In my old day job, the young scientists and engineers would often ask about advanced degrees.  They’d have a BA or BS, or even an MA or MS, and be wondering if they could further their career by receiving more training via an advanced degree.  I’d often say two things: (1) the PhD is over-rated, unless you want to paint yourself into a very tight corner (aka over-specialization); and (2) experience in problem solving is the most valuable thing you can gain to further your career.

Now that I’m a full-time writer, is the advice any different?  Generally speaking, no.  (Considering this is a blog post and not a tweet, I won’t stop here, though.)  I know some sci-fi writers have (or had) a PhD—Asimov, Benford, Heinlein, Hoyle are examples of scientists turned writers, and their books are classics—and I suppose a few authors of legal or medical thrillers have advanced degrees, but I claim that while their degrees might aid them to create tight, logical plots, they otherwise are irrelevant.  You might say, “That makes sense.”  But your next question should be: “What about degrees that have to do with writing?”  What about the various Lit degrees—English Lit, French Lit, Russian Lit, for example—and what about MFAs or journalism?

For Lit degrees, writing skills are required, probably more so than in any other formal college discipline.  When I took English with N. Scott Momaday, the Pulitzer Prize winner, I gagged at how much writing I had to do, and that was just a general ed English class.  I knew many Lit majors (that’s the advantage of state schools—they’re so big, you know people from all academic disciplines; I certainly didn’t see them as institutions dedicated brainwashing students, a current conservatives’ myth).  They would always be reading something.  One female student started out a first date with pizza and beer by reciting Chaucer to me; she was obviously more into The Canterbury Tales than she was into me.  It sounded like a mish-mash of French and German—pleasant, but the head was soon off my beer and my head was spinning.

I don’t know what you do with a Lit degree beyond teaching.  Yes, you can become a writer, but the writing you do for that degree probably doesn’t help you craft a good story.  A Lit major certainly has read many classics—English Lit, Shakespeare; Spanish Lit, Cervantes; French Lit, Rabelais; Russian Lit, Dostoyevsky; and so forth—and has probably written thousands of words in hundreds of term papers about what he or she has read.  Can that person create an interesting story?  Maybe.  But I don’t think skills or love for spinning a good yarn are developed with those degree programs.  Those degrees might help you write a book review about a Jane Austen opus (horrors!), nothing more.

Let’s move on to journalism.  I suspect that there exists a Steve Moore in a parallel universe who became a journalist.  I’ve discovered I love to write op-ed (this piece is about writing, but it’s still op-ed).  In the Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics, the initial conditions for the Steve Moores’ world lines all start out the same way, so there are bound to be a few that learned they liked that a lot earlier (maybe those few were born into one-percenter families where they didn’t have to support a family early on?).  Op-ed is only a small part of journalism, of course.  (Getting beheaded seems to be an up and coming offshoot.)

A journalism degree gives one both experience in writing and experience in tracking down and processing data.  It also allows the person to accumulate life experiences.  Fiction is about life, whether in the past, present, or future, and it’s mostly about knowing and understanding what makes human beings human.  Every fictional character should seem real to the reader.  A good journalist tells a story about human beings in certain situations.  His characters are real people.  The good reporter also collects facts and then tells the story.  All of this makes journalism a good training ground for a future writer.  Examples are Forsythe and Garcia Marquez—ex-journalists who became excellent storytellers.

MFAs, on the other hand, are over-rated.  I can see the place for a combo—a basic journalism degree, followed by work experience, and then an MFA—but the MFA alone (I suppose there are BFAs too) is about as useful as a Lit degree when it comes to preparing a fiction writer.  Sure, the MFA might teach you good writing skills—you can learn all the rules often broken by successful writers—and how to put Freud and Jung into your soccer mom character’s mind, but these skills can be learned in forums and critique groups just as well.  (Moreover, the student runs the risk of being a clone of their professors.)  Good storytelling is maybe ten percent skill set; the rest is having a story to tell and then spinning a good yarn (yes, the plot is almost everything)!

There are two more problems with MFAs: (1) people who have them often think their degree qualifies them to be writers, while no one else should be (by the way, all the examples just named weren’t MFAs); and (2) they provide no life experiences for young graduates.  Evidence for the first point is that MFA grads often become frustrated and migrate to positions like editors and literary agents (because they also erroneously believe they know what it takes to tell a good story?).  The second is less subtle: a twenty-plus-year-old graduate from an MFA program usually doesn’t have enough life experiences (I say “usually” and “enough” because some kids nowadays have one hell of a childhood).  Moreover, having those experiences isn’ t even a necessary condition, let alone a sufficient one (look up the difference if you don’t know).  That young graduate has to communicate that experience in his storytelling to an old fart like me who’s going to read his or her book, and that communication skill needs an understanding of the different readers’ perspectives.  You have to understand people—a psych degree would be much better than an MFA in that regard.

My claim is that the best way to learn to write is to write.  Sounds like Zen, doesn’t it?  In my first careers, I was a scientist, but I’ve been writing all my life (no one saw any of it, of course, until about ten to twelve years ago)—I’d sneak time for writing as I worked to feed my family.  The aphorism “practice makes perfect” is appropriate—every moment you can steal for writing is important.  Whatever degree you have, or no degrees at all, you can still be a writer.  The school of hard knocks is your best teacher, though.  If you must, and you choose to eschew those other degrees that might provide you a day job that will allow you to support you and your family, go for a journalism degree, perhaps followed by an MFA after some work and life experiences.  That’s free advice from this writer (but remember this is op-ed).

In elibris libertas…

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