You Ain't Mah Dad!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program of Beach Fantasies and Packing Tape to bring you The Rant of an Aspiring Writer with an Undergraduate Degree in Writing on the Lack of Publishing Education in Undergraduate English Programs! This production was inspired by an article posted by a writer friend, written by Cathy Day. I suggest giving a quick read before my rant.

I saw the link on Facebook, then clicked out of curiosity. As I read, my eyebrows lifted onto my forehead. Yes, the article was two years old, but did that assuage my indignation? Not really.

While attending the University of Cincinnati's Undergraduate Creative Writing program, I noticed a serious omission from my degree. We never learned how to submit work for publishing.

Not getting published, mind you, just the process for submitting. "Query," "Manuscript," "Agent," and even "Market" were all conspicuously missing from the vocabulary of my bachelor's degree. It wasn't until the last day of class when our professors - much like Miss Day describes herself doing - opened up the floor to our questions and we got a little information about the business end of writing.

This omission is described and justified by Day's article. Her reasoning behind this skimpy education is that "very few of you are ready for it right now." This is where I call bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Writing apprenticeship takes 5-10 years, she claims. Well I have a question: Who says?

Who gets to decide when I am ready to submit work? Mind you, still not talking publishing - just talking the usual route open to all writers: send work out, get rejected, revise, try again, hone craft in between rejections. Furthermore, how am I supposed to know I'm "ready" if I'm not submitting anything? What makes Cathy Day - and any other professor who chooses not to share the business end - the ranking authority of when people can learn how to submit fiction?

Now, I'm very independent and I'm very DIY. If I weren't, then there would have been no undergraduates at the AWP writer's conference in 2013 - despite all of the creative writing faculty and grad students attending. Hey, guess what guys - we aren't children! We deserve to meet other writers, listen to panels, and have a say in the conversation. We were all consenting adults and, I believe, had as much of a right to be there as anyone else - something we proved by banding together and making it happen. However, we didn't even know anyone else was going until we were about to leave. That's how left out the undergraduate class was.

Pardon the trampling from my high horse, but this is getting to be a pet peeve of mine. Stephen King started submitting when he was in his teens - should he have kept his prose to himself until he was "ready"? How many prodigies have been stifled by paternalistic-if-well-meaning professors? Ray Bradbury sums up some of my indignation nicely in an interview with the Paris Review: 

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad 

place for writers because the teachers always 

think they know more than you do—and they don’t.

I'll admit I agree with Day's points about not having to be publishing crazy. Let's remember writing isn't sales, it's content creation. However, to completely leave the business end out of the equation is patronizing - borderline crippling - to new writers who want to get their work out there. Publishing is a marathon, not a sprint - but it isn't a fucking naval gazing contest, either in which we wait for our teachers to tap us on the shoulder and give us a warm smile and a nod that means we can finally get started.

To any student or aspiring writer feeling left out of the publishing conversation by their college programs or any other elitists, there is hope. I went to college too. Thankfully I also learned to look things up for myself and there are plenty of resources out there to teach you not only what to do, but what not to do.

Who decides who gets successfully published? Readers, publishers, and agents do - not college professors(unless there's some overlap).

Part of Day's justification is that instructors in college programs need all the time they can get just to teach students how to write well, with little or no time to talk business "It's not their responsibility," she says. But I call bullshit here, too! It takes one 60 minute class - maybe two - to cover the basics of publishing and offer resources. Need proof? How long did it take you to click those resource links?

If you don't teach student's how to seek publication, then the quality of their prose is worthless. If an editor can't get beyond a student's query letter (assuming they even know to send one) then it won't matter at all if the new writer has written the next Great American Novel. There are already gates in this industry, we don't need instructors fortifying them too.

Additionally, rejection is an important part of writing and to be rejected you have to submit. Rejection is as important, in my opinion, as workshop; without it, a writer cannot develop a thick skin and learn where to improve. Wouldn't it be better if students submitted their work earlier rather than later, in an environment that can teach them the value of rejection? I would argue that if a professor thinks a student isn't ready to publish, that they should expose them to said rejection as soon as possible. Let them know how it feels - don't let them waste an entire degree on writing only to put their work in a sad, dark drawer or hidden file folder where no one will ever see it.

Education is how you get well-balanced writers who know not only how to write, but how to be read. Otherwise, what the fuck did I just spend $30,000 on?