What I Learned – and Wish I’d Learned – in Creative Writing Grad School

There are debates in the writing world about the value of studying creative writing, and whether it’s beneficial or detrimental for honing your writing skills. I spent two years in a graduate Creative Writing program. Having gone on to write and edit professionally, there are skills I’m glad to have learned in class and others I’ve learned out in the “real world.” While programs, classes, and teachers vary, here’s my breakdown of what I personally learned in school vs. the lessons that came later, some of which I wish had been covered in the curriculum.   

How to experiment vs. how to connect with readers

Graduate school did a fantastic job of opening my eyes to the different types of writing out there. By meeting practicing writers, I saw just how many genres and styles one could pursue, how many niches a writer could find for their own style and interests to shine. In classes, we were encouraged to try out different styles and voices. Writing exercises pushed our boundaries and deepened our abilities. We also analyzed a wide range of books in class. In this experimental climate, I could see that many different kinds of writing had value.

One thing that wasn’t at all stressed, though, was writing commercially. We were seen as artists, developing our abilities in an art form. Any considerations of marketing were left out, and so, in large part, were considerations of the readers – ironic in that I was hoping first and foremost for my words to connect with them. The elements that make writing “click” with people are often the same ones that make it sell, and I’ve been doing my best to learn them since graduating. Emotional resonance, concept appeal, and getting readers to turn pages are skills that transcend writing style and experimentation. I wish school had talked about them more.

How to write deeply vs. prolifically

“Write every day,” one of my professors told me, “even if it’s just a line in a notebook. If you’re writing a novel, it should be the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about before you go to sleep.” I followed her advice, keeping notepads handy at all times. I learned how to be absorbed in a project and open to inspiration.  

While depth was part of my education, no one talked about how to write prolifically or how to keep producing. There was no education about word counts or incentive to keep going outside of the thesis and classes. I also didn’t learn about outlining methods, which would have been helpful for the fiction I was writing. My instructors, of course, were part-time rather than full-time writers. If we’d had guest speakers in to talk about the discipline of writing full time and offer tips, or activities to instill discipline and practice along the lines of NaNoWriMo, how much that could have helped us learn about being productive, working writers.  

How to critique and edit vs. how to market

The workshop format of our creative writing classes was useful in teaching us how to give and take critique. We went over classmates’ writing with a fine-toothed comb, learning to identify what they had done well and where they could improve. When receiving feedback, we discovered through experience how to incorporate consensus about what wasn’t working into revisions. We learned which critiques to take into account and which were off the mark for what we were hoping to achieve. I learned a good number of editing skills both through self-editing based on these critiques and through working with literary magazines on editing and acquisition.

By the end of my studies, professors said my work was “publishable,” but how exactly would I accomplish that? I left the program with very little idea. I recommend that anyone teaching creative writing talk their students at least a little through the business side of things, demystifying the submission process, query letters, agents, publication, and what the market is like.     

There’s a lot I learned from my time in grad school about pursuing writing as an art. Since then, I’ve discovered how much it’s also a business, and how much I still have to learn. While studying creative writing can be the right learning opportunity for some, it’s not for everyone, and a lot of the craft’s practical lessons aren’t necessarily covered in the course curriculum. I recommend that anyone who’s interested in a writing career self-educate about readership, productivity strategies, and marketing. This part might come after writing a draft, as it favors strategy over artistry, but it’s important to look into if you want your writing to reach people and make its mark on the world.