I can't help noticing that most published authors have university degrees. Is it fair to assume that, without one, you're unlikely to be published?

If so, is it because the publishing world is educationally snobbish or because, without the benefit of degree level training in creative writing, you're never going to cut the mustard? Leaving aside creative writing degrees, I don't hold with the view that the highly educated necessarily make better writers.

I hope you'll throw all manner of 'uneducated' published names at me and prove me wrong.

I don't think it is the case that you need a degree to get published, but I can see where you are coming from. Alot of the big American Names seem to be Doctors and Lawyers etc etc.
However, I don't think Dean Koontz, Stephen King or James Patterson, to name a couple from my bookcase at home, have degrees. I am sure there are absolutely loads. I have often wondered if some of these degree holding authors were 'discovered' after having their work published themselves and then got lucky. I am working on the idea that these people will have the money to pay for it!

Lixxy

Having just read that post I realise it sounds desperately derogatory against those published authors that hold degrees - that is not what I meant at all. They are still very skilled authors and deserve their success. I was just raising the point that they may have been able to give themselves a helping hand.

Lixxy

I have a degree - but not in creative writing - and i'm not published!

The only benefit i can see is that it's said you need to write one million words before getting published and, well, if you've been to uni, for many of the courses, you've had several years of crafting essays.

However, many graduates leave being still unable to spell etc and having poor grammar - so i wouldn't worry. I'd say having a good story inside of you is the main thing - the rest will come with practice and receiving crits.

You certainly don't need a degree of any sort to be published - what you need is to write a book the publishing world thinks it can sell.

If you're talking statistically - that more writers have degrees of some sort, not necessarily anything to do with writing, than the national average - then I think it's probably true. For one thing, I think as a writer you have to like thinking in a sophisticated way about how things are and how things work, and people who do that are also people who're likely to want to go to university.

In the halcyon days of grants, when anyone who wanted to go to university and could get in, did, an awful lot of aspiring writers would go that route. Those were also the (halcyon?) days when humanities degrees, at least, mostly weren't professional training, or a passport to greater earning power, but as something mind- and life- enhancing.

So I guess the question is different, depending on whether you're talking about a degree as specific job-training for a writer, or a broader, more general training for the mind. I do think there's a kind of confidence that graduates acquire which is very valuable training for a writer: that everything is amenable to reason, research, hard thought and hard work. On the other hand, I know people who read English because they wanted to be writers, and found all those Great Works incredibly inhibiting. And I know lots of graduates who are so trained to think that everything is amenable to reason that they're deaf to or terrified by the a-reasonable (as opposed to un-reasonable) intuitive side of writing that can't be accessed by research and application.

Emma

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I certainly don't think it's publishing trade snobbery. The book trade can be incredibly snobbish, but I doubt if most editors could tell you if their authors have degrees, and if so in what.

Last thought - historically, there's probably an overlap between the socio-economic groups in which it's easiest for a writer to emerge (lots of books and book-talk, and quiet for reading, the room of one's own and the £500 a year...) and those groups most likely to consider sending their offspring to university. But that's historically, and writers have always emerged, albeit with more of a struggle, from all sorts of backgrounds, just as some children from 'non-university' backgrounds have always managed to get there.

I'm a published author and I've not got a degree. Or A levels.

All that matters is that you can tell a good story well.

Nik

PS I would add though that just because I've none of the formal qualifications mentioned above that hasn't stopped me spending a hell of a lot of time learning my craft.

just because I've none of the formal qualifications mentioned above that hasn't stopped me spending a hell of a lot of time learning my craft.

That's the core of it. In the end, how you learn the craft and harness it to your self to make art isn't the point - what matters is that you do. Until recently, universities didn't even try to teach that craft. You did it yourself. I'm still not sure about undergraduate writing degrees, but as Goldsmiths has just started one, I'd better not bite the hand that feeds me...

Emma

No nibbling, Emma!

I think another thing to bear in mind is: what sort of training did people like Dickens (for example) have? He was well educated but it was him that made him a great writer - he couldn't have been taught that well.

Nik.

I remember somone who took on staff telling me that they liked graduates, not because of their supposed brains, but because getting a degree showed a propensity for sticking at something until the desired goal was acheived.

I would definitely say that my university background has taught me to stick at something and see it through - ie starting and finishing a novel. But then you don't need to go to uni to learn this.

My English tutor at university told me there were these helpful things called paragraphs - and one or two in a five page essay would be welcome - also more than 1 full stop to a page and did I have to write the letter s 3 different ways?

(Can't see why not - Shakespeare wrote his name how many ways?)

I also owe a great debt to my first employer who, whenever I wrote anything flowery that I thought sounded good, would make me explain exactly what it meant.

Sadly I have slipped since

I should keep going - can feel a full acknowledgements page coming on(!) If I ever get published it might come in handy?

Sarah

Thankfully writing is one of the few professions still around that doesn't require a qualification.

I read law where my tutor complained that my Criminal Law essays read more like Ellery Queen mysteries! Abandoned thoughts of a legal career after my degree and still unpublished as well

I think it depends on what you're going to write. Some crime novelists might greatly benefit from a degree in law or forensics. Historical novelists, such as out own dear Emma Darwin, clearly get a lot out of studies in that area.

I personally have a self-taught masters in fantasy, sci-fi and horror, having never had a book in those genres out of my hands since I was about eight or nine. But officially, I only made A-Levels and a B-Tech in performing arts, which is, I don't mind telling you, about as much use as a sharp stick up a very soft part of the body!

I also think experience counts for a lot. I put a lot of my writing down to travelling and seeing different cultures.

JB

I agree, it's more experience. Don't use my law degree at all and aside from at uni have never dabbled in crime (fiction, that is.

I don't mention my B-Tech anymore, not since some guy who interviewed me remarked on it by asking 'bit of a drama queen then, are we?'

I didn't find it remotely amusing but my smile must have rivalled a razor's edge.

Likewise, I don't mention writing as anything more than a hobby, or I find the job interview goes out the window and I'm suddenly in a real interview. People are so curious.

JB