/
I’ve been thinking about the different experiences of attending Clarion and completing my MA in Creative Writing. Not surprisingly, they’re very different experiences, and both have been overwhelmingly good experiences. For me at least. And I should say that I had a great (and successful) Clarion class and that I’ve found my grad program at UW-Milwaukee to be very open to speculative fiction. Results may vary, but I thought I’d share what I think each does well.

Clarion is, of course, the famed six-week sci-fi and fantasy writing workshop that’s helped launch many a pro career (my reflections on Clarion one year after coming home can be found here.) One of the things I heard from instructors at Clarion was that it beat the pants off creative writing courses offered at universities. I agree 100%, but my experience is that this says more about Clarion than university workshops. What Clarion does that a university cannot replicate is the sense of pressure Clarion puts on students. It’s writing, reading, and critiquing non-stop for six weeks, five days a week. You begin to smell story problems from a mile off. You see annoying mistakes in your classmates’ work that mirror mistakes you’re also guilty of making. You must put words on paper, especially when you don’t feel like it. There is no coming up for air. It’s story, story, story, and then when you think you’ve had enough, you get a double-helping of story. Slow, steady pressure turns coal into diamonds. I think Clarion works the same way.

The other biggest benefit of Clarion is the emphasis placed on publishing. Or at least submitting stuff for publication. The message was that you’ve got to send stuff out, the more the better. And until you’re doing this on a regular basis, you’re kind of spinning your wheels. In order to be a professional writer, you need to sell things. Don’t kid yourself. You will get rejected a lot. That’s part of the game and it takes a lot of patience. If you can’t deal with that, get into another business.

These strengths highlight some of the weaknesses I perceive in the grad school program. The instructors and classmates I have had are every bit as adept at pulling apart stories but there’s not that sense of pressure. Over a 14-week semester, each student puts out two stories for critique. Compare that to Clarion, where in six weeks most people put out five or six. In school, we meet once a week to kick around fiction writing. In Clarion, it was every day. Universities can’t replicate that kind of intensity, and that’s okay. Grad school has other things going for it.

On the flip side of this, my grad school workshops really push students to experiment in different styles. Some critics of Clarion say that it teaches students to write in a certain way, and I think that’s a valid claim. (I believe the student must ultimately bear the responsibility for writing cookie-cutter fiction, but whatever.) The grad school workshops I’ve been in encourage experimentation, blending prose and poetry, toying with fiction conventions, etc. That’s not to say you couldn’t push that stuff through the critique circle at Clarion, but there’s a reason “Just tell me a damn story” is one of our class’ favorite phrases from the workshop. I would say my grad classes actively encourage such experimentation where Clarion did not.

The biggest advantage a graduate program has is on the other side of the house: the reading. Workshops are actually only one-third or so of a creative writing degree. The other two-thirds? Literature. You have to read, and you have to read a lot. As a writer, it’s natural to pick up on techniques you like and techniques you don’t. You read a lot of stuff you never would have known about otherwise, and even the stuff you don’t like can be interesting. In other words, you’re bombarded by ideas. So in your head you start comparing Native American Literature with James Joyce, or Angela Davis with Philip K Dick. The only reason this happens is because you’re stuffing so many goddamn words in your head from week to week that a cross-subject mash-up is inevitable. For a creative person, this is a Very Good Thing.

Neither Clarion nor grad school is inherently better than the other. In short, I’d say Clarion helped me get published but grad school may help me raise the intention of my stories, if that makes sense.

Of course, the most depressing factors in this whole comparison are those of time and money. Clarion is over relatively quickly and you can go back to your day job, which most everyone does. It costs a couple thousand bucks when all is said and done. A graduate degree in Creative Writing is a much longer, more expensive haul with horrible job prospects at the end. The sacrifice Clarion calls for pales in comparison.

Take this for the grain of salt that it is, one person’s perception of two writing programs. Just thought I’d get it off my chest.

Current Mood: Great, Actually |
Currently Listening To – Beck – “Mutations”