Ep. 179: Should You Get an MFA?

Bestselling author (and teacher) Rachael Herron talks about why you should (or shouldn’t) get an MFA in writing.

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #179! It’s a bonus mini episode with me, Rachael Herron. 

[00:00:22] And today I’m going to be talking about a question I get a lot and I’ve actually gotten it for some reason, three times in the last week. So I don’t know, maybe application season is upon us. But today I’m going to be talking about Should You Get your MFA? Let’s talk about it. What is an MFA? an MFA is a Master of Fine Arts, and you can get them in all of the fine arts, basically bookbinding and dancing and I don’t know if it, yeah, book finding would be a fine art, and fiction and poetry and creative nonfiction and whatever the heck else you want in Fine Arts. You can get a master’s degree in it, which is awesome. I have a master’s degree. I like having a master’s degree because I am snotty. And I like to say that I have one. I like to be able to have that. I always wanted a doctorate and I’ve even looked into getting a doctorate. I’m doing the next step and every time I do, I back away and say, no, I actually don’t want that. And there’s no reason for me to have one except for cache. That’s the only reason. And for me, that’s not a big enough reason.

[00:01:30] So let’s break it down. Should you get a Master of Fine Arts in Writing? I say, yes, you should get one if you want one. If you, and I’m not, I’m not just saying that flippantly. If you want one, if it will make you feel better about yourself as a human being, because of the cache or because you know, you always wanted a master’s degree in something, you want to prove your mastery over something with little letters that can go after your name. That’s a great reason. That is the- get one. Go ahead. But I would also add to this and get one if you want one, and you can afford it without going into debt. I think that going into debt for a Master of Fine Arts is so stupid. And I did it, so I get to say it, it was so dumb. I spent, almost, I spent like 17 years, paying that off I think. It was about maybe 16 years paying that off and some of you have heard me talk about this, but I did forbearance a million times. I was living in the Bay area as a dispatcher, not much money, no idea how many worked. So I was in a lot of debt in a lot of ways. So I kept pushing off, paying back that, that I had borrowed $40,000. But then, you know, I got the job and I start paying it back. I was paying $350 a month. I paid $26,000 of it back. So let’s do the math. I borrowed 40,000 I paid them 26,000, when I logged in to see how much I owed, I owed 50,000. That is how much the interest had gotten me. It’s just madness that after paying $26,000 of a $40,000 loan, I owed 50,000. I was so furious. There’s a blog post about it. You can search it on my site. But then my wife and I spent the next year throwing every single dollar we had at it and we paid it off in a year because I was so furious and we ate beans and I was working two jobs and we had the privilege to be able to do that. I have the privilege to be able to work a good full time 911 job, and I was making money writing, so pay that off. But I’m still, I’m still angry about that. 

[00:03:47] It was not worth that much money, so yeah, I spent $76,000 on that master’s. So if you can afford one to pay it out of pocket, or you know, earn as you go and pay it off, I think. Great. But if you’re already in debt, and you want to think about taking on more debt, no way. The masters will not help you make more money. That’s the thing. That my masters has never helped me make more money. Let’s talk about that. So I don’t think you should get them. 

[00:04:15] Here’s the reasons you shouldn’t get an MFA: If you think you’re going to learn what you think you need to know. Don’t get an MFA if you want to learn how to write. There are much better, much faster ways of learning how to write. I learned more, I say this all the time, but I learned more in my first two years with romance writers of America, which is right now in hell. Don’t join it. But it was, it was what it was when I joined. I learned more in my first two years with them about the craft and business of writing than I did getting my masters. The thing is, when you enter a master’s program, you are marrying their faculty and their students that joined, and perhaps the faculty is going to be amaze balls. But maybe a couple of teachers really aren’t that great and you’re gonna spend a lot of time learning from them. Whereas if you don’t get an MFA and you learn from everyone, you can learn from everyone. The place I learned to do writing. The, the place I have learned best from is in being edited. By being edited by my books. Being edited, that is where I learned. You do not have to get a New York contract to get your books edited, you can hire those editors on your own to make your books better, and then attempt to attract an agent and be traditionally published or then self-published. But where you learn is by doing the work, by writing, and then by being edited. That is how you learn to be a better writer. That’s how you learn everything. So, don’t get an MFA just to learn how to write. You’ll, you have a much bigger world to learn from. Don’t get an MFA if you think it will get you published. It will not. Agents do not care if you have an MFA. Publishers do not care if you have an MFA. They want a highly commercial book that will make them a lot of money. That’s what they’re looking for. By and large, that is what they are looking for. Don’t get an MFA if you think it’ll get you a teaching career. The market is completely saturated with MFAs and PhD candidates. those who are out there already can’t get permanent teaching gigs.

