Creative Writing Degree

[UNmaturestudent]

Thinking of returning to Education as a Mature Student. I'm twenty five and looking to do a degree.

Has anyone got any advice or guidance for this? Real life experiences, the application process, funding, etc. I won't be able to do it without qualifying for the maintenance loan.

The whole thing is pretty new and scary!

For further information, I have a part time job, two days a week and an almost three year old who will receive free nursery funding in September. I'd like to hang on to my job as I enjoy it.

Thanks!

I'm just reaching the end of my first year of an English Lit and Creative Writing degree through the OU. I'm really enjoying it, and managing to fit it around full time work, so would recommend it.

But be aware that for the first year you will have to study a full range of Arts and Humanities (history, classical studies, philosophy, music, art history, creative writing, English lit etc). In my first year I've only done one Creative Writing assignment, and for one assignment I had to choose between History, Philosophy and Religious Studies - which was tough going.

Second year looks to be much the same, though covering less areas - I believe it's English Lit, Creative Writing, Art History and Classical Studies.

So if you do go for it, be prepared to not be specialising in Creative Writing until after a few years.

I know a few people dropped out because they couldn't cope with that.

Medusa is giving you great advice here. I swear I actually cried when I was faced with stats, still hate them but there are almost always modules you will hate.

@bottleofbeer sadly that's a natural consequences of this whole 'anyone can go to uni'. As there are so many graduates that a lot of professors can't spend quality time with students.
The academic students get frustrated, the non-academic ones get a worthless piece of paper, and everyone loses except for the uni raking in money.
Nothing wrong with studying because you enjoy it - but the taxpayer should not be funding hobby degrees.
With the proliferation of MOOC's and short courses there are plenty of ways to learn.
A degree is an academic study of something and involves and academic set of skills. If you are not academic then this should not be for you.

Indeed, Lotus.

I'm writing my MSc dissertation at the moment. I can't get a zoom meeting with my supervisor for two weeks.

Just realised my post could feel a bit negative, and didn't want to dampen the OPS enthusiasm.

If you think the degree sounds overwhelming, then I'd suggest checking it the free OU courses - like this one www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/creative-writing-and-critical-reading/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab

Future learn is good too - www.futurelearn.com/subjects/creative-arts-and-media-courses/writing

OP if you love to write -- write! You don't need a degree to do it. It may be fun (or may not be actually) but I agree that you have to be careful about how you use your one financing opportunity.

You may not care about your career now but you may find in your 30s for example that you do need to make a normal salary and you need to retrain.

I would exhaust all other options first, like is there a writers group in your area? Or online? Maybe some short courses you can do?

Take advantage of your DC going to nursery next year and just WRITE, write every day, all the time, find people who will read and critique you. Do NaNoWriMo in November. There are so many resources out there.

@TheLastLotus I’m not sure where to begin with your hobby career comment. I have a career in writing. It is my job and it is incredibly challenging and bloody hard work. So much of what we all consume on a daily basis is down to what you describe as a hobby career, the books you read, the TV and films you watch, the artwork on your walls.
As for these subjects being studied as degrees, I believe this is the only way for people without connections to break into these industries. If you only want your theatre and tv to be controlled by the sons and daughters of the privileged, scrapping creative arts degrees is the way to go.

Agree with @LWOTT.

I also absolutely get why it's sensible to do writing groups or NaNoWriMo, or whatever else - but I'm slightly uncomfortable with the message that you don't need a creative writing degree to write. Obviously it's absolutely true. And there are really excellent published writers who don't have any creative writing training. But I think a lot of them picked it up the hard way, and maybe they'd have had a quicker and easier time if they'd done some training first?

I don't know if this is a useful comparison, but maybe it's a bit like learning a language. Of course you can go on Duolingo and study it on your own, or join a local group where you're all trying to do Spanish once a week. But will it be as good and as thorough and as quick as doing a degree course?

If you're seriously dedicating hours of the day to writing, with no degree result at the end, I do also wonder if prospective employers won't simply ask 'and ... why were you working part time here?' If you say 'well I was doing a degree part time too,' that shows a work ethic. If you say 'well I did NaNoWriMo that one time,' will it look as good?

I see what you're saying @SarahAndQuack, I'm a bit biased because I'm a writer, my parents are writers, I know lots of writers, and almost none of us have writing degrees.

The OP is in a very enviable position, she will have a lot of free time starting in a few months and no pressure to turn writing into a career or something that makes lots of money. If she has no career ambitions then getting a degree for the connections is less necessary.

Personally I would spend a year just writing and exploring all the free resources out there, if that turns out not to be enough then maybe consider a degree.

@LWOTT you have misunderstood my post. I did not mean to say that Creative Writing was a hobby degree. In fact it is the perfect choice for someone like yourself who seems to have both the drive and the capability, since you work in the industry.

What I take umbrage with is the idea that anybody who wants it should be funded for a full-time degree. People who have no idea what to do so they just do a degree, people who 'like writing' but have no intention of entering the field, people who are not academic, etc. A rigorous degree is rightly expensive as it should have decent amounts of academic facetime. The push to make everyone have a degree has resulted in universities being run like businesses with an emphasis of quality over quantity.

