When a former creative writing tutor wrote an article criticising his students, all hell broke loose. Why did this particular piece hit such a chord with the writing community? We spoke to an ex-student from the same school – and want to hear your views

Writer Ryan Boudinot caused a furore last week with an essay laying into creative writing courses. He had recently quit teaching on an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program in the US, and felt that gave him the freedom to spell out a few home truths. His essay for The Stranger magazine provoked internet outrage, including Twitter attacks and defences, blog posts against the piece and open letters asking the magazine to pull it.

“The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it,” he wrote. Though his piece was blunt and cruel at times, it wasn’t exactly news: creative writing programmes have been analysed – and criticised – to exhaustion. Indeed, they recently became the butt of Lena Dunham’s comedy, when she depicted the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop in a less-than-flattering light in her TV show Girls.

Not long ago Toni Morrison pointed out that “it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play. When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that.’”

It’s dangerous to judge the impact of a piece by the reaction sparked by its virality, but here is our attempt to explain what happened. If you have attended – or taught in – an MFA writing programme, in whichever country, we would like to hear from you: please leave your thoughts on the form at the bottom of the piece.



The original piece

For Boudinot’s full thesis, check the piece, but here are the five main points of contention:



Either you have talent or you don’t : “Writers are not all born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty adviser more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.”

: “Writers are not all born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty adviser more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.” Unless you started quite young, you’re probably not going to make it : “You have to be crazy about books as a kid to establish the neural architecture required to write one.” So it’s probably too late for you unless you’re a teenager. Unless you’re an exception like Haruki Murakami.

: “You have to be crazy about books as a kid to establish the neural architecture required to write one.” So it’s probably too late for you unless you’re a teenager. Unless you’re an exception like Haruki Murakami. Stop complaining about not having time : “Students who ask a lot of questions about time management, blow deadlines, and whine about how complicated their lives are should just give up and do something else.”

: “Students who ask a lot of questions about time management, blow deadlines, and whine about how complicated their lives are should just give up and do something else.” Read – a lot : “One student, having finished his assigned books early, asked me to assign him three big novels for the period between semesters. Infinite Jest, 2666, and Gravity’s Rainbow, I told him, almost as a joke. He read all three and submitted an extra-credit essay, too. That guy was the Real Deal.” It has to be said that he seems to have had some particularly bad students: one, upon reading The Great Gatsby, “told me she preferred to read books ‘that don’t make me work so hard to understand the words.’ I almost quit my job on the spot.”

: “One student, having finished his assigned books early, asked me to assign him three big novels for the period between semesters. Infinite Jest, 2666, and Gravity’s Rainbow, I told him, almost as a joke. He read all three and submitted an extra-credit essay, too. That guy was the Real Deal.” It has to be said that he seems to have had some particularly bad students: one, upon reading The Great Gatsby, “told me she preferred to read books ‘that don’t make me work so hard to understand the words.’ I almost quit my job on the spot.” Writing class is not therapy. “Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.”

The backlash

The piece radically divided the writers’ community on Twitter – with reactions ranging from “I found this article relevant to not just writers or MFAers but anyone who creates things” to “Some awful human being wrote this article” – that’s the internet for you. Some admitted that it chimed with their own experience: “So glad I realized early on that while I enjoyed writing sometimes, I never wanted to be or could be a Writer”, wrote one. “Some of the harshest advice for MFA students you’ll read and probably some of the best”, said another; “Clip and save, writers, people in writing programs, and people who fancy calling themselves writers. So good”, enthused a third. Yet another respondent pointed out that “[the piece] is the blue/black dress of the MFA world. He says what other MFA teachers are afraid to” (if you don’t know what’s meant by the blue/black dress, here is some context).

On the angry side were tweets such as:

“I kindly request that professors/instructors who empathize with this guy at all just choose to do something else” a

“Author says stories written with poor grammar have no value. As if best stories come from people with privilege. Ha”

“HAHAHA THANK YOU THE ONION FOR PUBLISHING THIS HILARIOUS PIECE ON MFA PROGRAMS ... oh wait ...”

“Wow this guy is a snob”.

Someone even created a website to compile all the blogposts and letters against the article. The Stranger seemed more than happy with being talked about – after following up with a brief interview with Boudinot, it published a retort by “The Student Who Made Ryan Boudinot Cry.” Judge for yourselves.

The views of an ex student

We talked to a former student on the programme in which Boudinot taught at Goddard College (Vermont), Rory Douglas, who made the point that “you could write a blog post called The Sky Is Blue, and later that day someone would have a rebuttal titled ‘Why The Sky Is Blue is Problematic. That’s just the way Twitter works, for better or worse. It’s especially prevalent on literary Twitter, where you have all these great writers — and all these platforms for them — who can eloquently express their opinions, and are ready to do so the moment someone posts something they only partially agree with.”

MFA programmes are a subject on which most writers have an opinion. In the words of Douglas, “On the pro-MFA side, they provide a space for emerging writers to hone their craft and receive feedback and mentorship from more established writers, and they give those established writers a writing-related income that allows them to give back to the writing community through teaching while leaving them time and creative energy for their own writing. The anti-MFA take, as I understand it, is that MFA programs are expensive and don’t set graduates up for a career that will enable them to make up for that cost. The anti-MFA side also sometimes says that MFA programs don’t actually create great writers — they might create writers that can imitate other writers, or competent writers, or writers skilled in a certain type of literary short-fiction, but not great writers.”

While Douglas had a good experience studying on the MFA, he wouldn’t recommend them indiscriminately: “You have to be serious about writing, and you should have already put in time reading as much as possible and as widely as possible. If you haven’t already read To Kill a Mockingbird, guess what: you’re going to be assigned To Kill a Mockingbird, and you might miss out on reading some lesser-known book that one of your instructors personally loved.” Ultimately, he said, “you get out of MFA programs exactly what you put into them. The more effort I put into my work, the better feedback I received, and the more I improved”. He also encouraged people to do some “real financial soul-searching before enrolling “.

Have your say

What is your experience of creative writing programmes? If you’re a current or former creative writing student or teacher, we want to hear from you. Please use the form below – you can choose to write anonymously.