Your English Degree is Not Useless
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of an English degree, must be in want of a job in the service industry. Society derides them, just like people with art degrees, or really anything not related to STEM jobs, and calls them useless. After all, what possible reason is there for studying literature in a media climate that values the snappy list? It doesn’t even, as more than one blog post I’ve seen suggested, prepare you for a career in writing.
I wasn’t an English Major in college, but with a writing minor and a theater major, I got a lot of the same looks from potential employers that an English major might. Some days, I wish I had stuck with studying psychology or environmental science, both of which could have led to meaningful, well-paying careers. It certainly would have been easier.
On the other hand, I write for a living. I work creatively, write what I feel like, and learn constantly. It’s not all heaven, but it’s the most fun I’ve ever had working, so I call it a win.
I am living proof that studying literature at school can lead to a career. The path I’ve walked down, though, is much different than a traditional career.
The problem as I see it is not with the degree itself, but with student expectations. Whether or not studying literature prepares you to be a writer depends on what you’re trying to do.
The Advantages of Lit Degrees
The great advantage of a degree in literature is that it makes you broadly read. This allows you to analyze and identify different techniques, see how they function in a piece of writing and use them when you want to.
For example, reading Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel, Lolita, the causal reader will notice that the work is both disgusting and disgustingly beautiful. Only someone versed in literary analysis, however, will understand how he achieves this. Through his use of clever language, intricate description, and metaphor, distances himself from the subject matter. Rather than thinking about the terrible nature of the story, the reader is constantly drawn into the book’s lush prose, making its moments of depravity all the more jarring.
Reading Lolita gives insight into the different ways writing functions. In a world obsessed with clarity and conciseness, you learn the value of writing that borders on the baroque. Rather than simply communicating, it affects the reader, makes them feel and think. It’s not something to use all the time, but it’s another kind of tool to include in your toolbelt.
If you approach the degree right, you can do the same thing with pretty much any quality piece of writing. You learn how to make your work more conversational by writing short sentences. Truncate them to change up the rhythm. Long sentences with intricate descriptions indicate emotional intensity.
You also learn what works structurally, and how other authors manipulate structure to their advantage. When you get why William James used a framing narrative for his immaculate novella, The Turn of the Screw, you will understand when, if at all, to use it in your work.
A Lack of Experience
However, studying literature often neglects a few necessary ingredients in being a writer. First, lit degrees do not prepare you to understand contemporary trends, or how to get work as a writer. Even the most practical struggle with this aspect.
Second, to be a writer, you actually have to have something to write about. Being in school, and immersing yourself in literature, does not give practical, emotive experience for you to draw from. You only understand how other people did it.
Most criticisms leveled against English degrees involve the second problem, and it’s a serious one. A lot of people working as writers today don’t make literature like the stuff you’ll learn about in class. They blog about DIY projects, how to take care of your baby, or the ten ways that you can improve your mindset. They have expertise in a subject matter, and then become writers because it gives them another income stream. If all you know is how to reveal the structural metaphors inherent in Moby Dick, it is going to be hard to write a successful blog on woodworking.
If your bag is short-story or novel writing, it’s also going to be difficult to come up with subject matter. Most writing comes from experience, and if your only experience is other people’s writing, it’s going to be difficult to make anything compelling. Especially if you’ve gone straight from High School to college, it’s likely you don’t have anything unique to write about yet. Writing becomes an exercise in copying other people’s work instead of drawing from the creative wellspring that is your life.
It takes time to find out who you are and what you write about. Life must scar you. It is from those scars that the most impactful writing is born.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Our society, however, is obsessed with immediate results, which is why people laugh at English majors behind their backs. Useful college degrees give you good job prospects immediately after you graduate. But trying to find work as a writer simply doesn’t work on that timeline. You have to build up an audience and find who you are. Many young writers will give up before this happens. Student loans, dead-end jobs, and rejection will wear you down. Society tells you that your degree is useless, so you allow your degree to become useless. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
English literature and writing teachers do tell students about this, but it’s difficult to understand until you’ve experienced it. You are not necessarily interested in the practical parts of the work when you’re in college, especially if you’re pursuing art. You just want to write. You want to live in your stories, and it seems like whatever you have to do to get there will be worth it. You are not used to rejection letters yet. You do not yet know what it is like to finish a book that no one asked for, that no one seems to want.
Degrees in English and the arts are not useless, but their career paths are a lot less certain, and they rely a lot more on you than a degree in accounting or biology. In other careers, you fulfill a function. As a creative writer, you’re working toward a concentrated version of who you are. English professors can’t teach you that. The good ones can help, but in the end, your self-discovery is your own business. Authenticity and identity can be suggested, but not taught.
The Goal Matters
Society also senses failure when you’re not doing the work that you want to be doing, but writers have always taken work that they’re not fond of to get a paycheck. When H.P. Lovecraft wrote Herbert West-Reanimator, he hated the process because the publication was serialized, and made him do a recap every time he wrote a new entry. But the guy was poor, so he did it anyway. And, while it’s definitely not the master of cosmic horror’s best work, it influenced everyone from B-horror filmmakers to science fiction novelists.
Even writing copy, a profession that a lot of people see as the place where creative writers go to die, can be a good place to begin. The work doesn’t exactly thrill the mind, but it pays well, which can allow you to pursue more artistic aspects of work in your spare time. It can also help you understand current trends, and help you learn how to pitch to publishers.
As you continue the process of becoming a writer, you have to keep your goal in mind. Are you not a novelist if you can only write on the weekends? No! You stop being a novelist when you tell yourself you’re not a novelist. When you give up.
No one starts out doing what they want in any profession. A student just out of law school might want to become a judge, but there’s no way she’ll don the robes immediately, even after acing the bar. She’ll probably have to work as a law clerk for a few years and show her competence as an attorney before anyone will even consider her.
In the same way, writers do things that they aren’t fans of until they prove their worth, and get their names out into the world. The only difference is that you might have to take jobs that don’t seem related to your work. The pipeline that leads writers to their destination is invisible to others and has a thousand junctions to choose from, but it does exist. You simply have to remind yourself that it’s there.
Low Bar/ High Bar
The people who say English degrees don’t prepare you for being a writer have a point, but only in one sense. Making a living as a writer on the internet is actually a fairly low bar. If all you’re looking for is to start a lucrative blog, an English degree probably doesn’t help as much as understanding finances or crafting. I also wouldn’t recommend getting a degree in this field if you’re going to incur a lot of loans. It’s not a profession that’s going to help you pay them back immediately.
But, if you’re financially stable and want to learn how to create impactful works that express something unique about the human condition, you’re going to want to study other great writers. A degree in literature is one of the best ways to do this. The results will not be immediately apparent. But the value, whether it’s in self-discovery or to your career, will be incalculable.
