The importance of choosing the Arts when attending university is more significant now than ever. I know that many, if not all—even your family members—will disregard your interest in a creative writing degree as childish and utterly useless. They will insist that you reform those creative tendencies to something in the vein of math or anything with engineering formulas.
Read more to learn why enrolling in a creative writing degree is a good choice and never something you would regret.
Hate for the Creative Writing Degree
“That’s where the money is. Not writing books,” you might hear them repeat while chewing their well-done steaks at dinner time.
Over the years, while in college and my subsequent years after graduating, it has become all too common to hear that I was wasting my college years as an English major. I never argued or commented, as I naturally was never one to duel. Defending my choices, simply, was never paramount. I was confident with my choice, and that was that.
I guess this opinion stems from the absurdity and blind ignorance from a population that only seems to latch onto and acknowledge professions that they can view as numerically productive to the money machine. Sure, science and math have created famous careers from such great minds as Einstein and Hawkings. But people are so quick to forget that all the TV shows and films and novels they like to enjoy. Generally speaking, someone who had majored in biology or chemistry or physics is not sprawled on their couch writing screenplays for a television series.
Where, exactly, do you think those stories about hobbits and middle earth came from? Where, exactly, do you think the massive tome that is King’s The Stand came from? Apparently, to these ignorant individuals, such ideas have simply appeared from out of thin air and produced themselves.
In fact, achievements come from hard work. And it is no different in the arena of storytelling.
Never-ending Exploration
If you decided to enter the world of creative writing while in college, then you most likely already knew of its ability to take you to different worlds. When you write your short story or novel or even a quick poem, you are that character who must make that dreaded decision. You are that setting that prohibits desperate characters from achieving their goals. You are the iambic pentameter of each stanza.
If becoming someone else for a specific amount of time is of interest to you, then pursuing a creative writing degree will allow such moments to burst outward and experience other perspectives.
Creative Writing Allows You to Pick a Career
Being fascinated with fiction writing means, most likely, you will be majoring in an English degree, or at the very least, taking a handful of courses involved in an English literature direction. Whatever the case, earning the backing of a creative writing degree endorses you two-fold.
Having a bachelor’s degree alone qualifies you for teaching at an American school (with the added quest for certification—but we shall save that for a different time). So, having a B.A. in English primes a candidate for not only a career in education, but also journalism, website content writing, and many more.
Also, if one is so tempted to go further down the rabbit hole towards advanced education and earn their MFA in creative writing, this will spread your career options even more. It then allows you to tackle teaching creative writing at a university level. Most colleges—for a full-time position—enforce a strict employable policy of their professors who have obtained a Master’s degree or higher. However, like anything else, there are exceptions to this rule. There are few professors with tenure who have not earned a Ph.D. or M.A. but have had their novels published with moderate to high success, which allows longevity in university teaching.
Genuine Appreciation from a Creative Writing Degree
Finally, the last reason doesn’t simply rely on creative writing so much as it applies to all higher education: the more educated you are, the more ways you can appreciate the endless facets of your life.
Somewhere, sometime as a college student myself, I realized a change was happening to me. I began thinking more critically and examining every choice I was to make with a level of clarity, unlike a few years prior to my entrance in college.
How creative writing factors in this unlocking of appreciation is simply in two words: creative writing. The creative part comes from being able to spark your juices when it comes to producing innovative ideas—whether in narrative or projects undertaken.
The writing part is probably the most important, yet underappreciated skill in general. Courses in university require and demand the absolute best of a student’s writing ability. If you don’t like writing upon entering college, believe me, you will love it when you finish. And you will find that your writing capabilities have increased exponentially as a result of this demand.
Now, more than ever, in a world of digital media it is mandatory that even those who did not enter college, have some writing skills. If you have the creativity behind those writing skills, it will provide you with more options because you will be more valuable to any company or institution.
I know first-hand the demonization that comes with announcing a desire to learn about creative writing while in college. The horrible stigma that comes with it is haunting to the point it scares many away to a major chosen from perceived necessity rather than sincerity. In a time where technology controls the earth and scientific formulas are providing longer life spans through advanced medicine, the choice to engage in the creative arts seems counterproductive.
It isn’t.
~M