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At a recruiting event for a top-ranked Ph.D. program in English, a current student asked the rest of us, “How many of you actually just want to be writers?” A deafening silence followed; the otherwise mild-mannered professor, who was moderating, appeared for the first time flustered before quickly steering the discussion to safer shores.
Recently, a former student of mine reached out for advice about Ph.D. applications. I was surprised when midway through the conversation, she suddenly inquired, “Do you have any tips for balancing creative writing with the Ph.D.?” Much of the discussion thus far had been straightforward, a mixture of pep talk and practical suggestions. On the subject of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the focus of her writing sample, her voice had lit up with the same unbridled enthusiasm characteristic of every scholar who has been given the green light to talk about their research interests. (I am the same with Henry James and literature of the fin de siècle.)
I didn’t hesitate to answer her question. “I’m afraid not,” I replied, “because I don’t think it’s really possible.”
It wasn’t the first time I had fielded such a query, and if my answer was succinct, it was also honest. There is nothing wrong with the question, much less to ask it. But I would argue that the premise on which it is based is flawed. “I’m working on my debut novel,” a Ph.D. student will tell me. “I’m actually a poet first,” said another. “I’m hoping to use this time to write while studying.” Then there are the creative writers with dashed hopes, those who enjoyed taking a few poetry or fiction courses in college and briefly entertained the dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace or Zadie Smith. Entering a doctoral program felt like a feasible—and respectable—backup plan, not so much giving up the fantasy as pursuing an avenue that appeared “aligned” with it.
A humanities Ph.D., however, is not a six- or seven-year sanctuary from the realities of the world to work on the next great American novel; to treat it as such doesn’t serve the interests of either the institution or, ultimately, the student. Part of the issue may be due to, for lack of a better term, blurred lines. Creative writers are, almost without exception, strong and considerate readers. If they are worth their salt, what they potentially have in common with the literary critic is a sensitivity to language, a grasp of abstract ideas and themes, and, most important, an ability to articulate to an admirable degree of precision their thoughts and conclusions. Both the creative writer and the academic also rely, to some degree, on a sense of intuition (another word for this may simply be talent). Given these shared attributes, it is understandable how a humanities Ph.D. might become a default option for many creative writers. After all, the most valuable asset for a writer is time.
But to assume this would be to misjudge the nature of the Ph.D. itself. The doctoral program is a rigorous undertaking, and there are many reasons not to do it. To describe it as time- and energy-consuming would be a gross simplification of the various and challenging milestones that mark each interval of what is customarily a long-term journey. Every year is different in its concentration and in its benchmarks for success, which means not only that results matter but also that professionalization, and thereby transformation, must occur at a relatively rapid pace. The attainment of the degree is, after all, only the beginning of a lifetime’s devotion to a specialized field. It’s a full-time commitment, and a commitment fueled less by financial incentive, which is often meager, than by pure, unadulterated passion for research and study.
If pursuing a Ph.D. is intellectually demanding, so, too, is creative writing. To combine the two in the hopes that one will support the other seems a surefire recipe for burnout. At the end of the day, a Ph.D. program isn’t the equivalent of a multiyear Yaddo or MacDowell residency, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for such.
In hindsight, I would describe my own training as hybrid. I had been an English major with a concentration in creative writing, which is hardly unique, but it enabled me to write a novel for my senior thesis instead of a traditional paper. Years later, when I pursued an M.F.A. degree in fiction, literature classes were required, though again, the focus was largely on creative writing. It was only when I entered a Ph.D. program in English that I realized the lens through which I had been reading books for most of my life belonged to a writer, not a critic, and there existed a not-insignificant divide between those identities. By then, in my career, I had published two novels, was underway with research for a third and under contract with my publisher for a fourth. Yet, I recall with some vividness a meeting with the director of graduate studies in which I admitted I had never taken a theory class and I had never read or even heard of Lukács. Equally vividly, I remember slogging through chapters of John Guillory’s Professing Criticism and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and wondering with some seriousness who actually wrote sentences like these.
That I struggled is no surprise. Academia possesses a language of its own, and familiarity with it (I dare not ever hope to say ease) comes only with time and practice. My inspiration for doing a Ph.D. largely stemmed from reading D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police. I found Miller’s command of his sentences no less revelatory than his findings vis-à-vis the Victorian novel. If I had no affinity for Girard, I discovered I favored Lacan and Barthes, that I even enjoyed Ricoeur and Genette. My motivation for doing a Ph.D. was because I wanted to better understand what made for good writing, and because I feared my own writing would plateau if I didn’t improve my grasp of how literature was studied and evaluated and what enabled some books (and not others) to stand the test of time.
This came at a price. In my desire to become a better critic, I put my creative writing on hold and threw myself fully into my coursework. What I emerged with was a clarity I didn’t possess before about what I really wanted to study and research, as well as an appreciation for the pleasures of struggling through a text, of having many more questions after several hours of reading than answers. Another lesson is this: If early on I had entertained any hopes of working on my next novel in concurrence with my studies, those hopes were very soon dashed. Simply put, to work on my fiction was not what I was there for.
While Ph.D. degrees for creative writing do exist, the M.F.A. is generally considered a terminal degree for good reason. You don’t need much beyond a finished manuscript to try to make it as a writer. Though I doubt many will heed this, I truly believe that one has a better chance of becoming a writer by working at a bakery, a coffee shop, a bookstore, a 9-to-5 corporate job, a blueberry farm, a publishing house, etc. A Ph.D. program in literature isn’t a glorified book club, and unless one can read the likes of Freud and Heidegger with the ease of a Colleen Hoover novel, it takes considerable time and energy to process new learnings and think about how to apply them to one’s own research.
The same argument could be made for creative writing. Much of the performance of creative writing happens in moments of quietude and, quite frankly, daydreaming. As Alice Munro described, “I like to look out the window … All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.” There is only so much downtime to be had; there is only so much time available in a day for processing and digesting new information in a world already inundated with so much data.
A friend likes to remind me that when you settle, you often end up with less than you were willing to settle for. A backup plan can even detract from reaching one’s true goals. So much of the journey of pursuing a Ph.D. runs on the fuel of enthusiasm and passion for research. While learning should be a lifelong objective, schools are not the equivalent of a hideout or a stopgap. There is overlap in the skills a literary critic and a creative writer possess, but to lump these under one all-encompassing sky does a disservice to the important work of the humanities and the immense dedication scholarly research requires.
This is all to say that I don’t believe knowledge ever goes to waste, or that what is learned should exist in a silo. One of my strongest convictions is that everything ultimately feeds into the same creative well, whether that is for a scholarly paper, a novella or a poem. That a reading or a takeaway from a seminar isn’t useful now doesn’t mean it won’t reappear in a different manifestation later.
The argument here isn’t that a choice must be made between academia and creative writing—far from it. Two literary critics I read and consult regularly (Peter Brooks and Lionel Trilling) have published fiction, while Kate Atkinson, an author with a truly wide-ranging career, failed out of her Ph.D. program in American literature, an experience she later described as “the making of me as a writer.” There are no hard-and-fast rules, and often, we only know what is right for us in the act of pursuing the dreams that have hitherto existed in our imaginations. Yet, scholarly work should also never be the equivalent of busy work. If one’s calling is to write the next great American novel, the only answer is to write it.
