I’ve asked myself this question AT LEAST thirty times. I’ve listened to my friends recount their incredible MFA experiences. I’ve dreamily reviewed the MFA program websites and calculated the expenses. I even started an application for an MFA program at least once or twice. But then I revert to my lingering question: Instead of investing all that time and money, should I spend my time working on my craft, attending workshops/retreats, and reading blogs and craft books?

Sure, there are plenty of NY Times bestselling authors who’ve never taken a formal writing class, let alone earned a prestigious degree. But wouldn’t it be nice to really feel like you’ve got the credentials to help you achieve your dreams?

I enjoy being a student, so the idea of earning a degree in Creative Writing that would help ensure I have learned all the basics associated with storytelling would be of great comfort to me. There are a wide variety of programs available, and chances are your state supported universities have some type of MFA program in Creative Writing that you might want to consider. Many programs are low-residency, meaning that you do most of your work online/independently in coordination with your advisor and then you report to campus for one or two weeks of residency twice per year. This is a good option for those who want the opportunity to be a part of a high-quality program but are unable to attend classes due to the distance they live from an MFA program or work/family life.

At the end of this post, there is a list of some of the MFA in Creative Writing programs for those hoping to specialize in writing for children/teens. I’ve also inviting a few children/YA authors to talk about their experiences with MFA programs––Andrew Chilton, Rebecca Petruck, and Leigh Statham.

Andrew S. Chilton  is the author of the middle-grade fantasy adventure The Goblin’s Puzzle. He is currently attending Vermont College of Fine Arts for an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults.

 

Leigh Statham is the author of YA steampunk fantasies The Perilous Journey of the Not-So-Innocuous Girl and The Perilous Journey of the Much-Too-Spontaneous Girl as well as a new dystopian series beginning with Daughter 4254 and (releasing February 2019) Imani Unraveled. She has an MFA from Converse College in Creative Writing.

Rebecca Petruck is the author of coming-of-age middle-grade realistic fiction books Steering Toward Normal and Boy Bites Bug. She has an MFA from UNC-Wilmington in Creative Writing, Fiction.

Thanks for hanging out with us to answer questions about MFA Programs, Andrew, Leigh, and Rebecca!

Do you recommend your MFA program? What aspects of the curriculum were most helpful?

Andrew: I’m entering my final semester at the Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) Writing for Children and Young Adults program, and I strongly recommend it. There’s a lot about this program that is terrific, but I think the most helpful part is the extent that you get to work with your faculty advisers. VCFA is a low-residency program, as are nearly all kids’ books MFA’s. More traditional MFA programs rely heavily on the workshop approach. A lot of the input on your work is coming from fellow students. You still get input from fellow students in the low-residency model, but the emphasis is much more on working with a faculty adviser.

Leigh: Yes! I totally recommend my program. That said, remember each program has unique offerings and you should take your time researching all the nuances of each school. Converse College has a very flexible low-residency program schedule that fit well around the needs of my large family and people working full time. But even better than that, the professors and visiting faculty were amazing. The variety of experience and publishing history is invaluable and they always made sure our visiting lecturers helped us in our writing careers outside the program. From editors to agents and screen writers, we were able to meet and learn from several different people from around the country who were making a living in their field. While the program as a whole has a very literary overtone, I feel like it helped my writing for children immensely. The rules of good writing are the rules of writing no matter who is in the audience.

I might be alone in this, but I really enjoyed reading and analyzing some of the classics along with contemporary work. We were encouraged to learn from all types of writing from different genres, decade, and even centuries. Even though writing varies stylistically in popularity with each passing generation, the golden nuggets of plot, character, and setting are the same and so much fun to dig out and analyze. I was encouraged to be specific in my analyzations and apply what I had found to my own work.

