best creative writing schools
Iowa University for creative writing? Is it good enough?
I know that being a writer in the world today is going to be hard. Extremely hard, even. I don’t want to be going from job to job. When I get older, I want to provide for my family and live a comfortable life. Being an author, I don’t know if that’s going to work out. But it’s my passion and it’s what I LOVE to do in life. I want to, therefore, take every advantage. And that starts with education.
I heard Iowa is truly known world wide for their Creative writing course. But from what I understand, it’s pretty easy to get in there. It just doesn’t seem like the most competitive school. I want to be in the best Creative Writing course in the country. Is Iowa suited for me?
(I have about a 3.7 in a competitive school and 1200 on my PSAT. I’m taking classes to bump that up higher for the actual SATs)
Thank you!
Last time you picked a book to read, did you check to see what college the author attended before you bought it? Neither did anyone else.
When a publisher reviews a manuscript to see if they want to publish it, they don’t even ask “where did you go to college” unless you’re writing textbooks and other non-fiction.
The profession is all about whether you can create and nothing at all about such things as where you went to school, where you live, or your SAT/GPA, etc…
That said, studying writing in college should make you a better writer and therefor make your writing marketable. If you look at the NY Times best seller list and Google those authors you’ll find that most don’t have a degree in creative writing (or even in English) and that most are journalists for a full-time “day job”. More than a few went to really good colleges though. They went to really good colleges known for being the best college. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UC-Berkeley, and the like.
Why journalists? Because the best way to learn to write is to write and journalists do exactly that all day-every day.
Be warned too – “creative writing” isn’t a commercial genre, it’s an academic field. Being an author usually involves a specific genre. SciFi writers don’t do much historical romance. Spy novelists aren’t writing much for children. It’s often best to get a degree (even if a double major) related to what you intend to write about.
Readers these days are well educated and informed. They don’t tolerate errors in historical fact in their historical romance or faulted quantum physics in their SciFi. A degree in ‘Creative Writing’ won’t teach you too much about quantum physics or world politics or grade-level appropriate child development or…. That’s why creative writing is most often an MFA major and not an undergrad major – so that it can build upon the advanced background of the writer.
Summer Scholars Creative Writing
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