Maybe an English degree is a must?

[Sully]

And then again, you see genre writers like Gregory Benford and Alison Sinclair who are working academic scientists, and I am a working scientist with strong love for writing and aspirations to write professionally myself.

Fair point, especially with classic sci fi authors.  Coming back to this thread with a different mood&energy level, I do think I'm being over-general to the point of being incorrect with my first point.  For instance, most ex-music majors go into the sciences.  Allegedly, the most common double major attached to music is math.  There is most definitely NOT a clear demarcation or caste system segregating scientists from being artists of any medium.  Besides, different stages of life, etc.  Hell, Borodin was a chemist first, composer second.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that I might not be using the most commonly accepted definitions though.  For instance, I consider most performers interpretative craftspeople-not creators(though actors are closer to creators than musicians, in my opinion).  The creators are the authors/composers.

I will stand behind my second point though.  Writing is a skill.  It has to be practiced.  Practicing violin for 3 hours a day doesn't make you a better writer, it makes you a better violinist.  Manipulating spreadsheets doesn't make you a better writer, it makes you better at manipulating spreadsheets.  Creating something on a canvas doesn't make you a better writer, it makes you better at expressing yourself on a canvas.  So if you want to become a better writer-write.  And what degrees are most likely to encourage, enable and require that you do so?

You've obviously never played DnD

Most of the people I've geeked out with have been terrible writers, and interested in manipulating the rules, not creation.  I think there's a difference there.  It can be a creative outlet though, definitely.  The more avid, creative players I know don't geek about science.  Especially on the DM side.  But personal anecdotes are not representative of society as a whole, etc.

[Quantus]

Most of the people I've geeked out with have been terrible writers, and interested in manipulating the rules, not creation.  I think there's a difference there.  It can be a creative outlet though, definitely.  The more avid, creative players I know don't geek about science.  Especially on the DM side.  But personal anecdotes are not representative of society as a whole, etc.

Fair enough, and I whole-heartedly agree that manipulating the rules is not the same as creation.  That just hasnt been my experience with scientists who love to geek out, or with DnD fans that were superb (and in several instances, published) writers.  Many of my crowd were both.  Granted, now that I think about it, many of those scientists were getting degree's as computer scientists, which is arguably one of the closest "sciences" to writing this side of Physical Cosmology. 

[Wordmaker]

Writing is a skill.  It has to be practiced....So if you want to become a better writer-write.  And what degrees are most likely to encourage, enable and require that you do so?

To follow on from that, if you didn't go to college and get an English degree, what other ways are open to you to learn and hone your craft? It's the practice that's necessary. The degree really just provides an excuse to see how other people put that practice to use.

[The Deposed King]

In other words if you want to be a writer you have to write.



The Deposed King

(half a million words and counting)

[Wordmaker]

Yep 

[Dom]

Yeah, I'd agree if you want to be a writer...just write.  Learn how not to suck.  And write more.

I don't think you need a degree in English to be a good writer.  Many authors out there don't have one.  For every famous author with an English degree, you can find an equally famous author without it.  Writing is simple to teach one's self, and to me it seems a bit silly to waste money going to college for it.  (It's simple to teach yourself how to write, but requires time and effort like any other craft, and some sort of logic and deductive skills so you can pull a book off a shelf and figure out yourself what's great, mediocre, or bad about it and why.)  I used to sit in the bookstore with Terry Goodkind books and Anne McCaffrey books and just open them and try to figure out why they wrote the lines they did at certain points and why.  And I enjoyed it a lot more because nobody was forcing novels I didn't enjoy on me, expecting me to figure out why a novel I hated was loved by others.  Instead, I learned from examples I loved myself.  (Side note...the Sword of Truth series started going downhill after Temple of the Winds in my opinion.  I was a tween when Wizard's First Rule was published, though, and that was a fantastic book, so that's what I taught myself from.  I disavow any fondness for the latest books in that series!)

However, I  DO think if you do go for an English degree of some type, you also need to have an interest in some other topics other than writing to balance it.  You need to fill your life with knowledge and interests and events you can write about, things that you can use to fuel your writing.  Writing about writing (about writing?) is probably not going to get you anywhere.  I get a bit nervous (realistically or not) that going the English Major route will turn out a critic, or maybe if lucky a journalist, but not someone who has written their million words of crap and has become a creator and storyteller of fiction.  It seems safer to put the college money into a major that will help you get a job to provide basic necessities for you you while you gather up life experience to feed into your writing mill.  Then again, this is just all my opinion, heavily influenced by my own life.

I could throw out the vocabulary and slap down the dashes and dialogue right when I was out of high school (and before I even graduated high school, honestly), and I could bullshit papers on symbolism in my sleep, but it has taken another decade to build up life experience and knowledge so that I don't disgust myself with the shallowness and gaps in my own writing.  I write things I actually enjoy these days, even six months or a year after I've written them, and that didn't use to be the case.  I've improved that much, and gained that much more depth than I had before, and a lot of it came from just living life and being able to talk about certain subjects drawing on my personal experience.  I already knew how to place the commas...but I didn't know what to put between that punctuation.  So I think you need to do the million words of crap, and an English major isn't necessarily going to help you with that.  I've done at least 422,153 words of fanfic in the past 6 years (thanks to AO3 for providing me with that statistic!), and probably twice that in my original stories and notes.  And it all taught me something about writing.

Of course, I can't say I'm published or pro yet.  But I do know an English major hasn't been required to get where I'm at now.

[The Deposed King]

Yep.  However you can't emphasize this part enough.  You will start writing out crap, I did, everyone did.  Give yourself the permission to write the stink bomb and then come back and fix it up later.  If you don't give yourself permission to write something you yourself recognize as terrible stuff initially, you'll never get there.




The Deposed King

[Wordmaker]

You really, seriously can't repeat that enough.

[LeeringCorpse]

And, even though you know it to be bad, don’t be afraid to show your work around to people you feel you can trust to give you a true accounting of it. A third party can see the good and bad in a work that the creator of said work can’t.

Also, don’t hesitate to see and take pride in the small successes in your work. I know the stuff I’m writing now is poo, but it is the best I’ve ever written and I’m excited about that. It is inspiring me to continue on and work harder to improve.

[Dom]

Give yourself the permission to write the stink bomb and then come back and fix it up later.

Or, you know, just bury it in the backyard and never look at it or smell it again.

Side note...I've also noticed I produce more interesting worlds/universes as I'm older and more experienced with million words of crap, and I'm less likely to go back to old ones that have "structural problems".