[00:06:30] I do teach at Stanford and at Berkeley, and it was made a little bit easier for me to teach, because of my MFA is just a tech check box. They could check off, but the thing is, I could have taught there anyway because I have an established writing career. I have books out. Once you have books out, you can teach. Boom. There you go. Bob’s your uncle. I did not know that Bob’s, your uncle was a New Zealand phrase. I’ve said it all my life cause I’m a half new Zealander and apparently the Americans don’t say it. This is blowing my mind. You should say Bob’s your uncle. You do something, you do something else, you Bob’s your uncle it, done. There you go. That’s a, that’s a writing tip you just learned and you’re not in MFA program. Okay, so don’t get an MFA. If you think it’s going to teach you how to write, it won’t, I mean, it will teach you a few things, but it won’t teach you everything you need to know. Don’t get it when, if you think it would get published. Don’t think, don’t get one if you think of, get your teaching career, this isn’t as important. Don’t get one if you think it’ll make you write. You will be just as big procrastinator in an MFA program as out of an MFA program. MFA programs do have the ability to make you write to a deadline. Your master’s thesis will be due on a day and it’s going to be probably a book or a half a book or whatever their thing is, and you’ll have to get it done by that day.

[00:07:50] But you could do that without paying them. My master’s thesis was done, it was half a book. I never picked it up again. It is terrible. It is in the college library where I went. It is bound. I picked it up one day and I tried to read a few pages. It was just so agonizing. It was not good. So, don’t get it for that reason. If you think it’ll make you write. Your whole life cannot be an ivory tower. Even if you give yourself two years in an MFA, you will come out and then just be back to normal life. So learning to write around a normal life is more important than getting an MFA. If you do decide for whatever reason, you can afford it and you want to get an MFA, fantastic. What kind? It is worth thinking about whether you want to write a literary novel, which is a genre. It’s just a genre or a commercial novel, which is, can be broken down into the books that sell a lot more than literary novels. So mystery, romance, science fiction, upmarket, women’s fiction, all of those. Because there are a few programs that particularly deal with commercial fiction, and the best ones that I know. Let’s see, Seton Hill is a fantastic, program. They are in, just outside of Pittsburgh. And, they are wonderful, my friend Nicole Fieler actually is the director of the program. And they teach you how to write a commercial book. Your ending thesis must be a finished novel. That will sell commercially. They don’t really talk about literary too much. Let me give you a few, a scary, well, actually, let me give you a couple more schools. USC also has, a commercial fiction orientation. Apparently NC state, Temple and Stone coast are other commercial fiction MFA. I’m not familiar with those, but I would think about going, if you’re getting an MFA, get one from a program that wants you to make some money from it. Eventually. 

[00:10:09] But speaking of money, depressingly, this was two years ago and this didn’t take a lot of self-publishing into consideration, but the authors guild did a large survey, which did include self-published authors. Just not a lot of them. The meeting income for all published authors based on book related activities fell from 3,900 to $3,100 per year. While full time traditionally published authors earned 12,400 per year. That’s, that’s the median. If you count all writing related activities, including teaching, whatever you’re doing to make money that is writing related as well as writing books. The median income was $20,000 a year. So when you keep that in mind, when you’re thinking about how much you want to pay for an MFA, how much money you would want to spend on that. You are probably not going to be able to pay it off with writing money, not for a very long time. So, if you can pay it off with something else, that’s fantastic. If you just want it to have it, great. If you want to have those two years in the ivory tower. Beautiful. That is what I wanted. I honestly wanted to be in school talking to people about writing, building a community, which by the way, I lost completely. We just are – our grad program just didn’t, it didn’t, it fell apart. Those people are not in my life. My life and my writing life is supported by this incredible web of interconnected writers, but none of them are from my MFA, not one single one, which is sad because I really like those people. 

[00:11:52] What else did I want to say? Oh, yes, I know. Pick up the book before you get an MFA, before you apply to a program. Pick up the book, DIY MFA. I have not read it, but it has incredible reviews and I was just looking about looking at what it’s about. And basically, it is, it’s three-part mission of the DIY MFA is to write with focus, read with purpose, and build your community. Those are the three things you’re looking for in an MFA program. You are, you need to learn how to write with focus, and ignore life around while you get the writing done. You need to learn how to read with purpose in order to learn from books you want to emulate or compete against, and build your community, which my graduate program didn’t manage to do somehow. So pick up the book. It’s like, I dunno, probably $50. Let’s see what it is. Oh, it’s 14.99 in Kindle that’s a lot, 19.99 on paperback. Just grab it, see if it helps you. See if it is something that you could do instead of, or perhaps you will get the book and then decide to do an MFA as well. Again, totally go for it if you want it. Just have those other things in mind that it will not help you do. That said, I guess I am glad I spent $76,000 on an MFA. Because I like to say I have one and I did have a good time in the ivory tower when I did spend those two years single, no kids, living in a little tree house and writing in Oakland and working at a, you know, as a waitress in a restaurant. Those were two good years of my life. But I didn’t spend much time writing. I spent the least amount of time writing that was possible to complete the program. And that is how writers do it. 

[00:13:38] So I hope this has helped a little bit. I don’t want to step on your MFA dreams. I really, really don’t. But I want you to have clear, open eyes and heart when it comes to what it means for you. So if this has helped, if this has helped you make up your mind, or if you say, screw you, Rachael, I’m going to get an MFA in order to write a highly literary novel, and I’m gonna put it on all credit card. Then, you know, that’s fine. You do you. But, these are my thoughts. So yes, thank you for these questions. Thank you for listening and I wish you very happy writing no matter where or when or how you are doing it. And we’ll talk soon my friends. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.