No, you don’t need to go to college to be a writer.
But I am anyway.
In the last four years of my life, I have attended two colleges (three come August) in two states with three different majors and over a dozen professors, studying almost every topic imaginable and trying to figure out what in the world my final major should be.
That decision has been made easier by the fact that I’m now enrolled at a college with exactly one major (classical liberal arts), but it still leaves me wondering—am I doing something wrong? I know I want to be a writer, so should I be an English major instead? Or should writing be relegated to a hobby for when I have more free time, and should I focus on something more practical in the meantime?
I’ve gotten drastically different advice from a variety of family members, friends, and mentors, including two established authors, one of whom said I should definitely get an English degree, and the other of whom said I shouldn’t go to college at all. So . . . what are we young writers to do with that conflicting advice?
What I’ve come to realize is that the whole idea of college preparing you for adult life is a new one. For most of history, the average person didn’t attend college—and those who did had very limited careers. Medieval university students could study medicine, theology, and law. And if you wanted to do anything else, you became an apprentice.
And this means that most of the authors we read and enjoy did not study English in college, because they never went to college at all.
Jane Austen never attended college. Charles Dickens never attended college. William Shakespeare, widely considered the greatest writer of all time, never attended college.
So why, you may ask, am I?
The thing is, being a writer requires far more than the ability to write. As a writer, your mind is like a garden. Everything you put into it becomes fertilizer for what your mind produces next. And in order to write well, you need to make that soil as rich as possible.
The last time I took a formal writing class was in my freshman year of high school. (Well, if you don’t count the college English class I suffered through, in which we learned how to write complete sentences, and the professor marveled over my ability to use a semicolon correctly.) That’s five years ago now—and my writing has drastically improved in those years.
So how did that happen, if I wasn’t studying writing during that time?
Part of it is just practice. I read somewhere (and you shouldn’t trust everything you read online, but still) that you need to write about a million words before your writing is publishable. I hit that about 2 years ago, and I definitely saw improvement in my writing at that time.
But a bigger part of it is that I’ve learned and grown not just as a writer, but as a human being. I’ve experienced deeper grief than ever before in my life. I’ve struggled with severe mood swings that expanded my empathy for the people around me. I’ve made new friends and met new people and lived in new climates. And all of that has given me a wider bank of information to draw from in my writing.
So yes, practice is part of it, and life experience is part of it. And, of course, so is education—while I haven’t taken a formal class in those five years, I’ve read several dozen books on writing (and that’s not even mentioning blogs and podcasts).
But more than that, good writers know how to tap into the depth of wisdom handed down to us from the past. Some great writers of the past—J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis among them—took the equivalent of today’s English degree. But while modern English classes tend to focus on modern literature—or on deconstructing the great books of the past—their studies guided them in reading the greatest works of literature ever written.
When you read books like the Odyssey or Paradise Lost or Hamlet, it doesn’t just change how you write. It broadens the way that you think about everything—but especially about human nature. When you branch into the other humanities and read great works of theology or philosophy, it teaches you to think in a new and more complex way about the world around you. And all of that finds its way into your writing, even if you’re not aware of it.
So do you need a college education to be a good writer? Not necessarily. But studying the great works of the past is absolutely essential to learning both to think well and to write well, and a college education is one way to do that.
I know I could go to the county library and check out Homer’s Iliad or Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations or Aristotle’s Poetics or the other twenty-nine books purchased for my next year of college—but I also know I won’t gain as much from independent study as I will learn from discussions with classmates and professors.
No, that college atmosphere isn’t necessary to be a good writer. And college isn’t practical for everyone—whether for financial reasons or something else. But whether you’re on the fence about college or still years from considering that (or even in the thick of it right now), there’s one easy thing you can do to improve your writing:
Read old books. Read books that broaden your mind, that make you think about the world and other people in a new way. Absolutely read books for fun, because a good book is one of the most delightful things in the world. But also read books that will serve as fertilizer for your mind.
And that will do more to make you a good writer than all the English degrees in the world.