Also the more people have a piece of paper, the more ways the industry finds to differentiate - which works against the children of the poor. If 10 people have a degree (from various backgrounds) and there are 10 jobs they all get jobs. If 100 people get a degree and there are 10 jobs - those jobs will with a high likelihood go to the children of the rich and privileged who can do unlimited unpaid internships or use mummy and daddy's connections.

Sorry OP this has nothing to do with your post but as I said, a degree with a capital D is not the only means of acquiring knowledge. If just knowledge is what you want without all of the accompanying academic rigour then I as a taxpayer see no point in paying for it. I'd rather increase research funds to universities.

*Quantity over quality, sorry!

Oh, I do get it - I know lots of writers who didn't ever study creative writing. But I think maybe this is where the networks that @LWOTT mentions come in? If your parents do something, it's normalised for you, and you have some idea of how to go about it all. Not just the actual 'sitting and writing' bit, but the whole idea that you might have to find an agent or pitch your work or even just think about what else is being written at the moment and how the market is going.

@SarahAndQuack That's true of almost every field. Even something supposedly more 'meritocractic and acessible' like computer science. Most people in the field had spent their childhood fiddling with computers, had engineer parents etc. Even if they were not programming prodigies they were still exposed to it!

At the end of the day if you have a network but no piece of paper you'll still get somewhere. The other way around is harder. Especially in the creative industries.

This is why if the piece of paper can be tied to a network it has more value... conversely if it's 'just a piece of paper' in isolation it really does no good to anyone

@TheLastLotus, I get where you're coming from, but - and I could be wrong here - I think actually, back when a much smaller proportion of the population went to university, face to face contact with academics may have been less, not more. It's skewed by the dominance of Oxbridge, which hasn't changed its model of teaching very much for decades, and which gives students masses of small group teaching. But I understand that at other universities, there's been an increase in face to face time since the 70s/80s (which are the heyday of small numbers of students getting an expensive degree for free).

I also think we'll get nowhere by putting pressure on potential students to choose something other than university - the pressure has to come top down, and there have to be other good alternatives to university. The reason people who don't know what to do, do degrees, is because we all know lots of employers will require you to have a degree, even if it's not terribly relevant or exciting. It's a stupid system.

[quote TheLastLotus]@SarahAndQuack That's true of almost every field. Even something supposedly more 'meritocractic and acessible' like computer science. Most people in the field had spent their childhood fiddling with computers, had engineer parents etc. Even if they were not programming prodigies they were still exposed to it!

At the end of the day if you have a network but no piece of paper you'll still get somewhere. The other way around is harder. Especially in the creative industries.

This is why if the piece of paper can be tied to a network it has more value... conversely if it's 'just a piece of paper' in isolation it really does no good to anyone[/quote]
YY, exactly.

@dreamingbohemian I am sure that you and your parents and all your friends are marvellous writers but you sort of make my point for me. Degrees open up opportunities for less privileged and connected people to pursue a career in writing. There are other avenues of gaining knowledge but what a degree or MA provides is a huge amount of feedback and notes, which you wouldn’t get otherwise, which is critical to becoming a better writer.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but to me, the ability to write a bloody good story is almost innate? The natural ability needs to be there so the person doing the CW degree is giving themselves a much better stab at being published one day?

Can you write? I mean, genuinely or is it a nice, romantic idea? I know that sounds so harsh but to me it's like deciding to do a fine art degree and thinking you will be able to give Da Vinci a run for his money.

There are some brilliant suggestions on this thread which you should try first because six weeks into level four? You already owe the fees. Six weeks isn't very long to decide if something is for you or not.

That said, best of luck and hope to be buying your writing one day!

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but to me, the ability to write a bloody good story is almost innate? The natural ability needs to be there so the person doing the CW degree is giving themselves a much better stab at being published one day?

I am so, so, so sure that isn't true! If you look at published writers, they all wrote utter crap at times and as juvenalia. If you look at the ways editors help writers shape their work, you can see how much it changes.

It's like saying being a brilliant pianist is innate. Well, maybe musicality is innate, but you'd never get there without the piano, the training, and the hours and hours of hard work!

Yes @SarahAndQuack It’s like giving two gifted children a piano each. One has concert pianist parents who pay for their lessons and the other has youtube videos. Then the former argues they both had the same piano. This is how the middle-classes justify their position in society. They stick their fingers in their ears on these issues because they want to believe they got where they did on merit.

I think some of the previous posters advice to do an English degree and go the full academic route would be better if you're unsure of your final career as then you could move into something like teaching later on.

Alternatively if you're definitely sure you want to work in creative writing and or the media, maybe a subject that is more specific like scriptwriting, copywriting or journalism would be better from a career opportunity perspective.

Be warned it is hard to achieve a good work life balance of you work in the creative industries. Something like teaching is hard but at least it has a set payscale and conditions.

Look carefully for the following on any course:

Group assignments where you submit a group project and a mark is given out for the project which is shared amongst the team members. If you're paired with someone lazy their mark is improved due to your hard work and yours is lower because you had to do their share of the work. My degree had 2/3rds of the classification based on group work which if I'd had known at the time I would not have signed up for.