Converse also has options to add on workshops and even minor in other areas of study. I have my MFA in YA fiction, but I was able to add a ten-day poetry workshop to the end of my degree, which felt like a giant cherry on top. I used that experience to help me write a novel in verse with a poet I met in those classes. Their Creative non-fiction program is wonderful too. I was tempted to stay for a semester with those mentors, but I didn’t want my kids to forget who I was. If I need to, I feel like I can reach out to any of those professors at any time for advice or suggestions. Converse really has a family feel to it.

Rebecca: I received an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from UNC Wilmington. The program does not have a kidlit component—nor is ever likely to—though I was accepted with pages about two teens and my thesis eventually became my debut novel, Steering Toward Normal. Long answer to say: It’s a good program for practicing writing in general.

I appreciated that, at the time, it allowed a flexible curriculum, so I could take towards my required credits classes in Literature, Screenwriting, and Philosophy. I think most Forms classes are really helpful, too, because they were reassuring, for me at least—every single book we discussed, no matter how well renowned or award winning, had flaws, sometimes pretty big ones when you stopped to think about them. It got me over any sense of “perfectionism.” Just write it, tell the story as best you can, and move on.

Was your program tailored to children/teens? Do you think that’s important if that’s your audience?

Andrew: Yes and yes. I think there’s a lot of value to working with writers who operate in other areas, but you need to be in a program where at least some of the faculty are familiar with the kind of work you are doing. If you don’t, you’re going to run into problems. Also, it’s unfortunate but true there are a lot of faculty on more traditional writing programs that simply don’t take kids book writing seriously. (This is changing but slowly.)

Leigh: My program was tailored to teens specifically. The first year focuses on good writing for all ages and requires reading from the standard literary canon. This is to prepare you to teach at a university level. The next year focuses specifically on Young Adult literature. During both years, my creative work was specifically for young adults and my professors were very supportive of my writing. The first year was more of a focus on overall craft. The second was specifically on writing for teens. I felt like it gave me exactly what they intended, a broad understanding of good writing and literature through the ages.

I think it’s wildly important to know your genre and be well read in that and supported by a program that knows it as well. I think it’s just as important to be a good literary citizen and know your craft through multiple genres. I like that the Converse program covers more than just contemporary or commercial fiction for teens. The classics might be a bit slower than we’re used to as kidlit authors, but there is so much to be learned from short stories as well as novels by writers like Jamaica Kinkaid, Steinbeck, O’Connor, Carver… I could go on for pages just naming names, but I won’t. It was a reading intense program but worth every page.

Rebecca: I think if one’s goal is to learn to be a better writer, then probably any program is fine. I think if one’s goal is to be a better storyteller, especially for a certain category, then a program that has offerings that specifically approach that category is really, really helpful. The reader wants of kidlit are very different than for adult, and the approach to the storytelling and writing is equally different. Adult fiction, particularly adult literary fiction, is fairly permissive of writing for writing’s sake, side elements that are interesting but not essential, and even some weak plotting. Kids have no patience for that. There is much adult fiction I love, and  in the last decade we’ve seen many “adult” authors try their hands at kidlit because that was the only category experiencing sales growth—and tank. There’s a reason for that.

What was the greatest challenge you encountered while pursuing your MFA?

Andrew: For me, it was time. Even though I knew it was a substantial time commitment, it was still a surprise just how much time I had to commit to it. Of course, you have to find a balance, too. I know some students who let the program completely take over their lives. Don’t do that.

Leigh: Balancing family and homework was difficult for me. I have four kids (and a lot of pets!) that keep me very busy. I knew I needed to do this for myself, however, and we got through it by working together. Being away from home for ten days at a time was tough, but so much better for me than running to class five days a week between kid stuff. I think we all appreciated each other more when I came home from those residencies. And who am I kidding? I slept more at school than I ever did at home. It was practically a writing vacation five times in two years.

Rebecca: I was pretty fortunate because I knew exactly what I was doing there—I had left a really great job in NYC to create a window of time to seriously give the writing thing a go. My advisor was happy to let me piece together the kind of program I wanted, and my focus kept me from getting mired in some of the drama that inevitably happens in any kind of program like that.

