Quote

“Thus my advice to the aspiring fiction writer: don’t be tempted by that graveyard of literary talent, creative writing courses. Take a sharp turn and study history instead.”

– Caleb Carr, WSJ Weekend

8 comments

  1. Good advice. I very occasionally encounter an MFA vet with real chops, who used grad school as an avenue to make useful connections in publishing and more importantly to acquire and utilize financed writing time (a recent example: Hanna Pylvainen, who published a superb short novel this fall called We Sinners, and won a well-deserved Whiting Award), but for every writer who meets this description I have personally met dozens who served essentially as useful idiots for the preservation of creative writing chairs, matriculation statistics, and as cheap labor for English departments. You can make a case that the vast numbers who go nowhere in effect collectively (if unwittingly!) prop up an institution that aids the notable 1%, but no one is really going to "learn" in a workshop what I believe are the two crucial aspects of great fiction–voice, and vision. Near as I can tell, you either have them, or you don't. On the other hand, that same 1% probably would find a hell of a lot more useful fodder in the history books.

  2. The best writing programs in US universities don't have MFA programs (Princeton with John McFee, Alice Walker and Joyce Carol Oates teaching undergraduates, UPenn with its odd assortment of poets, and Yale with John Crowley and others). Gary Snyder wrote that studying anything with a master (carpentry, car repair) would teach more useful things than studying an art with a mediocrity.

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