I am not against higher education in the least, given that I have three college degrees. But – and here’s the crucial distinction – I have an MA in International Relations. Not an MFA. I also have a BA in English Literature … not a BA in Creative Writing.

Both these degrees required extensive reading and writing, but I was writing about writing. (Much like the whole concept of High Poetry.) I was analyzing books, picking them apart, examining their arguments and themes. My papers were not thrown like sacrificial lambs to my fellow students, who would then tear them apart and demand that I tone everything down so they were comfortable.

Unlike some of my other pieces, like tradpub vs. selfpub, I am not even going to attempt to be neutral here. I don’t like MFAs. I don’t think they’re valuable. I’m not going to pretend I do, nor provide any devil’s advocacy.

Even MFA graduates themselves have said that it’s not worthwhile unless someone else is paying for it. That should be a warning sign for you.

MFAs make writers overconfident.

As I have said about a thousand times, I strongly encourage you to write a million words before you try publishing.

Yes, I know that’s a lot. I know it takes a lot of time. And that is why people who immediately jump from MFAs to publishing tend to write the most godawful books.

You will write a lot in an MFA, of course, but nowhere near 1 million words. Not even close. You will spend a significant of time hemming and hawing over one singular short story, adding every single little thing a critic said (more on that in a second), and this will make you certain that you’ve really got this writing thing down.

But you haven’t. You’ve spent a lot of time carefully rearranging the words in a single short story. I suppose you will get very good at revising and incorporating feedback, but not much else.

However, having an MFA makes it seem like you really have done all the work! You have letters behind your name to prove it! You’re ready to go!

Booo. Nope. Million words or bust, baby. You ain’t ready yet.

I would argue that MFA students are almost more prone to jumping the gun on publishing than self-published authors – and more entitled about it. They are certain that they know what they’re doing because institutions have told them so, and then they’re hurt when no one outside of those institutions likes their books.

Treating writing like a degreed profession sucks all the creativity out of it.

I can guarantee that none of your favorite authors from before the early 20th century had an MFA. That is because MFAs did not exist then.

The University of Iowa started the proto-MFA in 1936. The website mentions that several prominent authors, like Robert Frost, came to visit, but they certainly did not take courses; they had already established themselves.

During the post-war boom, other MFA programs popped up in the US, like Indiana University, and soon almost every podunk liberal arts college had one. Each one was swayed in its “voice” by whoever directed it at the time, as this determined which teachers were assigned classes and how they guided students.

The MFA degree is considered a terminal degree, designed for people who want to go on and teach writing. Like a Ponzi scheme. Get the letters behind your name so that you’ll be hired and can go on to teach the exact same things to other people so they can get the same letters.

However, there’s a problem with this: it treats creative writing like something that can be standardized and assessed, as if it is similar to any other profession.

People can tell whether you’re doing a good job as a nuclear physicist because if you’re not doing a good job, your skin falls off. You’re a bad pharmacist if a bunch of people accidentally take Viagra instead of Prozac. Not everyone can tell if you’re a bad writer because writing is entirely subjective at a certain skill level.

And this brings me to my next point: an MFA program is almost structurally designed to create bad writing, because it ensures everyone sounds the damn same.

The MFA style sands all the edges down on unique prose or plots.

Over time, the MFA system has created its own dialect, a specific subset of fiction that Sam Kriss calls Mfalé. I’ll let them explain:

Texts written in Mfalé are brisk, frank, stark, plain, competent, and readable. They concern the daily lives of a few everyday characters, usually young, usually in some kind of bad sexual relationship or complicated breakup, usually mediated by digital technology. There’s a close attention to sensory detail, and an even closer attention to minor affective nuances: moments of inattention or miscommunication, people who see each other as more or less than they actually are, small eddies of desperation or loneliness or regret. There’s a lot of banal but realistically rendered dialogue. Stories are generally (but not always) written in the third person, but hew very closely to one particular perspective.

As Kriss explained in later parts of that essay, MFA voice is intentionally voiceless. It is smoothed down and “realistic” in that it blandly describes small actions and minute states with dogged journalistic attention instead of prioritizing something that is, well, interesting to actual human readers. It says so much but so little at the same time, like another critic mentioned at The Missouri Review.

Despite having three degrees myself, I have significant misgivings about academia as a career for a simple reason: it’s designed for groupthink. Everyone is citing everyone else, nodding their heads in agreement. The politicking means you can’t call someone an idiot in a published article, nor can you plainly express what has pissed you off.

We all know that I am an avowed hater. If I don’t like something, I say it. I would probably be hogtied and thrown in a classroom closet if I tried to join a workshop.

Another commenter over on Reddit concurs:

And to add, the nature of the workshopped novel is that the writer starts pandering to groupthink dynamics natural to such groups and a sort of lowest common denominator of what “good literary fiction should be.” Obviously there is no such thing as what good literary fiction should be.

