I was reading the Guardian Books blog this morning, and I came across a line so throwaway I’m not even going to link to it or take the author to task for it specifically. But I’ll tell you what it said, so you know what triggered my ire:
“Now, with creative writing courses churning out novelists by the hundred…”
Half a sentence, containing no explicit judgments whatsoever. Pretty incendiary stuff, I know. But it got to me because I am so fucking sick of this meme that’s sunk its teeth into the cultural conversation (such as it is) about books and writing over the last few years: that creative writing programs are somehow creating hordes of writers who have no business calling themselves writers. (See also: Creative Writing Programs Foster Mediocrity; Real Writers Don’t Need No Skool; Shakespeare Didn’t Have a Goddamned MFA; and No One Wants to Talk about the Real Epidemic Threatening Our Children Today–Bad Writing!)
If you didn’t know and haven’t guessed, I have an MFA.
But my point here is not to defend the credibility of my degree, mostly because it’s already too late for that. Newly minted MFAs are routinely cautioned not to mention that credential in query letters, because agents and editors will merely roll their eyes and say, “Great. Another one.” Another product of the mediocrity factory, another dupe of some university selling false hope to the profoundly untalented at $30K a year. Seriously, the only people impressed by an MFA in writing are those who don’t write and never worked in publishing. Restoring the degree’s reputation as a literary credential would take a lot more effort than I’m willing to put out.
But there are still plenty of reasons why MFA programs aren’t utterly pointless and certainly shouldn’t be blamed for the scourge of crap writing. I can at least make the effort to draw your attention to those.
