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| Recently rereleased by Crimson Gate Books. |
In the September/October 2026 issue of Poets & Writers, Uttama Kirit Patel describes herself and other writers featured in her article “The Self-Taught Writer” as being, well, self-taught. The point of the article is that an MFA is not required to establish a successful writing career, and it does support that thesis.
On the other hand, I do wonder if the writers in this piece had advantages that truly self-taught writers do not have, including high socio-economic status and advanced educations. The author, for example, “holds an MPhil in psychology from the University of Cambridge.” Another writer “came to fiction writing after a law career dedicated to social justice” and “years of education as a classical violinist.” The author “moved to New York City” and “took classes with the Gotham Writers Workshop,” and another writer “took writing workshops while pursuing a degree in political science at Yale University.” The author even “spent eight weeks disconnected from technology, writing chapters in the natural beauty of New Zealand.”
While I do not make light of anyone’s journey to publication, because all paths are valid, these experiences do not align with my experience.
I came to writing as the child of blue collar parents eking out a living somewhere in the middle class. Advanced education was not an option, and the thought of attending Cambridge or Yale was beyond the pale. Giving up everything to move to New York City or spending eight weeks writing in New Zealand was never (and still isn’t) an option.
I suspect I am much closer to being a self-taught writer than Patel or the writers in her article. Without high income, social connections, or advanced education (even if not specifically for writing), I had to build a writing career the way pulp writers of the early 1900s did: by pounding the keyboard and collecting rejection after rejection until something finally stuck.
My writing education came from reading everything I could and from Writer’s Digest and the various how-to books the company published. I attended my first writing conference—a small, regional conference—in the early 1980s. By then I was already selling professionally.
The one writing group in which I participated—made up of people I met at that conference—did not last long. We were mismatched, with poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction writers unable to help one another because our needs were so different.
In addition to a creative writing class I took in high school, I attended three college-level creative writing classes and one journalism class during my on-and-off (mostly off) college career, and I finally earned a BA in Professional Writing at the age of 48. By then I had already sold many hundreds of short stories, articles, essays, and other writing.
Throughout the years I did have periods of time—similar to Patel’s eight weeks in New Zealand—where I concentrated on writing. Those periods were called unemployment. So, even though I was writing, I was also spending time seeking steady paychecks.
For all these reasons and more, my education as a writer came primarily from reading what others had written, from pounding the keyboard, and from submitting work to every publication imaginable. I learned all that I could from rejections and from acceptances. And I continued to improve.
And that is a more accurate description of a self-taught writer.
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Prohibition Peepers, first published by Down & Out Books, has been rereleased by Crimson Gate Books.
Interesting. I fall somewhere in between- on the self taught scale. had advanced degrees but never writing courses and struggled through college with writing. College profs can be am amazingly indifferent to teaching the basics of writing form. I learned by doing weekly movie reviews for a small local paper. 600 words on time, on subject every week will teach you a format, Once you learn one, others, even complex ones like mystery plots, are much more doable. I used to recommend something of the same to my struggling students .
ReplyDeleteIt certainly is, Michael! I can relate completely to your article today. Disappearing to writing retreats was never an option on my way to regular publication. And like Janice above, I started as a columnist (humour, in my case) on a local paper, 600 words on deadline. Nothing like a deadline to coax you to write - smile.
ReplyDeleteRay Bradbury would agree with you. He did all his learning for writing at the library.
ReplyDeleteMy father had a degree in economics but ended up in sales, and both my uncles were engineers. My mother left college after one year during the depression. But she and my great aunt read widely and loved mysteries, so I picked up my reading tastes from them. I started reading when I was 3 or 4 and learned everything I know about plotting from The Hardy Boys.
ReplyDeleteAfter college, I became an English teacher but never took a creative writing course except a playwriting class in grad school when I was 43 or 44. I have three grad degrees in literature and theater, but never had a class in either creative writing or teaching writing, except that one, six weeks during a summer session. I subscribed to The Writer and Writer's Digest for years. I occasionally used something I learned in the magazines in my own English classes.
I collected dozens of rejections for five novels (one of them became my sixth-year project in those grad sorties). Those novels gradually improved, but not enough to sell.
When I retired from teaching, I finally read some books on craft and attended several workshops. I sold my first short story when I was 60 and my first novel when I was 63.
I still learn more from my mistakes than anywhere else.
Since Blogger won't let me sign in (again), this is Steve Liskow.
I never even went to college until I was 30, because I couldn't afford it. Instead I read my way through libraries, paid attention wherever I was working, to see what people did and didn't do, their quirks, mannerisms, rhythms, etc., and wrote it all down in my scribble books at night. And that's how I taught myself to write.
ReplyDeleteThe other group that has never had the luxury of giving up everything and moving to New York City or buying a car and bumming around Europe so they could write is women. (I never understood how they could buy the car when they were always broke.) I've always wanted to strangle the many men who've described their writer's journey that way in fiction and in memoir,. Maybe that's changed some in recent decades, but for my contemporaries, there was a huge gender gap.
ReplyDeleteamen to that! Melodie
DeleteI didn't go to college. I've worked in court reporting & as a medical language specialist. Whatever I might know about writing came from my own observations, trial, & error.
ReplyDeleteI was a court reporter too. Did that for 8 years. My learning to write came from college classes and craft books. But first started reading Greek snd Roman mythology and then Hardy Boys books. Then I discovered Mark Twain and Alistair MacLean and John Cheever and fell in love with the short story.
ReplyDelete