Compelled to write from a young age, I rarely thought about how to do so. I felt I must, and so I did, an eager storyteller oblivious to the possibility of needing an education in what she loved. Decades later, while reading the novel of a brilliant new author, I worried I had missed a trick. The finesse with which that writer had blended genres, paired with a narrative restraint, made me wonder if I’d played it too safe in my storytelling. My debut novel had come out that same year, and falling prey to literary comparison, I asked the dreaded question: Should I have done an MFA in creative writing?
When I set off from Abu Dhabi to study at Northwestern University, where an MFA program would not launch for another fifteen years, pursuing a career in creative writing felt a distant, impractical dream. I studied journalism, not for the economy of words and editorial precision it taught me, but because I believed a livelihood could not be made from fiction. Rare (or rich) is the writer without another profession. These other vocations, in fact, often turn out to be one of the experiences that serve us as writers.
Self-taught writers broaden the definition of what makes an education. The MFA can feel de rigueur in today’s competitive literary culture, and as programs for the degree abound, opting out can seem risky. Writers without MFAs, however, can thrive in making their art and being published—not in spite of but rather as a result of skipping the degree. Without the structure of a program, self-taught writers design a myriad of ways to acquire technical skills and build a creative community. This facilitates not only a unique writing practice, but also an education specific to their art.
Martha Anne Toll, author of the novels Duet for One (Regal House, 2025) and Three Muses (Regal House, 2022), came to fiction writing after a law career dedicated to social justice, a transition that required her to “unlearn everything I learned in law,” she says. “In law you have to prove every point with conclusory statements, and that’s your enemy in fiction.” Toll drew instead on her years of education as a classical violist. This training informed the subject of her written work but also primed her for the discipline both arts require. “The only way you can learn to write is to write,” says Toll, who had written four novels before her first was published. When her career left no time for writing classes, she built her own apprenticeship. “I read as if I were a writer,” she says, and read widely, keenly observing author techniques; Toll found Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000) the most instructive. To counter the psychological hurdle of beginning a novel, she would “start in the middle and write outward,” she says. “I would never say you have to write every day, but you have to keep at it. The thing that I did most was write all the time.”
MFAs can enable such deep practice, but those wary of the programs point to a limitation: Time in academia takes time away from the other lived experiences that inspire our work. Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West (William Morrow, 2024), which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Carol Shields Prize, and the Maya Angelou Book Award, sees a trade-off in pursuing the MFA. “If I’m consumed by my writing cohort or the craft of writing, I’ll probably become really rigorous and much better stylistically,” she says, “but what I have to say through my writing fundamentally comes from the life I go out and live, so I need to make space for that. I need to collect experiences in order to have things to say.”
Edward Vidaurre, an award-winning poet, editor, publisher, and the 2018–2019 city of McAllen, Texas, poet laureate, says his formative education came through “family stories, neighborhood conversations, music (especially), memory, and the cultural richness of the communities that surrounded me.” He adds: “Before learning craft and technique I needed to find where the heart fits into each poem I wrote. Technical knowledge matters, but it serves the deeper purpose of helping us tell the truth.”
While MFA programs can read as an in to the otherwise-guarded literary space, Rey Lescure sees an advantage in not being on the inside. “I was scared that doing an MFA meant becoming more myopic…and in a way that felt kind of dangerous,” she says. An all-defining, all-consuming environment had the potential to corrupt her relationship with writing, she worried. Instead, being part of a weekly writing group with people of different ages who “had their jobs, had their families, had their lives” gave Rey Lescure a balanced perspective.
Self-taught writers tend to pursue community and accountability through such workshops, or through writing classes outside of graduate programs. My first step was not dissimilar from what MFAs require: a commitment. I switched from full-time work to freelance and moved to New York City, where I took classes with Gotham Writers Workshop, attended author events and free lectures at NYU, and sat in coffee shops, hoping to absorb literary wisdom by proximity to creative strangers. Rey Lescure took writing workshops while pursuing a degree in political science at Yale University and later received fellowships from both the Writers’ Room of Boston and GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program. For Vidaurre creative community grew organically. “For writers who don’t have access to formal programs, I always say the same thing: Show up. Go to readings. Buy books. Volunteer. Introduce yourself. Build genuine relationships. Literary communities are rarely found. More often they’re built through conversations.”
“Community is very important psychologically,” says Toll. Early support or discouragement can be critical in influencing how, or whether, a writer persists on the self-taught path. This need for community comes in addition to the technical feedback from others that written work requires, and it is primarily through trial and error that writers learn whose criticism to trust and whose is destructive. Having early readers from other artistic mediums, one of whom is a violinist with “a beautiful ear and totally different sensibility,” was extremely valuable for Toll.
For me, having agency over when to share my work was an advantage of being self-taught. I stepped in and out of workshopping depending on my writing stage but also my state of mind. At times, readers’ opinions swayed me from staying sincere to the story. Having undergone no admissions process to which selection would have instilled confidence, no one was less kind to me than my own doubts. To counter those doubts I did not want to rely on external validation, and so I went inward. I spent eight weeks disconnected from technology, writing chapters in the natural beauty of New Zealand. I put in an application to adopt our daughter and pushed myself to complete the novel before her arrival. I remained silent for periods of time longer than I spoke and in so doing reconnected to why I write in order to ensure I had written.
Being self-taught lends itself to freedom, the epitome of creative expression. I took somatic poetry workshops even though I am a terrible poet. I wrote a beat sheet for a screenplay with no intention of making a film. I threw in a “Sell your novel to a major publisher” class to better understand the industry. I avoided the cerebral constraint of reading fiction similar to mine, which a program might have required I do. Without a set reading list I chose books on craft with caution, correcting only for what needed correction. The books included Several Short Sentences About Writing (Vintage Books, 2013) by Verlyn Klinkenborg, How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2008) by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman, Writer in the Newsroom (Poynter Institute, 1995) by Donald M. Murray, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (Catapult, 2022) by Melissa Febos.
Liberating yourself this way can be a gift to your creativity and to your practice. “Being outside of academia allowed me to develop my own voice without feeling pressure to fit into a particular aesthetic or literary conversation,” says Vidaurre. “Because I wasn’t in a formal program, I wasn’t writing toward a workshop, a grade, or a degree. I was writing because I genuinely needed to write.”
What neither an MFA nor a self-taught path can do is guarantee publication. This is the great equalizer in a writer’s education. When up against the book-deal odds, I relied on what I’d used to reach that point: conviction and a capacity for weathering uncertainty.
“Even when nobody was technically waiting for a manuscript,” Vidaurre says, “I felt accountable to the stories I wanted to tell and to the people whose experiences helped shape those stories. I wanted to finish because I believed the work mattered.”
On the book tour for my debut novel, the question I was asked at every event was why I did not give up—even as it took me seven years to complete my manuscript, writing every Saturday alongside a demanding career, despite the eighty-eight rejections from agents, and without heeding the feedback I received that my story had no market. There would have been next to no repercussions if I had stopped writing, an easier abandonment than if I’d had to quit a program I’d financially invested in. But degree or no, my certitude remained. I answered those questions the way younger me would have: Giving up did not cross my mind. I was compelled to tell the story.
Uttama Kirit Patel is a writer, an editor, and the author of the novel Shape of an Apostrophe (Serpent’s Tail, 2025). Her work has been featured in the Tribune, Vogue, Literary Hub, the Times of India, and Wasafiri and on the BBC, among other venues. She holds an MPhil in psychology from the University of Cambridge, has been a semifinalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Thumbnail credit: Jennifer Ramos