And I simply do not think this is a good way to create fiction. At all.

The idea of workshopping came from the concept of the “death of the author.” Students in an MFA program bring their work to the table and sit in stony silence as everyone else picks their work apart.

But there is no “death of the author” when you’re actively crafting the work. This is why I am baffled at the very concept of a workshop in the first place; they’re basically murdering you in front of you, dressing this up as constructive.

Your writing is your writing. No one else’s. It is not supposed to reflect a group consensus or a common denominator. Having so many people throw their opinions at you is going to kill the whole soul of the piece.

The Redditor goes on:

But an MFA program is a collection of students all struggling mightily to find their own voice and most don’t yet have it. They want end results and parameters. When someone comes along who might have a unique voice, it’s like a survivor island show where you want to knock off the best first because they are a threat.

In other words, you have the same problem as Reddit forums, where a lot of beginners and intermediate writers are spewing their uninformed opinion from a place of insecurity and ego. They want you to fail, because if you fail, then they look better.

You are paying a bunch of money to get the same benefits you would get from asking twenty people on r/betareaders to shout at you. It has nothing to do with providing good critique, which typically involves the Socratic method. Everything to do with jockeying for good favor from a likeminded professor.

A far preferable option would be to take classes on good fiction and absorb the craft advice while you are guided along by an experienced instructors. You can carefully disarticulate a quality book, look at its seams, and then practice this on your own time.

If you are lucky, one of your professors will be willing to take a look at your original fiction and give advice, or you can take one or two creative writing classes (not a whole degree) to get some polish. Many universities also have writing centers where you can bring your original fiction, or make a small informal workshop group of other writers who you vibe with.

In other words, an English degree. I will discuss this later in depth.

The workshop system can cause genuine harm to marginalized writers.

Instead of assisting the singular writer, workshopping is explicitly framed as being for the other students, to help them generate their own ideas. The idea is that everyone will get their turn being the victim of everyone else’s whims, but that most of the time they are armed with their throwing stones and aiming high.

Having spent eight years in higher education (and having had to do creative writing workshops myself), I can tell you this: most of what other students say isn’t really for you. It’s to impress the teacher because they want to get a good grade. But if most of the student body in that room is from a predominant culture, their comments may be ignorant at best, genuinely racist and cruel at worst.

Naseem from Sword & Kettle Press shares their MFA experience, including some frankly atrocious “suggestions” from other students:

• A lot of my work takes place in a Persian-inspired secondary world. I had that world compared to Agrabah, was told to bring in a Marco Polo–type character to help orient the reader, and was asked where the camels were.
• Said world is a matrilineal and matriarchal society vaguely, a queernormative world specifically. People wondered whether (cis) men were oppressed or whether they didn’t exist.
• While working on a YA contemporary ghost story about Islamophobia and white supremacy, in which the main character’s visibly Muslim brother is killed in a train accident and is subsequently blamed for the accident as a terrorist attack, I was told I was being too mean to my white characters.

These are genuinely awful things to say to another writer, and they all come from the fact that many MFA programs are homogenous. These folks come from middle-class, white, cisheteronormative backgrounds and struggle to conceive of different perspectives.

There also might be the fact that many MFA programs lean heavily toward “literary fiction” and despise genre fiction, which means that any genre fiction will get far less praise than even the most driveling literary slop. But, as I have learned, this attitude is being phased out across many programs, so maybe in a few years it’ll be better across the board.

Regardless of that distinction, these kinds of comments are allowed to pass with many teachers because they think it’s important to consider “diverse perspectives” and not “censor” their students.

But one can dress racism up in quasi-intellectual language so it becomes a microaggression; academia is very good at that specific magic trick. Polite discrimination is still discrimination, but with a good PR team.

I guarantee you that if I walked into an MFA workshop with, say, Funeral of Hopes, and the group was unusually sympathetic to genre fiction, I would be told a range of things. Many of those, I suspect, would be that it is wrong to make Uileac an asshole who tries to push societal expectations on his husband, and that Orrinir shouldn’t have tried to cut Uileac to pieces during a sparring practice with real swords.

The liberal arts world has now veered wildly toward cooing, defanged queer characters who are always a paragon of purity. Which, in itself, is a type of Othering, similar to what I discussed when talking about whether I fridged Juliska in What Is Cannot Be Unwritten.

Queer characters are supposed to be sweet little cinnamon buns who never put a paw out of place, and who have tragic backstories that are more like trauma porn than reality. They’re not allowed to be ugly and unpleasant, except perhaps if they are sex-addled one-night-stand coke fiends who represent the hedonic underbelly of the queer community. That, apparently, is okay, but other character flaws are totally passe.

And that’s shit representation. Sorry, but it is. Queer characters are allowed to be wrong; they’re allowed to be unpleasant; they’re allowed to have all the nuance and flavor of any other character. Doing otherwise turns them into pathetic cardboard characters to demonstrate that you are a Very Moral Author.

