instruction, which is minimal, but instead in the elite community they provide to the developing novelist. When you spend two years reading and critiquing and admiring work by other young writers pushing their prose in new and interesting directions, your standards for what writing can achieve sharpen. You don’t have to attend one of these programs, of course, to succeed in literature. Colson Whitehead, for example, is undoubtedly one of the most talented novelists of his generation, and yet he never studied beyond his bachelor’s degree. But there’s a reason why MFA programs are so common
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