In all the debates that swirl around education, there’s one kind you don’t hear much about in this credentials-obsessed era: self-education. Yet once upon an American time — think Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Edison — it was considered a perfectly reasonable way for an ambitious person to go out and seize the knowledge they needed to get ahead, and for someone to say “I’m entirely self-educated” was as proud a boast as someone bragging they’d gone to Princeton or Yale.
And if there’s any profession where self-education should be a prerequisite it’s novel writing. To write well you need to know a lot about a lot; you need to read omnivorously; you need to have experienced a variety of jobs, made your way among all sorts of people, gone out and seen the world; you need to spend long hours alone in your garret or cabin, perfecting, by a long series of failures, your relationship to language, your understanding of your characters, your understanding of yourself.
Fifty years ago this kind of apprenticeship was just about all that was on offer when it came to novelists seeking the path to a career. Graduate from third grade so you’re literate. Grow up. Remember everything. Get a job in journalism, quit as soon as you have money saved, rent a room of your own and get to work.
If you were looking for shortcuts there was something called The Famous Writers School back in the l960s, fronted by none other than Rod Serling, which — between its catchy slogan, “We’re looking for people who want to write,” and its 800 aggressive salespeople — managed to enroll more than 65,000 students.
The Famous Writers School was looked upon as a ripoff and/or joke, and yet the joke turned out to be on those making fun of the creative writing business, for it was about to be given academic legitimacy and take off. The ’70s and ’80s saw the explosion of masters of fine arts in writing programs across the country; counterintuitively, just at a time when the numbers of serious readers were rapidly declining, the numbers of those aspiring to be writers themselves grew exponentially.
Today, the creative writing industry dominates what’s left of American literary culture, to the point it’s rare to meet a novelist who hasn’t either graduated from a MFA program or one who doesn’t teach there. (It seems to be an exclusively American phenomenon; foreign writers think teaching novel and poetry writing is crazy, at the very same time they dream of landing teaching gigs here themselves.) If you pick up Poets & Writers, the magazine for prospective writers, and peruse the 118 pages of ads, you’ll get a taste of how this business markets itself.
The University of Tampa bills itself as “The Oldest Low-Residency MFA in Florida.” “Live a literary life in a community of dedicated writers,” urges the University of Nebraska-Omaha; “Write in Paris!” counters NYU. “Crafting the real” is the slogan of the writing program at the University of Cincinnati; “Write the next chapter of an epic” is that of Hollins University.
On and on it goes, ad after ad, from Cheryl Strayed’s Writers Camp in Big Sur to the Mont Blanc Writing Workshop in Chamonix to Sierra Nevada College on Lake Tahoe (“Come Write By The Light Of Our Fire”) to the graduate writing program at William Paterson University where you can “Write your future success story if you have the will to succeed.”
There are now over 500 (!) college writing programs in this country for undergraduates and graduates, each one subscribing to the notion that writing can be taught just like engineering or accounting — and that anyone seeking to learn how to become a novelist on their own is a heretic. This has led to one of those great American schisms, where people on one side of the argument can hardly believe there are sincere, well-meaning people on the other.
To those involved in it, the creative writing biz offers aspiring writers the support and mentoring they need to develop; the rarified theoretical knowledge without which, in their mind, creation is impossible; a degree they can use to get a job teaching other aspiring writers; it provides, for that matter, the only literary community left in this country.
Those on the outside argue that MFA programs and writers conferences do little more than suck in thousands of credulous wannabes, taking their money and giving back very little in the way of skill or marketability; in their view, the whole creative writing world is staffed by too many charlatans and mediocrities, and is little more than a profitable scam.
Both groups would probably agree that the one definite plus of MFA programs is that they provide jobs for writers. But Malcolm Cowley, the famous critic, saw the dangers in this as far back as the 1950s, when writing programs were in their infancy.
“Teaching and writing are two separate professions, and hard to reconcile. College writers either have been erratic and slipshod teachers, or else more frequently — for they are men and women of conscience — their writing has been neglected or fallen into the academic mode.”
From the student’s perspective, the debate over whether writing can be taught may be beside the point. Many of those enrolled in MFA programs are high school teachers needing a master’s degree; many are in the midst of reinventing themselves after a divorce or other life change; some, having already published, want the credentials to teach; many just like being around people who love literature as much as they do. They don’t begrudge the tuition.
When you teach these students you’re always impressed by their dedication — and yet being around people paying big bucks to have their expectations inflated makes you feel like a NBA player telling ghetto kids that they too can be pros, never mind that the odds are many thousands to one against that.
Many writers believe MFA programs are the best place for novelists to develop their talent; many writers feel they’re the worst place. But here at the end I’d like to address myself to one type of young writer in particular if any such still exist. Totally dedicated to writing seriously, willing to do whatever it takes to make a career out of it or die trying, possessed by that stubbornly rebellious can-do attitude that is often the mark of real ability, unwilling to let anyone ever tell you how to write.
Still, you’re tempted to enroll in a MFA program just because that’s what writers all seem to do now, though it’s impossible to think of your heroes — Tolstoy, Dickens, Twain — ever sitting meekly through a workshop.
I’m prejudiced, an autodidact to the core, but I’ll offer my advice anyway. Don’t! Or at least consider the old-fashioned do-it-yourself way first. Take the money and buy yourself a year or two of unencumbered writing time, learn, at the minimum, whether you have the gumption to stick it out. For all the creative writing biz’s extravagant claims, they’re up against a paradox no amount of advertising will get around. If you don’t have writing talent, you’ll never buy it at an MFA program; if you do have writing talent, you’re far better off developing it on your own.
W. D. Wetherell is a novelist, story writer and essayist who lives in Lyme.