (to increase the value of those few she has in her collection), knitting sweaters for her friends’ octopi and running away to the beach where she reads nothing but existential French philosophers in an attempt to make up for her years of non-party-conversation-producing secondary education.”
man, i’m going to have to start writing my own Author Bio, just in case…
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