Masters in creative writing or no?

Honestly, from what I'm hearing, masters is only good for making connections.

The teacher's gonna ask you to produce small stories at the drop of a hat. All the time. The students are encouraged to tear apart the stories. All the time. Rinse/repeat for like four years. Coming away from all that, the exhaustion of every small creative impulse and destruction of those whimsical stories, has left my two college degree friends withdrawn into their rooms; "it's not ready yet.... it's not perfect..." has become the endless mantra.

And Brandon Sanderson seems to think of his class, there's only two in each (of maybe 30/40 students) who are actually ready to be authors.

Mercedes Lackey posted that most editors/agents find college degree students pretentious and egotistical; that they're less desirable to work with in general, and less likely to pick them cause they don't want to fight, they just want to do the book thing.

So I mean, those connections? It's actually going to be about becoming aware writer's conventions. That sounds silly when you consider you spent four years putting yourself through creative hell for just that. But even the cons are (to some extent) a matter of luck and timing; if your manuscript stands out from the crowd, if you strike friendly with an agent, if you're in the right place at the right time... I know that sounds absurd, but yeah..

That aside, Scalzi (who is often speaking with up-and-coming authors to feature their new book on his blog) doesn't seem to think there's one clear path to publishing either. He did once ask somebody (who came to him for publishing advice), "Is your book finished yet?" and when they said no, he encouraged them to finish writing the book first, and worrying about the publishing end later.

Sure, your first book might not be great. But we got support groups for you here on reddit. There's writers' subs who will help you critique in their genre, a publishing tips sub, and other stuff to get you started. All you really need is to write a story.

/r/writing Thread