In Defense of Writing Degrees

When I tell people I have a degree in Creative Writing, they immediately get That Look. You know, the look that says “oh, you're one of those people, one of those artsy types who got a fake degree and will end up working at a restaurant your whole life.” I don't see anything wrong with working at a restaurant (other than the frustratingly low pay and lack of sick days…but that's the industry’s fault, not the workers’), but a lot of people seem to think that being a cashier or waiter is somehow shameful. So, when I say I have a degree in creative writing, I get That Look, and it's immediately clear to me that the person I'm talking to thinks I'm either stupid or willfully naïve. They think I should have gone to school for something useful, like accounting, or engineering. They give me this tight, pained smile, and say something like “oh…how nice,” and then they immediately get away from me, away from the sinful freeloader who had the audacity to go to school for something I love.

Those people (and society as a whole) see writing as something that anyone can do. Everyone has that book they want to write, that memoir, that poetry, that movie script, and everyone thinks that they're just inherently capable of writing it and writing it well. Meanwhile, those people go to their office jobs and write professional emails and newsletters and memos and what have you, without ever acknowledging that what they're doing is writing. In my own office job, I can't tell you how many flagrant typos I've seen in emails, or run-on sentences, or comma splices, or sentence fragments, or chatspeak/emoticons (in professional emails!). Everyone thinks they can write, but no one wants to put in the work to actually write well.

Now, I'm not saying that every single email anyone ever writes has to be a perfect 5-paragraph essay. But we need to do a better job of stressing the importance of writing, in all shapes and forms. There seems to be a massive disconnect when people write, where they don't connect speech with thought. It baffles me, because many of these people are paid to be great communicators, these are sales people or managers, people who know how to get their point across with words. So why can't they get their point across on the page?

The truth is, writing is both simpler and far more complicated than people think. To write well, you need to make the connection between speaking and writing. Those little dots of punctuation that everyone seems to misuse left and right? Those are just tools to convey the same pauses and tone that you hear when someone is speaking. But, more importantly, to write well you need to put in the work. You need to acknowledge that writing is hard and doesn't just “come naturally” the way so many people think it does. Like any skill, it requires years of work to perfect.

That seems to be the issue when I tell someone I have a Creative Writing degree. Many people think that took less work, or was somehow easier than other types of degrees. In reality, while in school, I was writing hundreds of pages of writing each semester (yes, hundreds, actual, literal hundreds. This is not a hyperbole). I was reading at least 4 or 5 books every 15 weeks, on top of whatever I was reading for fun. And, on top of that work I was doing, I was learning everything I could about the world around me, and developing other skills that you might not expect from a Creative Writing program. See, when you’re a fiction writer, you have to learn to be observant. It’s hard to write convincing, realistic characters, so you have to observe the people around you, see how they talk and interact. This means you become a good listener, because you spend so much of your time figuring out how people interact and think and feel.

But perhaps the greatest thing I learned is the power of editing. When you’re writing papers in high school and college, the concept of drafts and editing is mostly just “I’m going to switch around some words and hope I get an A.” When you’re a writer, suddenly editing becomes a whole lot more than that. Now there are actual consequences beyond just a bad grade, because you’re trying to find the best way to communicate your ideas. Even more than that, the process of editing in a writing program teaches you how to collaborate with your peers, and how to take criticism. If you want to survive for any length of time in a writing program, creative or otherwise, you need to learn how to take constructive criticism and use it to your advantage. It can be difficult to sit and listen to your peers as they pick apart a story you wrote like vultures picking apart a corpse on the side of the highway, but it’s an important experience. You learn what comments you should take to heart, and what comments you can (temporarily, at least) brush to the side. The lesson to learn from intensive editing isn’t that your writing is terrible, but that your writing can get better. You learn to make mistakes, and you learn to fix mistakes, which is maybe the most important lesson any of us can learn.

So, whenever I tell someone that I have a degree in Creative Writing, and they scoff, and act like I made a terrible decision, I take some small comfort in knowing that they’re wrong. They act like I went to school to learn about a silly pipe dream. In reality, my degree taught me how to communicate effectively, and how to learn from my mistakes, on top of learning how to write a killer story. Maybe it’s not a degree in finance, or medicine, but don’t act like it was worthless. The thing is, everyone thinks the know how to write, but no one wants to put in the work to write well. So the next time you see a horrible typo in a professional email, or a product description online that doesn’t make sense, think of this post. And ask yourself if writing is really as useless as so many people seem to think.