Your Creative Writing MA: Where do you want to be, and what do you want to get out of your program?
Weighing your options and priorities matters just as much as putting together your application.
While I was working on my MA in creative writing, one of my old classmates asked me: How did you apply to your program?
I remember how lost I felt when applying to creative writing programs. Although I asked a lot of different people for help, I was frustrated by how uncertain I still felt about the whole process. Was I doing this right? Were the things I had in my applications good enough?
The easiest way to answer her question was this: I found programs/universities I liked, looked at the website a lot, and put together whatever was required for the application. The longer answer follows.
The Research
I had the luck, but also the limit, of knowing that I wanted to return to Newcastle upon Tyne, the UK city where I did my exchange program. If you know somewhere you’d like to live and write, that’s a good place to start. Programs differ in how much class time you’ll actually have, especially between the US and UK (more on that later), so I think living somewhere you feel you can be inspired is important.
