TEACH YOURSELF WELL

“No one, and I mean NO ONE, was ever going to tell me how to write.”—William Carlos Williams.

In all the debates swirling 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 Lincoln or Thomas Edison—it was considered a perfectly plausible way for an ambitious youngster to go out and seize the knowledge that needed to get ahead; for someone to say “I’m entirely self-educated” was as proud a boast as someone bragging they’d gone to Stanford or Yale.

And if there’s any profession where self-education should be a prerequisite, it’s fiction 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.

Sixty 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—a six-step process. 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. Find 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 1960’s, fronted by none other than Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), which—between its catchy slogan “We’re looking for people who want to write!” and its 800 aggressive salespeople—managed to entrap over 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 scam, for it was about to be given academic legitimacy and take off. The 80’s and 90’s saw the explosion of Master of Fine Arts in Writing programs across this country; counterintuitively, just at a time when the numbers of serious readers was rapidly diminishing, the number 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 doesn’t teach in one. (It seems to be a primarily American phenomenon; foreign writers think teaching novel writing it crazy, at the very moment they dream of landing teaching gigs here themselves.) If you pick up Poets & Writers, the magazine for prospective writers, peruse the 160 pages of primarily ads, you’ll get a taste of how this business is marketed.

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 and hucksterism goes, from the Writers Camp in Big Sur to the Mount 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 Patterson University where you can “Write your future success story if you have the will to succeed.”

( Note. An important book could be written on the creative writing biz by an investigative journalist with a background in shady businesses and confidence schemes; follow the money!)

We now have over 500 (!) writing programs in this country, each one subscribing to the notion that writing can be taught just like engineering or accounting—and, by implication, that anyone trying to become a novelist entirely on their own is a dangerous heretic. This has led to one of those bitter American schisms, where people on one side of the argument can hardly believe there are sincere, well-meaning people on the other side.

And full disclosure here—Substack most definitely joins in the fun. The majority of its writing sites are written by the flimsily-credentialed offering “tricks”for writing success, such as relying on your left brain—or is it the right? Even someone with the lofty reputation of George Saunders has a Substack site where, if you pay for a subscription, you can access his, yes, “tricks.”

(I promise you from the bottom of my heart; mine is a prompt-free, trick-free Substack, and always will be.)

To those invested in it, the creative writing biz offers aspiring writers: the support and mentoring they need to develop; the token theoretical knowledge without which, in their view, creation is impossible; an expensive, but academically-easy degree they can use to get a job teaching other aspiring writers; membership in the only literary community left in this country.

Those on the outside argue that MFA programs and writing 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 charlatans and mediocrities, and is little more than a profitable scam.

Both groups would probably argue 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 back when writing programs was still 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 for their credentials; many older students are in the process 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 thousands it demands in tuition.

Perhaps MFA programs would justify their existence if each one served as a regional literary center, hotspots of interest in contemporary fiction, but, sadly, the opposite is the case; they’re often the last place to find people seriously interested in books. Van Wyck Brooks, that grand old man of letters, saw the anomaly, the disturbing little secret, at the heart of this as far back as 1958, writing “Regarding the ‘creative writing’ courses in our colleges, one must add that they tend to destroy the audience of literature. They do so by promoting into writers the susceptible but uncreative persons who might otherwise be our best readers.”

Or, to put it another way, the readers who were once content asking novelists to entertain them, enlighten them, inspire them, now demand Let us be writers, too!

When you meet writing 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 star telling ghetto kids that they too can be pros, never mind that the odds are 100,000 to one.

Many honorable writers believe MFA programs are the best place for a novelist to develop their talent; many writers, often better writers, feel they’re the worst place. But here I’d like to address myself to one type of young writer in particular—if any such still exists. That is, totally dedicated to writing seriously, willing to do whatever it takes to make a career of it or die trying, possessed by that stubbornly can-do spirit that is often the mark of real ability (see Williams’s quote at the top), unwilling to let anyone ever tell him or her 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—Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Wendell Berry—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 tuition money and buy yourself a year or two of unencumbered writing time, learn, at the minimum, whether you have the gumption to spend hours alone at a writing desk.

For all the creative writing biz’s extravagant claims, it’s up against a paradox no amount of advertising will ever get around. If you don’t have writing talent, you’ll never buy it at an MFA program; if you do have writing talent…and you need to trust me on this…you’re far better off developing it on your own.