Young Writers Society

The Education of a Writer

A reader sent me a very good question:
If you want to be a writer what should you major in? I was thinking creative writing.

Back in 1958, I was thinking English literature (creative writing was not a big deal at Columbia...in fact, it didn't exist beyond a couple of courses). In high school I'd written several novelettes and lots of short stories, and I knew I wanted to be a writer. So I became an English major in college. By 1960 I realized this had been a big mistake, but I was stuck with it.

It wasn't a total mistake. An English major will at least get a fairly systematic tour of English literature. A careful choice of electives will help. I enjoyed Oriental Humanities, American history, and a few others. The basic approach at Columbia back then was close textual analysis, the purpose being to see how a given work expressed a particular political position. (By then Northrop Frye had published Anatomy of Criticism, offering a far more useful approach, but Morningside Heights was a provincial backwater in those days.)

English majors are in job training; the job is literary criticism. I picked up the basic skills quickly enough to paralyze myself as a writer. Type a paragraph or two, apply close textual analysis, and throw away the text as hopeless. So my four years in college were a write-off, so to speak. I produced nothing but a few self-conscious short stories and poems, and a lot of C+ term papers.

My real education as a writer began in the US Army, when I began to acquire some non-literary experience. That enabled me to write a pretty dreadful World War III novel (never published), but the real value was in being part of a non-literary culture. The army is concerned with doing stuff, not writing stuff (except training manuals).

This is important. If the only job you know is writing, that's all you're going to write about. If you've had jobs with people whose reading extends no farther than deciphering the menu at the local pizzeria, you're going to have far more subject matter.

Eventually I ended up in teaching (and in the course of obtaining the required MA, I ran into Frye and learned what literature is really all about). I've taught creative writing, and it's fun; if you're a disorganized young person, such a course can impose some discipline on you.

But Norman Mailer majored in aeronautical engineering, then went to war, and came back to become a major American writer. He didn't need an English prof to nag him into reading Dickens and Wordsworth, and he didn't need a creative-writing prof to nag him into writing The Naked and the Dead. He just went ahead and educated himself as a writer. I think he was a very wise young man.

I'm not a technically minded guy like Mailer. If I had it to do over again, I'd have majored in classics, learning Greek and Latin and reading Plato and Tacitus in their own languages. Or I'd have majored in some branch of Asian studies, learning about a totally different culture. Either way, I'd have gained a new perspective on my own culture, and my writing would have reflected that perspective.

So don't take creative writing, except maybe as an elective. Study what interests you: languages, business, science, whatever. If you can't decide which, spend a year in a minimum-wage job; that will focus your mind wonderfully, and give you some great material as well.

Think about the truly great writers in this fortunate language, and tell me which of them started out with a BFA in creative writing. Or a major in English.