5 Reasons Why You Should Do an MFA

Writers ask me all the time if they should do an MFA, a degree that gets lots of negative criticism these days.

I tell them that my own experience was very positive, a great start to a long career, and I list the main things I got out of the MFA:

1) I learned to write under deadline. I took lots of creative writing classes in college, but I never had to produce so much writing per semester with a jury of my peers waiting to pass sentence. It wasn't always easy, but it helped me later on...