I think that’s key to pursuing an MFA—know exactly what you want out of it. It can be exploratory, learning to write better, learning to tell story better. I think a weakness of my program is that there was a lot of focus on short-form writing, like short stories and essays. There was only one whole-novel workshop offering. I get it; it’s much easier to critique a complete short piece than parts of a novel, but no one is making a living by writing only short stories. If you want to write novels, question the program in depth about their offerings for long-form writing and workshops. Also, if you do want to make a living as a writer, question the program for how they help you transition into a working writer. Again, at the time, that was a real weakness of my program. That may be true for all programs, I don’t know. But I think if a program is charging tens of thousands of dollars to “certify” you as a capable writer, then it should also go out of its way to help you onto the path to making it a profession as well. Do they invite agents and editors to speak? Do they develop relationships with agents and editors such that alumni may contact them even if they are closed to queries? Do they host pitch sessions? Do they lead workshops on how to write a query and synopsis? Do they teach you how to best use resources like Publishers Marketplace? Do they have Forms classes that include current, new books in your category? 

MFA programs have positively exploded in numbers since I first entered in 2002. The costs of a writing department are almost entirely only in staff—no labs, equipment, etc—so it’s a fantastic  revenue source for universities. Keep that in mind. You’re not leaving with a degree that equals (essentially) automatic employment like nursing or accounting. You will leave with a degree that means you can teach in a field that is flooded with more experienced and published people, and that’s about it. Before taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, really think about your goals.

I’m really happy I got the MFA because for me it was a time of tremendous growth as a writer that I wasn’t getting by taking here-and-there classes at The New School. I’m someone who needs more structure in learning. At the time, I couldn’t have created my own regimen of reading craft books, writing pages, and joining critique groups. (I’m somewhat better now.) 🙂 So I got what I wanted out of the MFA.

If you are someone who can self-structure a learning regimen, then you may get as much from that as an MFA. Put your dollars instead to attending a few conferences, getting some paid critiques, paid mentorships, etc.

Would you like to use your MFA credentials to teach writing?

Andrew: It’s not the primary reason I went, but I’m definitely interested. In fact, I was just asked to be on faculty at the Writers Who Run retreat in Georgia this June. It’s my first time teaching at a retreat and I’m really looking forward to it.

Leigh: I really enjoy teaching workshops and conferences. I am hoping to work full-time in a creative writing program in the near future, but if that doesn’t pan out, I still feel like my time and money were well spent at Converse. I’m definitely the kind of person who benefited from an MFA on a lot of levels. The structure and support helped push me to a new level of writing, and I found life-long friends among the other students in the program. Low-residency MFA programs have a tendency to pull together like-minded writers. It’s a great place to expand your network and writing family. I think having the ability to teach at a university level is just another big fat cherry on the delicious dessert that is the Creative Writing MFA experience.

Rebecca: Yes and no. I geek out talking about writing and storytelling and LOVE to talk with aspiring authors about how to do that. Love it! Did I love the politics and favoritism and general shenanigans of a university department? No. So if I taught because I had to teach for income, probably no. In order to teach on my terms, though, I have to have a certain level of esteem in the form of bestseller-dom or awards. For now, I work one-on-one with writers, and that works well for me—and for them, I hope!

Thanks so much to our panel for sharing their experiences with MFA programs! I hope you learned a bit to help you decide if an MFA in Creative Writing is right for you. If you think it is, I’ve collected a list of programs you may want to consider. If you have an MFA program to recommend, please tell us about it in the comments!

MFA Programs for Your Consideration

Hamline MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults

Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults

Mountainview MFA in Fiction or Nonfiction

Spaulding MFA in Writing

Hollins Creative Writing MFA

The New School Creative Writing MFA

Pine Manor MFA in Creative Writing

Simmons Writing for Children MFA

Converse College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing

UNC Wilmington Creative Writing, Fiction

For more advice on writing middle grade or young adult fiction head to our Master Your Craft page where you’ll find dozens of posts to choose from!