Creative writing: should I do an MA or a short course?
Creative writing short courses have become big business in the UK, while many universities offer a creative writing MA. I’m currently finishing my MA, but I started this journey with a couple of short courses.
Short courses range from weekly classes over 10 weeks to weekends and week-long residential retreats. Short courses are an attractive way to dip your toe in the water if you’re just starting to write, even if you’re an experienced writer trying a new form — I’d been a journalist for 20 years but a novel was very different from anything I’d written before.
An MA takes a year, or two part time, with most giving you one or two classes and a critique workshop every week for two full time semesters. Most creative writing MAs cover all forms of creative writing in the first semester and allow you to focus on a single form or genre in the second. I chose St Mary’s University, Twickenham, because it’s entirely focused on writing a first novel (although I had completed one novel before I began).
What are the differences, and why would you choose an MA over a short course?
1Deadlines. Every writer knows that there’s nothing like a deadline to freeze the words in your brain, so you need to get used to living with them. Most writing courses will make you write regularly for your peers to dissect in a workshop, which is a fairly low-pressure way to write a chapter every few weeks.
It’s a fundamental discipline for any writer to be able to squeeze words from the often unwilling stone of the imagination, but an MA goes further, with deadlines for assessed content that will go towards your final grade. You don’t just have to write, you have to write the best words.
Compared to my short course experiences, the MA has enabled me to get to know my fellow students over a year. I feel that we’ve learned to trust each other’s opinions so that we can be a lot more detailed and sometimes a lot tougher, hopefully without anyone being insulted. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing their writing mature and advance, following their stories as they emerge, chapter-by-chapter, and I can only hope they get the same from reading my excerpts.
It’s also an enormously supportive community, particularly as we struggle to complete our dissertations for mid-September. We’ve continued to meet as a workshop group and in the long term, this group will be more valuable than any certificate when the MA is over.
2 Quality. Short courses are usually open to anyone, so while I met some good writers and a few potentially great ones, I also encountered a few people who were busy killing time. When it comes to critiques, they’re also wasting your time.
Short courses often take anyone who’ll pay the fee, but I had to win my place on the MA and it’s a serious commitment of time and money. From the first day at St Mary’s, I knew that I had joined a group of talented writers who were serious about improving their skills. I’ve learned a lot from them, and I continue to find them inspirational.
The same quality is also evident in the teaching staff. While short courses often have good teachers, an MA gives you one-to-one access to an experienced writer through monthly tutorials in addition to seminars and workshops. That sort of time costs a lot on the open market, and it’s an invaluable part of the MA experience.
3 Guest speakers. Some short courses, particularly residential events, revolve around access to a published author, agents and editors, and they charge handsomely for the privilege.
We’ve had a fascinating array of guest speakers at St Mary’s over the past year. Authors Paul McCauley, Christie Watson (a former senior lecturer on the MA), Claire Fuller and Nick Harkaway gave up their time to offer us insights into writing and getting published. Gollancz commissioning editor Rachel Winterbottom, Picador editor Kris Doyle, Jo Fletcher (of Jo Fletcher Books) and Tristan Kendrick of literary agents RCW offered entertainingly honest opinions about the challenges we’ll face on the journey from manuscript to published author.
If I could have added something to these guest slots, I’d have asked an agent or editor to host a seminar on pitching and synopsis-writing, which is a hurdle I’m looking at for my (other) first novel, Blood River, when it comes out of beta reader purgatory this autumn.
4 Your portfolio. The St Mary’s MA course is designed to get you through a solid chunk of your first novel: after three marked assessments and your dissertation, you’ll have more than 40,000 words, which is almost halfway to a typical novel of 90k words. It’s only a quarter of an epic fantasy, but you’ll also have done a lot of the key world-building to help with the rest.
And these won’t be the first words you wrote — I’ve rewritten, edited, honed and sweated over the assessments far more than the regular 3,000-word critique deadlines. Workshop pieces can be experimental, and the comments from those workshops and my tutor have been instrumental in shaping the final submissions.
We were also assessed on a 4,000-word detailed chapter breakdown, showing the entire plot of our novel. We all bitched endlessly about this, but it brought into focus many of the lessons from the second semester workshops on structure and plotting and will probably be one of the most useful documents as I attempt to complete my first draft.
5 Facilities and benefits. The internet has made research a lot easier, but if you’re on an MA course you also get access to a university library. Not only can you get physical books, you can ask librarians to help with your research. It’s their job!
My MA project, In Machina, is based partly on a 2019 Acta Astronautica paper that predicts humanity could consume our solar system’s entire resources within 400 years. Although St Mary’s (with good reason) doesn’t have a subscription to this journal, the librarian not only showed me how to access it through the British Library for a smaller fee than the £30 direct access cost, he also recognised that it was a free Open Access paper, then downloaded and emailed the entire PDF.
On top of these benefits, full-time students get free MS Office for three years (including OneDrive), reduced Council Tax and a host of discounts through Unidays and Totum. Things have moved on since my undergrad years.
And finally, a short course doesn’t give you a qualification. A master’s gives you a higher degree certificate and the right to use the letters MA after your name. It might take years to win a publishing deal, but everyone knows you put in the effort.
Image: agilemktg1
