Most people trying to do an MA / Masters degree in creative writing probable wish to achieve this as a way to release their profession as a professional author.
But if it’s your motivation, you need to suppose very cautiously indeed. Many MA courses on provide don’t even pretend to put together you nicely for the publishing marketplace. Here, as an example, is the blurb from UEA (one of the UK’s exceptional recognised writing faculties):
“The MA does no longer characteristic through physical 香港 mba games however through thinking about fiction as a shape of aesthetic, mental and cultural enquiry. Neither the poetry nor prose fiction strand is normally business in route and neither teaches conventional style forms or, within the conventional experience, marketability.”
Eh? What does that imply? Marketability ‘inside the conventional experience’? Call me an idiot, but some thing is marketable if you could sell it. It’s highly marketable, if you could promote it for a lot. And if you want to be a writer – you recognize, the type who writes books which are bought in bookshops – then thinking about marketability in a conventional sense seems like a rattling properly idea to me.
Here, for some other instance, is the blurb from Goldsmiths, every other particularly esteemed creative writing university, with a enormously appeared MA / PhD software:
“The inter-dating among theory, scholarship and the creative procedure is fundamental to the Goldsmiths MPhil/PhD in Creative Writing… Doctoral college students for the PhD in Creative Writing are anticipated to mix their own creative writing with studies into the style or area of literature wherein they are running, to benefit insight into its history, improvement and modern-day practices…. They are also predicted to have interaction with applicable modern-day debates approximately principle and practice.”
Blimey! I’ve no concept what the inter-relationships between principle, scholarship and the creative technique is for my work. I do not even virtually know what which means. I doubt if my publishers do. Or in the event that they care. They’re probable simply happy publishing my books.
On the other hand, the quality Masters publications do certainly do a stunning activity for a share of their college students. UEA can boast of the following alumni: Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Tracy Chevalier, and plenty of others. Bath Spa says, ‘Two [of our recent students] had been lengthy-indexed for the Man Booker Prize, three for the Orange Prize, one for the Costa Prize and one for the Guardian First Book Award.’
Those are strikingly excellent achievements. Genuinely astounding.
So before you sign on for an MA direction, you want to think hard. What do YOU want from your degree? Does the ethos and emphasis of your selected MA innovative writing route satisfy that intention or now not?
Overall, I’m sceptical. I think a minority of gifted writers may additionally bloom to a super diploma on any such courses. A huge majority will, I assume, emerge as being rejected through the publishing industry… Having in no way been well ready with the capabilities that could have allowed them to thrive.