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This question is silly – ironically enough, you maybe found this post googling that very same thing… Do you need a degree to be a writer?

As I’ve often mentioned, the answer to any headline ending with a question mark is “no”. This is the case here, too. No, you don’t need a degree to be a writer (as I said, the question is so silly that I feel stupid just answering it).

However (here it comes)…

This isn’t the entire story, either. No, you don’t “need” a degree to be a writer, in the sense there have been many writers who didn’t have a college degree and produced some stunning works of art.

Yet, I’d be a liar not to admit my PhD has made me a better writer – though probably not quite for the reasons you might suspect.

In today’s post I’ll take a closer look at what getting a college degree (say, in creative writing or English literature) does for you as a fiction author. Is it better? Could it be worse?

Ultimately, the proper question isn’t whether you need a degree to be a writer, but whether going through a (relevant) degree makes you a better writer.

Did I Need a Degree to Be a Writer?

No, I didn’t need a degree to be a writer. As most (though not all) writers, I began writing at a very young age. As an 18-year-old, I’d already written a couple of novels which I then started pitching to publishers. One rejection came after another.

A few years later – well before I even thought I wanted to follow an academic path – one of my novels was finally accepted by a respectable traditional publisher. You can find some details in my post about what it means to be a published author.

Going through a very bizarre roller coaster of emotions and events that took place for two or three years, I ended up feeling sick of the publishing industry. I was entirely disillusioned with the whole thing. Inevitably, this affected my writing to the point I stopped writing fiction for many years.

Somewhere at that point I thought, screw it, instead of writing literature, I’ll just study literature – the very embodiment of the saying “Those who can’t do, teach”.

It was only after I got my MA and during my doctoral studies that I became interested in writing fiction again. It’d been almost ten years. And then I realized, nothing was the same.

Getting a Degree Did Make me a Better Writer…

By the time I timidly started writing fiction again, I’d gone through five years pursuing an MA degree and another couple of years a doctoral one.

I’d become exposed to a vast amount of quality literature – for all its conservatism, the academia is a great quality filter in terms of what kinds of books reach you. That thing alone enriched my vocabulary and knowledge of the language.

But also from a more active perspective, having to compose exercises, essays, course journals, and entire theses, meant I had to learn a certain kind of writing discipline – in multiple senses of the word.

Naturally, on a theoretical level, I’d also learned a lot about narrative theory, exposition, genre and intertextuality, metaphors and allusion, you name it.

But I also had the chance to collaborate with some intellectually very stimulating people – both peers and educators – that taught me something more important than how to control the English language.

They taught me how to think.

… But not (only) for the Reasons You Suspect

I won’t lie, the practicalities were important. To a writer, feeling comfortable with the (English) language is arguably akin to a painter feeling the brush is merely an extension of their hand.

Yet, learning how to think during those years in the academic world was far more important. Getting a PhD in English literature opened a hole in the wall blocking a more enhanced view to reality, but I still needed to peep through.

Think of it like this: Slash, the guitar god, sounds better with a $2500 Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall amplifier than with a $100 guitar and a tiny toy amplifier. But my not owning a Les Paul guitar and a Marshal amp is not the reason why I don’t sound like Slash.

It’s the same with whether you need a degree to be a writer.

You’re better with it – in the sense university education teaches you many things – but they’re all useless if you don’t have something to say. A degree (or rather, what leads to it) is not so much about what you learn through it but because of it.

It’s not what You Learn Studying; it’s what you Learn while Studying

I mentioned how during my studying years I learned how to think. In more concrete terms, I learned things like abstraction, seeing the bigger picture, understanding gradation. I also realized that the way I saw the world rarely matched with what others saw.

I thought, and then I thought about my thinking. Then I also thought about my thinking of others’ thinking – while perhaps thinking of their thinking about my thinking.

This isn’t some linguistic trickery; only an admittedly humorous metaphor regarding the nature of meaning and affect – the two pillars of fictional writing.

Ultimately, I became a better writer through my university education not because I expanded my vocabulary, because I learned about synecdoche, or because I read Shakespeare.

To be sure, those turned out to be useful when I returned to writing fiction. But they were far less important compared to learning why I wanted to return to fiction.

It’s All a Matter of Character

…And no, I don’t mean your novel’s characters. I mean yours.

In the introduction I implied – in the form of a rhetorical question – that getting a college degree might even make you a worse writer.

This is absolutely the case. It can happen; it has happened, to people I know.

The reason this can happen – and the lesson we can learn – is related not to what you learn studying, but what you (don’t) learn while studying.

You see, being a fiction writer is not about putting words one after another – no matter how skillfully. Being a fiction writer is about the need to express a different reality.

And so, acquiring knowledge without a framework of purpose (one, perhaps, with ethical underpinnings) is pointless and it can likely turn you into yet another mediocre elitist.

Or, to use the words of one of my academic mentors, “we won’t change the world simply by reading literature a different way, even against the grain. It’s a matter of whether we want to be a part of communities outside the university, where issues of equality are the daily reality”.