Degrees of Literature

When I started college, I had no intention of getting a degree in literature. Actually my first choice was youth ministry. Then it changed to early childhood education. Finally, I settled on English, though I thought I was going to get a creative writing degree. When a rather impressive bout of inattention on the part of my advisor resulted in me having taken all the prerequisite classes for a lit degree instead of a creative writing degree, you can understand why I might have been a bit upset. (To be fair, I probably should have seen it myself, but I have a nasty habit of trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. I have since learned to stop doing that.) With this lovely mishap, I wound up making the choice to get a degree in literature instead of a degree in creative writing. I didn't know it at the time, but this would wind up being quite helpful to my writing career. It's only been in the past few years that I've begun to realize just how helpful all those literature classes were.

The most obvious benefit is that getting a literature degree exposed me to large amounts of classic and varied writings that I would never have read on my own. I had the chance to study writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer in depth, giving me an appreciation of their work that I didn't have before those classes. I took multiple classes on American, English, and world literature.

These classes exposed me to some things that most people read in high school, but I had not because I was homeschooled. I also got the chance to take more specialized classes, like an entire class about fairy tales and folk lore, or the class I took that was all about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (can you say awesome?). I also took classes on plays, poetry, research methods, the history of the English language, and the history of the English novel.

Overall, I was exposed to more great literature than I ever would have had the inclination to read had I studied strictly creative writing or any other subject. And every writer knows that one of the keys to being a good writer is being a good reader (okay, I did just use that cliche. But it is true).

The second, and probably less obvious benefit is that having a degree in literature gave me the ability to look past my own feelings about a piece of writing and simply look at its strengths and weaknesses.

Here comes a shocking revelation: I really can't stand literature, for the most part. All those classic authors and masters that we have to read as a part of our education are some of the most boring reads I've ever read. Most of the classics are depressing and or leave me feeling, well, icky after reading them. They hold little to no interest for me. (I realize that I am severely offending all of you classic literature lovers out there, but it's how I feel.)

Yet, I had to sit down and read hundreds of pieces of writing that I really didn't want to. And more than that, I had to be able to understand it and give intelligent answers to the questions my professors asked. I had to know their strengths and weaknesses, to be able to see the good in the pieces even when I couldn't stand reading them. It was incredibly frustrating at first. I've never liked being told what to read (who does?) and having to spend four years doing just that annoyed me.

But I did it. I wanted to earn my degree and I wanted decent grades. So I read, and processed, and learned to put my own dislike of the style or subject matter aside and simply evaluate the writing apart from those things. It wasn't easy. It's hard to put yourself aside and just look at things for their own value. But I got better at it. And by my last year, I was starting to actually kind of enjoy reading all that literature. Well, as much as someone who doesn't really care for literature can enjoy something like that.

So what does all this have to do with writing? Reading good writing, classic writing of master storyteller, adds depth and breadth to my own knowledge of writing. And that gave me more material to draw from for my own writing.

The other thing it gave me was the ability to critique pretty much any type of writing out there. I have particular reading tastes (most people do). I like YA fantasy, sci-fi, and an occasional contemporary story. I read very little outside of those genres. But that's reading for pleasure. What my five years in college gave me was the ability to set my preferences aside (to a point) and read other writer's stories effectively even if they don't fall into my preferred genres.

So there are advantages to that lit degree after all.

Besides, I can always get an MFA in Creative Writing. :)