Why I Didn't Get an MFA in Creative Writing: The Truth
If you’re thinking about getting an MFA in Creative Writing, I understand the temptation. I struggled with this decision for years. Ultimately, I didn’t decide to get one.
It worked out, because I found an agent and saw my novels published without one. Today, I’m going to share with you why I didn’t end up going to get my MFA.
Like many writers I know, I wanted to be a writer since I was really young—for me, it was seventh grade.
My seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Chancy, inspired me to want to be a writer. So if you’re out there, I LOVE YOU, MS. CHANCY!
I took a slight detour and wound up in law school. So, that happened.
But once I realized my mistake and left law to be a writer, I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I was serious about it…but did being serious about it mean I had to get an MFA?
On one hand, going for my MFA sounded like a dream. I loved the idea of it…being back in school again, going to classes, and for something I loved as much as writing. It sounded like a dream!
On the other, it felt impractical given my life circumstances, like really impractical…and this, coming from someone who had just quit her first ever law job only seven months in.
I was willing to make bold choices.
But I still had over $100,000 in student loan debt from law school. I was living paycheck to paycheck on my tutoring salary as it was. I was turning 30 in a few months. Was I really going to go back to a full-time graduate program, take out another $100,000 in loans unless I could get into a fully funded program, which I knew was very unlikely, and go back to school again, for years? I’d graduate at that point with over $200,000 of debt.
It just seemed rash.
Still, I was committed to becoming a published author, and I might have done it if I really believed it was going to launch my writing career.
But a few things gave me pause.
I should say here that I actually did apply—more than once—and was offered a spot two different times, once to a school that cost less that I was not as excited about, and once to a school I was really excited about that cost a ton.
So why, ultimately, didn’t I go?
Three reasons.
Reason #1
The first is that I’d made a new writer friend at a writing residency, and she happened to have gotten her MFA from the best school in the country years earlier.
It was fully funded; she hadn’t paid a cent. And she was very clear with me: it had destroyed her creatively.
She said she hadn’t written a word for years afterward. It had taken all of the joy out of writing for her, and now, about a decade later, she was finally starting to be able to write again.
This story was very disturbing to me.
I loved this woman as a person, and as a writer. I thought she was brilliant. So if she could be so derailed by an MFA program that was supposed to be the very best one…what might happen to me?
Reason #2
The second reason is that, by this point, I had a number of friends who had also gotten MFAs. And so it was really strange to notice that we all seemed to be in the same boat.
They hadn’t finished their novels either. They didn’t know how to get a literary agent. They still had self-doubt and all that. And they also had lots of debt.
It was impossible to look at this situation and not go…okay so what did it gain them, then?
I don’t mean to be dismissive—I’m sure they could list all kinds of benefits from their program, like how it made them better writers, etc.
But just looking at these concrete facts: they didn’t write a book in their program, and they didn’t learn how to get an agent.
Those…seemed like the hardest things. Not craft stuff. Craft stuff was the fun stuff…the hard stuff was finishing and getting published.
We’d have these conversations where I seemed to know more about getting a literary agent than they did….and so that planted a pretty big seed of doubt as well.
And reason #3—this is going to sound the harshest
But when I read many of my friends’ work from MFA programs, it all kind of sounded…alike.
Like the same sort of disenchanted, disengaged protagonist who is floating through life, the same sparse writing, very sparing sentences…it felt almost like someone went in the MFA machine and came out the other side writing just like everyone else who went into the machine.
And it wasn’t fun. I didn’t like these books. They didn’t make me want to keep reading. I felt like I was supposed to find them brilliant, but I didn’t. I didn’t find it impressive for someone not to write a plot.
I was trying to plot a novel myself and knew how hard it was…I was most impressed by writers who could plot, not the other way around, and it increasingly was seeming like the plotting writers didn’t get MFAs.
There were exceptions, of course. My best friend and his husband both kept their brilliant, individual voices through their MFA program.
But they seemed to be the exception when I looked at the books that were coming out.
In the end, I decided that the cost and risk combined didn’t make it worth it to me.
Luckily, I don’t regret that decision, because ultimately, I did finish my novel and land an agent, who, shortly after, sold my book, then my next two books.
It’s such a personal decision whether to get your MFA or not. I will say that if the reasons I’ve listed in this post resonate with you, check out the program I run, the Book Incubator. It’s an MFA alternative that I created after going through all that I shared with you today.
If you’re the kind of person who thinks you’d thrive in an MFA program, you’re the kind of person who’d thrive in the Book Incubator. You can learn more at the link below this video. Check it out!