Weak lecturers that let other students dominate the class with a load of waffle and are not assertive enough to move the discussion on to other things and as a result the class learns very little.

If you really want to do creative writing make sure the course gives a lot of assistance on plot development. Apparently this is one of the hardest elements to teach in creative writing as it requires more one to one time and so courses with a lot of students and less tutor time may scrimp on it.

[quote SarahAndQuack]@TheLastLotus, I get where you're coming from, but - and I could be wrong here - I think actually, back when a much smaller proportion of the population went to university, face to face contact with academics may have been less, not more. It's skewed by the dominance of Oxbridge, which hasn't changed its model of teaching very much for decades, and which gives students masses of small group teaching. But I understand that at other universities, there's been an increase in face to face time since the 70s/80s (which are the heyday of small numbers of students getting an expensive degree for free).

I also think we'll get nowhere by putting pressure on potential students to choose something other than university - the pressure has to come top down, and there have to be other good alternatives to university. The reason people who don't know what to do, do degrees, is because we all know lots of employers will require you to have a degree, even if it's not terribly relevant or exciting. It's a stupid system.[/quote]
Not really. At undergrad level for RG unis there have been attempts to increase face time with teaching assistants but these are not trained tutors, rather just PhD students who have to teach as a condition of their PhD scholarship. They're not very good and 'by the book', don't stimulate academic discussion To see your actual lecturer (or dissertation supervisor if you have one) takes a very long time. And a lot of them don't know the students they teach by name.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle- the more people have degrees the more employers will ask for one, if only as a filtering mechanism. As a society we should be less snobby about not having degrees. I rather like the Scandinavian system where there are a set number of uni places based on the needs of the job market and it's very low cost if you can get a place.

@LWOTT

Yes *@SarahAndQuack* It’s like giving two gifted children a piano each. One has concert pianist parents who pay for their lessons and the other has youtube videos. Then the former argues they both had the same piano. This is how the middle-classes justify their position in society. They stick their fingers in their ears on these issues because they want to believe they got where they did on merit.

Absolutely this!

I also think, while the advice about going to a creative writing group or getting people to read your work is absolutely fair and sensible, it has the same flaw. We don't all have the same networks. A creative writing group could be full of people who really know what they're doing, have published, have done some training themselves, are very literate and articulate ... or it could be people who want to write but have far fewer tools to share around.

Not really. At undergrad level for RG unis there have been attempts to increase face time with teaching assistants but these are not trained tutors, rather just PhD students who have to teach as a condition of their PhD scholarship. They're not very good and 'by the book', don't stimulate academic discussion To see your actual lecturer (or dissertation supervisor if you have one) takes a very long time. And a lot of them don't know the students they teach by name.

Wow. Ok then.

The lecturer is also likely not a 'trained tutor'. Although increasingly there is progress to get university lecturers to undertake some form of training in pedagogy, this is still rarely a requirement. It is often more likely the PhD tutor has formal training in teaching, than the lecturer does.

I know a lot of PhD students who teach, as well as teaching assistants. In my field, a teaching assistant will be a post-doctoral position, intended as temporary cover for a lectureship, and doing everything the lecturer does. Both PhD tutors and teaching assistants can, and often do, get excellent results. I absolutely acknowledge I have skin in this game: but I have supervised undergraduate and postgraduate students to very successful dissertation completion as a teaching assistant; I've had extremely strong feedback from students and colleagues on my teaching, and I am in no way an exception here.

[quote LWOTT]@dreamingbohemian I am sure that you and your parents and all your friends are marvellous writers but you sort of make my point for me. Degrees open up opportunities for less privileged and connected people to pursue a career in writing. There are other avenues of gaining knowledge but what a degree or MA provides is a huge amount of feedback and notes, which you wouldn’t get otherwise, which is critical to becoming a better writer.[/quote]
Not really sure how I'm supporting your point?

My grandparents were all factory workers, in no way helpful when my parents decided to be writers. My parents moved to the big city when they were very young and lived in a terrible part of town and just wrote like crazy. My dad managed to turn it into a (poorly paid!) profession, my mother did not. She only came back to it much later in life.

I definitely benefited from having my parents as writers but the main lesson I learned was to write every day and as much as possible. They were not middle class, they did not have amazing connections, but they were supportive and gave feedback. That is the main thing the OP would benefit from but you don't need to do a proper degree to get that.

If the OP wanted to work in publishing or make a good career out of writing, I would definitely recommend a degree for the career aspects. But if she just wants to write and enjoy it, you don't need a degree for that.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but to me, the ability to write a bloody good story is almost innate? The natural ability needs to be there so the person doing the CW degree is giving themselves a much better stab at being published one day?

I think it's like any creative skill, if you have an innate talent (disclaimer: I'm not convinced anything is innate) then you will find it easier to pick up the skill and improve on it. Even more so if you are encouraged in it, or around others who you can learn from.

I don't think an innate talent alone will guarantee brilliant work, it always needs an element of technical knowledge, which has to be learnt somehow.