When the AWP conference was held in New York City a few years ago, I attended a discussion panel focused on the ways an up and coming writer could make a living without going into academia. At one point during the question and answer period a young woman, apparently dissatisfied with the advice given thus far, told the panelists she needed to know what kind of work she could pursue when she graduated because she didn’t intend to be another broke poet. Well, the speakers answered as best they could, but the reality is that if writing is what you feel called to do, then you better be willing to not make much money for a very long time.
Historical examples: James Joyce worked as an English tutor and begged money from wealthy patrons of the arts his entire life, never earning a comfortable living from his writing; despite being the best short story writer since Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver declared bankruptcy twice and would’ve been forced to do so a third time if he had not died at such an early age; Honoré de Balzac, the most prolific novelist ever, spent nearly his entire life in debt—in no small part due to his taste for luxury goods.
Personal anecdote: I’m willing to admit that, aside from the fellowship I was awarded for the next four years as I work towards a PhD, I’ve never made any money off of my writing despite having devoted nearly ten years to the pursuit. Not only that, but in order to have the time to write I’ve spent those same ten years working part-time or low skill jobs, the result of which is that I’ve never made more than $20,000 in a single year.
Why am I telling you all of this? To illustrate the primary reason I oppose making creative writing a course of study for undergraduate students.
In my experience on the undergraduate level anyone who wanted to study creative writing was allowed, regardless of talent, potential, or progress. A quick search on the AWP website, reports there are a little over 300 programs that offer an undergraduate degree in creative writing. If we make a conservative estimate of ten fiction and ten poetry students graduating from each of those programs in a year, then there are over 6,000 people being awarded a creative writing degree annually. And of that number of students how many will ever publish a book? Probably no more than two or three percent.
Seen from this perspective, awarding creative writing degrees to undergraduates is tantamount to an enormous scam. The university where I completed my undergraduate work now charges over $8,000 a year for a full-time student, meaning a creative writing major will spend more than $32,000 on a degree that for the vast majority will not lead to a career in their chosen field. Imagine if 95% of all the students who earned an engineering degree would never go on to work as an engineer. I suspect there would an outcry, and yet the creative writing structure plods on, unchanged.
So, Black Beard, how could we go about correcting this injustice? Well, basically, creative writing should no longer be offered as an undergraduate major. The only difference between a creative writing degree and traditional English degree is that writing students take fiction or poetry workshops—classes in which students submit their work for review and discussion by a teacher and their peers—in place of additional literature courses, which to me is a mistake. Workshops, on all levels, are pretty much useless. And moreover, Twenty-year-old kids wanting to write should be directed towards studying great literature and away from serious discussions about their own stories, for when a student’s knowledge of literature is limited so is there ability to create it. I, for instance, did not begin to read Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy until after I completed my undergraduate work, and my exposure to this prose made a larger impact on my writing than all the feedback I’d received in undergraduate workshops.
People who defend writing programs like to say that a student will learn in two or three years what it would’ve taken them five or six years to learn on their own, to which I counter it would take me ten years in writing workshops to discover what I learned by reading the work of the five authors named above. So, incoming writing students, forget school, just read Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Your odds of being published will remain the same, but you’ll be ahead $30,000.