Groupthink is, in general, not great. That is especially true when it comes to creative expression, which is about making an individual experience legible to those outside of your own mind. And when you add marginalized identities, that groupthink can veer very closely toward racism, queerphobia, misogyny, and all the other -isms and -phobias we despise.

If you want to become a great writer, studying great literature will be infinitely more helpful.

Naseem from Sword & Kettle Press, when discussing their experience, made this interesting comment:

It was useful to have continued conversations about craft (which didn’t really happen in workshop, but rather, with like-minded individuals outside them), taking graduate courses outside my discipline (I took courses in the Gender, Race, and Identity program), and my comprehensive exams (a list of 30 books (most of which I chose) with craft papers on each). This latter is not a requirement for most MFA programs, but it was, by far, the most useful thing I did in my program.

Literally all of those things are the basis of not an MFA program … but an English degree. The very things Naseem thought were valuable about the MFA were not MFA-related at all.

A BA English degree requires you to write dozens of papers on specific books from a wide range of eras, depending on what courses you take. Every class time is all about studying craft and having interesting conversations about authorial choices. You learn about the historical context of the given book, how contemporaries received it, and what controversies it has generated.

While I specialized in British Literature at University of Illinois-Chicago, specifically Victorian literature, I studied everything from Greek tragedies to postcolonial literature. I discovered some of my favorite books, like Cloud Atlas and The English Patient, and even did an entire class on early Christian literature, all of which were outside of my specialty.

You are also required to take gen-eds and a sampling of classes from other disciplines. I had a minor in Latin and another in gender studies. I took classes on disability rights, archaeology, qualitative logic, Scottish history (during my study abroad experience), and chemistry, among many other things.

That was invaluable for my progress as a writer. I got to see different perspectives and taste separate realms of academia. None of that would have happened if I were crammed in a classroom with a bunch of other would-be writers desperate to show off.

An MFA is only valuable if you want to get traditionally published or enter academia.

Here is the final verdict: MFA is great for networking. Your teachers might know an agent. They might recommend you publish in the college’s quarterly review or poetry journal, which gets you citations. Your classmate might go on to work as an acquiring editor, and then you have a friend who will help you get a fast pass to querying. Which does happen and cannot be ignored.

And, of course, it is practically a requirement if you want to teach anywhere, even at a small community college. That is why it is considered a terminal degree; it is typically the highest accreditation you can get (though there are some creative writing PhD programs now). You get the degree, you’ve won the game.

However, I have a problem with anything that suggests you “win the game.” Writing isn’t a game; it is a long-standing journey of discovery, where your voice gets deeper and richer with each piece. The very concept of reaching the top encourages stagnation. You’ve hit the ceiling, and what do you do now? I guess you just keep putting out the same kind of stories, over and over again.

There’s a reason that most of the most iconoclastic, breathtaking writers do not have a credential in writing except maybe an undergrad and some honorary degrees. They don’t feel settled in their writer identity. They don’t feel they’ve reached the top. There’s always more to explore because no institution told them that they’ve made it; they have to decide for themselves where to go next.

Forging your own path requires more intrinsic motivation and emotional courage than many can stand, but it’s also the way anyone does anything unique.

Shakespeare sure as hell didn’t get an MFA, now did he?

I am sure detractors could say I’m just bitter and jealous, and that’s why I hate MFAs. Not at all. I never applied to an MFA because I don’t want one. I also don’t care about networking, the external validation of having a special title, or becoming a professor.

One might also say, “Well, you just couldn’t make it in an MFA program and you were scared to apply so you’re projecting.” I don’t want to make it in an MFA program; I’m confident enough in my voice that I do not need a lot of unconfident fellow students giving their uninformed opinions. I have trusted beta readers who help me, and that is more than enough.

And the last potential character assassination is that I’m jealous of traditionally published authors who got there through an MFA and I’m seething about how I will never see my name on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

Listen, if I cared about getting on a bestseller list, I wouldn’t write a 10-part queer literary fantasy series. Famed stallion American Pharoah will win the NASCAR Cup Series before the Eirenic Verses gets critical acclaim. Ain’t gonna happen, and I know this, and I don’t care.

Your writing is yours. You can be guided along by experienced writers; indeed, I think having support from professionals is extremely helpful. Writer’s Digest has a variety of courses that allow you individual feedback from a respected author.

They are pricey, yes, but much cheaper than an MFA, and you aren’t being subjected to a bunch of other peoples’ bad takes on your work. The Writer’s Digest courses also recognize something that MFA programs do not: every genre is valuable on its own, and each genre requires a different approach. You cannot simply flatten them all into a bland, sterilized Mfalé and think that’s good enough.

Save your money. Save your time. Study good fiction, and get verifiably good advice. Don’t wander into a workshop full of other bumbling beginners and expect the blind to lead the blind.