The quickest way to start a fight in a room full of writers is to argue about writing school. Everybody has an opinion, ranging from "my creative writing program changed my life" to "only losers go to school for writing."So naturally, I had to ask published author and blogger Joel Derfner what he thought about creative writing programs.
This is the second installment of my interview with Joel Derfner, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...
Jason Boog:
You say you have a "useless degree from NYU in musical theater writing." How useless is it, really? How did you develop professionally as a writer at NYU?
Joel Derfner:
The most important thing I learned in school works equally well for musical theater and writing, and that's an understanding of how to be critiqued...
We all have our own styles of hearing critique, and at NYU I found out several things about mine.
For example, if people spend five minutes telling me why this is the best thing ever written, then they can rip the manuscript apart for two hours and I'll listen to everything they say; but if people skip that step and starts right in addressing problems, I'll be so furious and resentful I won't be able to listen to a word they say.
Also, I write everything that everybody says down but I only really pay attention to comments if a) they make me think, oh, of course, b) a lot of people say the same thing, or c) they come from somebody I really trust. And even in those cases I'm not necessarily going to change anything--but I know what I'm going to look at.
A third thing is that I know what I need from critique at different stages of writing and how to ask for it, whether it's 'read this and tell me how it's good and that I should keep going' or 'tell me why the hell this isn't working.'
As far as going back to school, I think the reasons to do it are to hone your craft and impose discipline on yourself (and by 'discipline' I really mean 'deadlines'). If you just want to make connections, I suspect it's not worth the money.
Sure, I got to know a lot of people, but in the end whether I know people or not has had little to no effect on whether they're interested in my writing. Producers and publishers respond to what they respond to, irrespective of any personal connection with the writer. Of course I could be completely wrong about that.
From what I can tell, there's almost no overlap between the fields of musical theater and publishing. I'm one of two people I know who are involved in both. So unfortunately the connections I made in musical theater writing grad school weren't much use when it came to getting a book published.
I did make some very, very smart friends who have given me invaluable feedback on my writing, but I didn't meet anybody to whom I could say, 'Oh, and by the way, I also have this manuscript here I'd love to show you.'
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