I hear the question all the time—from parents of prospective students, neighbors, acquaintances, strangers on a plane: What do you do with a degree in creative writing?
They aren’t talking about writing as art but as employment. Most undergraduate majors aren’t going to earn their livings as poets or novelists, and even MFA grads typically will have to navigate some period of time before their books find publishers, and even then most will want to combine their writing life with a career that complements what they are trying to do artistically.
Oddly, too many students don’t ask this question, waiting until they are about to graduate before addressing the future. In their defense, they are likely just caught up in the joy and challenge of writing stories, poems, essays, plays, books—hard enough to do without facing the daunting prospect of what comes next. There is a lot to be said for living in the moment of your creative mission, putting your head down, and going full-throttle at the work.
But eventually the question rears up, and you can’t really ignore it.
To me, the answer is self-apparent and encouraging—but it requires that we get beyond the mindset of defining any educational experience by “major.”
Leaders in business, education, the nonprofit sector, and government don’t think so much about majors when they recruit people for important positions on their team—whatever their team is trying to accomplish. They think in terms of skill sets: what the prospective employee can actually do. Which means, what he or she has actually been trained to do and has already done successfully.
And the ones I’ve talked to over my long years of writing and teaching pretty much agree on the skills they value most in graduates and potential employees:
· The ability to write clearly, correctly, and persuasively—as well as to edit reports and other documents to a professional standard.
· Practice in research—finding out facts across a spectrum of fields, knowing where and how to look for valuable information. This often means finding the right people and talking to them (interviewing) or in some other way communicating with them.
· The habit of active listening—hearing what is spoken and what is cached between the lines.
· The skill to analyze a problem and devise a creative solution to it.
· The “people skills” to get along well with peers and supervisors alike and ability to collaborate with a team toward a common goal—adding valuable ideas and hard work toward that goal.
· The temperament and training to give constructive criticism tactfully and in turn make good use of it to improve their own work.
· The imagination to conceive of a project and the self-discipline to see it through.
· The habits of revision and perseverance to turn rough early efforts into a polished final product.
· A good sense of organization and time management, to be able to keep track of multiple projects and work efficiently and effectively on each.
· Hands-on practical experience with digital media—including computer programs such as Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, etc.) and using social media to promote professional, not just personal, projects.
· The ability to speak clearly, tactfully, and persuasively—including the presence and confidence to make lively and interesting public presentations.
· Reliability: can we count on you to show up and deliver what you promise?
· Perhaps most important of all: the ability to overcome setbacks, to fail to achieve a desired result but not give up—rather to go at the problem again from a fresh angle and find a solution, however imperfect, that works.
It turns out that these are exactly the skills fostered by undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing—including workshops and classes in research, editing, publishing, forms, and special electives.
Creative writing students must conceive of a writing project, find out all they need to know about the subject and structure of it (research), then execute it through many drafts toward its best version. As I tell all my writing students, “You are here to fail.” Only with a willingness to fail can we be free to try new approaches, to test the limits of our project and our own abilities. Character resides in what we do to move beyond those failures, using the insight they have given us.
Along the way, creative writing students take criticism from a group of peers, consult closely with a teacher (supervisor), present their work out loud to an audience, and address the work of their peers in a collaborative workshop where they must offer tactful critiques based on their own analysis of the work under discussion. Not once, but many times. They get good at all these skills.
To do all the above, they must manage their time and be organized. They get comfortable using all sorts of digital tools and software, especially in the editing and publishing classes. They must cultivate trust, be reliable citizens of the workshop and the program. Of course, I am talking about the student who is sincere, diligent, conscientious, and hard-working—which in my experience is the overwhelming majority. I’m deliberately not stressing talent, because talent is not the point here. Any student with a modicum of talent can get better by paying attention and exerting effort—by practice.
So by the time such a student graduates with a degree in creative writing—whether a BA in English with a CRW track, a BFA, or an MFA—he or she has a powerful and attractive skill set: the ability to write professionally, read deeply, research intelligently, analyze precisely, listen attentively, speak persuasively, use digital and other tools effectively, organize work efficiently, collaborate successfully with a whole variety of personality types, give and take constructive criticism, take from failure insight and the seeds of future success—all this and a highly developed imagination, too.
Now let’s talk about salary and benefits.
—Philip Gerard
Photo c/o Andrew Schwegler, Flickr Creative Commons