MFA Programs Killing Creative Writing?

 Bill Morris' Does School Kill Writing? made me laugh and feel my continued efforts were not wholly without merit.

In a dazzling essay in the London Review of Books called “Get A Real Degree,” the brainiac Elif Batuman deftly fillets McGurl’s claim. “According to the internet,” she writes, “writers have, in fact, been going to college for hundreds of years.”  In a footnote she lists dozens of writers, from Balzac to Joyce to Graham Greene, and the universities they attended.  She concludes: “I have been able to find only a handful of famous novelists who, like Hemingway, avoided university in favour of journalism.”  She names Defoe, Dickens and Twain.  (The deftness of this filleting job is greatly enhanced by “according to the internet” – sly shorthand for “as any high school sophomore with a laptop could have found out.”) 

Batuman, a Harvard grad with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford, argues persuasively that the problem is not that virtually all American fiction writers go to college and that growing numbers of them then go on to grad school; the problem is that they study the wrong things.  She comes down squarely in favor of writers studying literature as opposed to studying how to make fiction.  After conceding that the creative writing program is equally incapable of ruining a good writer or transforming a bad one, she asks: “Why can’t the programme be better than it is?  Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves?”

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So I’m dubious when people fret that school is killing writing – that college boys ruined newspapers and the growing horde of creative writing MFAs is ruining American fiction today.  Flannery O’Connor graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent some time at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and neither experience bleached the color, the humor, the horror – the felt life – from her fiction.  Sometime in the early 1960s she wrote: “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers.  My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.  There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher…  In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story.  In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.  We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly.  What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

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