From time to time, I contemplate the MFA in Creative Writing.  It could only help my writing career, I’m sure.  I can imagine the benefits of having a writer/professor guide and foster my writing efforts and a group of fellow students on the same path, with the same struggles.  I’m a believer in the 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration school of thought – that writing takes some talent, but it’s also a craft that can be worked at and improved.  There are conventions to be learned and tricks of the trade. There are those fine points of point of view and vantage point. Writing may come from an interior place, but it lives in an exterior world and needs outside affirmation to breathe. I can see these advantages, and I would welcome the help and perhaps streamlining of the sometimes painful learning curve. I would be accountable to someone other than myself. There would be considerable financial investment in something I wanted a return on.  It wouldn’t hurt either, to develop the networking contacts the MFA programs seem to offer, and the “Seal of Approval,” so to speak, that the degree confers. With those credentials, editors and agents may be more willing to take a chance on an unknown writer.

True confession: I’ve looked, I’ve yearned, I’ve even filled out an application to enter a M.F.A. program.  It was Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., and I had met someone on the faculty, a very talented writer who spoke at one of my book group meetings.  The program was not overly costly. The time commitment seemed manageable: weekly submissions, I think, with a week long “residency” at the end of each semester for two years.  I requested the on-line information package, including the date of an open house. They were so kind to follow up with a phone call. But then I got cold feet. Couldn’t picture myself doing it.  All the other responsibilities of home, to begin with, and maybe answering to myself as well.

So, the question remains in my mind, how did so many great writers do it without the MFA in Creative Writing?  Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare – they had no programs available, but they were prolific and they developed strong individual voices.  They were readers, I’m sure.  They were also under pressure to make money – always a good incentive – rather than pay it out.  It doesn’t seem they worried about the conflict of literary vs. commercial.  And maybe more to the point, I don’t think the focus was on being “great” writers, just writing on an everyday, workman-like basis.  When I think of many of the authors I’ve studied, they were more or less busy people who did many things, not waiting around for inspiration to strike.  What they didn’t have was middle-class lifestyles, supported by doting parents, given lots of advantages and opportunities – and pressure to succeed, or at least not take foolish risks.  Jane Austen doesn’t fit that mold, and yet she is uniquely inspirational to me as a woman writer. She was somewhat cloistered, and not particularly busy. She wrote, it seems, for her own interest and for those around her. What sharpened her pen, I think, was the rich material, the drama of social conventions and the underlying fear of those on the brink of genteel poverty.

 There is the market, and maybe that’s where the MFA makes the difference.  So many computers and so many submissions, there have to be some guidelines as to whose query actually gets read. I’m trying to envision the synopsis for Melville’s Moby Dick of a huge, flawed novel, and calculating his chances for publication today.  Not sure. But somehow, I feel the book would be a different book if he had an MFA.