Doing a PhD in Creative Writing: Is it for Everyone?

When I go to my local surgery, I often see a different GP, and invariably a moment comes when they ask, “Just what kind of doctor are you?” I assume they think I’m judging them, like a secret shopper. When I tell them I’m the kind of doctor who can spell, they laugh and we move on, everyone sure of their status once again.

It’s weird, having a PhD in Creative Writing. It’s both real—I have Dr on every piece of identification possible—and make believe: how many people even know that creative writing is an academic discipline? and how can you be a “professor of making things up”?

PhD in Creative Writing programs are becoming more popular, but the question remains whether they are necessary for a writer. The easy answer: no. The harder answer: not really but maybe there’s some benefit.

Doing a PhD is a four- to seven-year commitment, depending on the country and whether you study full or part time. I did mine in the UK, because I researched 400 years of English gardening history and how gardens function in fantasy fiction, and this is where those gardens live. I was incredibly lucky in my supervisors, and after almost five years sat my viva. The dissertation consisted of a 100,000-word historical fantasy novel about a “haunted” garden and a 40,000-word critical commentary in which I analysed my process and project though the lens of various theories about space and time that I applied to gardens (both real and fictional). I started my research having a solid idea of what it was I wanted to do, with a novel partially planned out (though it changed—that’s not unexpected). I did the PhD not because I wanted to write the novel, but because I was interested about the context of the novel and its place in the genre with other novels that use gardens fantastically, and because I have always felt comfortable in academia.

When I interview PhD applicants, I always ask “Why do you want to do a PhD?” I get numerous responses, from “I want to be a university lecturer” to “I want to learn how to write a best-seller”. The only right answer, however, is “Because I want to” because those other goals cannot be guaranteed. First, getting a full-time permanent lecturing position is rare, as most academics will tell you. Yes, I have one, but I had a career before I ever did my PhD (which I started at 40!), and that career was a distinct benefit when I applied for my current position. And second, no one can ever guarantee that you will be a best-selling novelist. Doing a PhD like mine can help you better understand your own writing process and, in turn, make you a more conscientious writer, but it isn’t necessarily going to make you a better commercial writer.

If you have a love of spending hours and days and weeks alone, reading and thinking and analysing a topic, then doing a PhD in Creative Writing might be for you. It was for me when I realised I hadn’t left my room in two days while reading The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction and trying desperately to understand it; when I sat in the British Library holding back a coughing fit while ill but desperate to get through the pile of books I had ordered; when I had no choice but to work on my dissertation after a devastating breakup and subsequent house move in the dead of a very cold and snowy winter; and when, after graduating at 45 with a degree but no permanent home or work visa, I had to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up. The work led to physical and mental-health issues. It’s not for the light-hearted.

My best advice:

Choose a topic that you love. You will spend years and years on it, and it will get boring. And you will get sick to death explaining it to well-meaning people who ask you what you’re researching.

Choose a topic that can be studied academically. If you want to write a novel you’ve plotted out, then go write it. But if you have an idea for a novel (or short story collection) and are almost more interested in the different angles of the genre or the world or the context than the story itself, then you might have something worth PhD study. Do some digging and academic reading before you start filling out applications.

Choose your university wisely. Mine was open to SFF writers, but many aren’t. You don’t necessarily want to stay at the same university for your MA and PhD. On that note: an MA in writing isn’t necessary for a PhD application, but it really helps. So, too, does having finished writing a novel before and having experience in a workshop/critique setting.

Choose your supervisor even more wisely. First, their research interest should match yours and they should be active in your genre; and second, it’s a close relationship, but a working one. Interviewing the supervisor is as important as the possible supervisor interviewing you.

In the end, a PhD in Creative Writing is an academic pursuit, not the means to finish a novel. As it turns out, the novel I wrote, Threading the Labyrinth, worked as the result of academic study but wasn’t commercially publishable until I revised it and even restructured it, and now, more than three years later, it’s on its way to being published. I don’t know whether I could have written Threading without the research I did as a PhD student, but I do know that Threading is a better novel for it.

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Tiffani Angus is a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, who lectures in Publishing and Creative Writing, is the Course Leader for the MA Creative Writing, and is a Director at the Anglia Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has published short fiction in a variety of genres (among them science fiction, historical fantasy, horror, and even erotica) and her debut novel Threading the Labyrinth will be out with Unsung Stories Press in late 2019. Her current work in progress is novel inspired by her research into the estrangement of women’s bodies in apocalyptic fiction. An American who grew up in Las Vegas, she now lives in Bury St Edmunds with her partner.

She can be found on Twitter @tiffaniangus

Her website is at www.tiffani-angus.com

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