How does one learn to become a writer? The answer now put forward by many universities -- and one that I must question -- is: Enroll in a master-of-fine-arts program in creative writing.
The old answer, of course, was that you learned the writing trade in the marketplace, under conditions that forced a certain economy of style and fostered self-discipline. Charles Dickens worked as a parliamentary scribe. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck began their careers as newspaper reporters, as did Graham Greene. John Updike spent two years writing “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker before breaking free. For novelists, the idea was that you would do this apprentice work for a few years -- or as long as it took for your “real” work, your fiction, to find an audience. After that, the audience would support you.
Poets, who had little hope of supporting themselves by their craft, usually took whatever day jobs were available. T.S. Eliot became a bank clerk, Wallace Stevens went into the insurance business, and Robert Frost raised chickens. They learned their trade in the solitary hours of early morning or late at night, depending heavily on other poets for criticism and encouragement.
Since the end of World War II, novelists and poets on this side of the Atlantic (the situation is vastly different in Britain, where journalism is still the usual alternative to starving) have tended to shelter in universities and colleges. The pay is decent, the hours reasonable, and the company more or less enlightened. Thus Vladimir Nabokov went to Cornell University, Theodore Roethke to the University of Washington, Saul Bellow to the University of Chicago, Bernard Malamud to Bennington College, Robert Penn Warren to Yale University, and Robert Lowell to Harvard University, to name just a few. Every self-respecting academic village had to boast of at least one poet or novelist of stature teaching literature or creative writing; the process continues today, with many of our best writers occupying posts in the academy.
It was, and remains, a healthy arrangement. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being a writer in an ivory tower.
“Better such towers than the cellar alternatives some writers choose,” argues Saul Bellow in an interview recently published in It All Adds Up, a collection of his non-fiction. “Besides, the university is no more an ivory tower than Time magazine, with its strangely artificial approach to the world.”
What writers do once they get inside the walls of Flaubert’s tour d’ivoire is another matter.
English departments have always been somewhat uneasy about having “creative” writers so close at hand. Over time, two clear problems have developed. With the rise of professionalism (and literary theory) in English studies during the last two decades, it has become increasingly difficult for writers to fit comfortably into literature departments. Creative writers tend to resist theory. They are uncomfortable, for instance, with being relegated to the role that the social theorist Michel Foucault called “the author function.”
Hence the seclusion of creative writing in hermetically sealed programs, where the craft is taught to aspiring young writers. They sign up in droves, hoping to begin the long climb up Parnassus under the direction of published writers. Administrators happily respond to students’ interest, as might be expected; supply and demand rules in the academic marketplace. But is what students demand actually being supplied? If not, should universities be held responsible for failing to practice truth in advertising? Given the extra time and expense of master’s programs, I doubt that M.F.A. degrees in creative writing are generally worth the investment.
I have long thought that creative-writing classes are really better suited to the undergraduate level, where expectations are not so high. At Middlebury College, where I teach, we offer a considerable array of undergraduate classes in the writing of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
At least once or twice a year a colleague asks me: “Can creative writing be taught?”
Yes, I say, it can, but only to the limited extent that all writing can be taught. There is important basic work to be done with most undergraduate writers; aspiring poets, for instance, can easily be taught to write acceptable blank verse. One can explain the shapes of argument that are possible in a sonnet or the use of refrain in a villanelle. But one does not expect most undergraduates to blossom into major poets any more than one expects most undergraduate English majors to become major literary critics. Let us assume (generously) that a hundred people in any generation become poets whom someone might want to read a hundred years from now. That leaves a lot of others writing poetry for their own “self-development,” as we say.
Nevertheless, a steady stream of novice writers filters from undergraduate courses in creative writing into M.F.A. programs all around the country. Few students enter such programs for spiritual nourishment. They hope to improve as writers, to be sure, but they also want to get a leg up in the world of publishing and, perhaps, to acquire a credential that will be of some use when they apply for a job as a teacher of creative writing.
If one leafs casually through any issue of Poets & Writers, a newsletter that has become the bible of the creative-writing industry, one sees ads for M.F.A. programs, new and old, at dozens of universities. Iowa, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Stanford -- the list is a mile long. The demand for such programs is obviously there, and the supply has grown to match it. But what can the graduates expect to get for their money and time?
The fact that graduate creative-writing programs are proliferating has not translated into an excess of available jobs in the field. If young writers want jobs in creative writing, they had better write creatively. Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and Toni Morrison were hired by Princeton University to teach creative writing because they are all extremely gifted and accomplished novelists, not because they have an M.F.A. (Not one of them does.) An M.F.A. may help someone find a good job once in a blue moon, but I would never send one of my undergraduates on for the degree so that he or she might wind up employed as a teacher of creative writing. Such advice would be tantamount to malpractice, since the chances of his or her finding employment in this field are minimal.
I also would never recommend a master’s degree in creative writing to anyone suffering from the illusion that an M.F.A. would turn him or her into a good writer. For years I have looked on with dismay as class after class of M.F.A. graduates “enters the field.” Perfectly competent but essentially uninspired poems, stories, and novels pour into the world, often between hard covers and often selected by prize committees established by the M.F.A. programs themselves, so that their graduates can have an outlet for their work. The ho-hum factor seems not to deter anyone, although rarely do these writers ultimately find voluntary readers for their work. It may well be that graduate study in creative writing actually damages potentially good writers, making them too aware of what is fashionable and too fearful of developing in the idiosyncratic ways that make for genuine originality, if not greatness, in a writer.
By contrast, undergraduate programs in creative writing actually do some good by creating better readers. The fact that very few pianists will ever play as well as Vladimir Horowitz or Vladimir Ashkenazy is no argument for limiting the number of people who want to take piano lessons. The more people who want to learn to write well, the better the potential audience for good writing. Having taught seminars in creative writing for 20 years, I know at first hand that a lot of crucial work is done in the guise of “creative writing.” Students often learn more about poetry and fiction in these classes than they do in more conventional classes. There is something about actually trying one’s hand at a sonnet, for instance, that makes one appreciate exactly why Shakespeare’s are great.
Despite what I have just said, there may be a place for M.F.A. programs in creative writing on a small scale; some beginning writers seem to need a transitional year or two after college in which to scrutinize their particular gift and work on the technical aspects of their craft. So, when my best students come to me to ask if they should go on to get an M.F.A., I usually say something along these lines:
“If you have the money and the temperament, do it. The degree probably won’t hurt you -- if you can resist the group mentality that obliterates individual style. You might just get lucky and find somebody -- perhaps a classmate, perhaps a teacher -- who can offer you the kind of criticism that will actually improve your work. But remember: Two years after you start the M.F.A. program, you will finish it. You will still have to go into the world and find some kind of job and continue on your own the process of learning to write. This work takes a lifetime, and it is always difficult, and the rewards are ultimately personal. All that matters in the end is that you find a language adequate to experience, and that is terribly hard to do.”
This little speech is usually enough to discourage those who should not be thinking about a career in writing, and it sends up the appropriate red flags in the minds of those who may, after all, have the talent and doggedness it takes to become a writer.
Jay Parini directs the creative-writing program at Middlebury College. A poet and novelist, his biography of John Steinbeck will be published by Henry Holt and Company in February.