Classes teach what study, experience and opinion believe to have produced prior success.

Corollary, businesses prefer what has been previously successful. A sure win is money in the bank. If only anything was sure in business.

If you take classes that are well constructed (no guarantee of this), you are likely to be taught strategies that will work to produce works in generic ways. But, it's not like anyone has has studied all permutations of words and identified strategies for ending up in the goldilocks zone of what we call a book.

What you are more likely to obtain from coursework is a common language and bedfellows who believe the same things you do. So it may be more likely that after you join a school, you're swimming in the right direction. ;)

So here's the question. How do we know what will beget success? The answer is not very clear.

Let's consider some writers who were very inventive, at least as we view them today. Mary Shelly wrote all of Frankenstein in a weekend on a bet. Professor Tolkien spent most of his life tinkering on an encyclopedia history of middle earth that most people find to be a drag. His other four books (The Hobbit, and the trilogy comprising Lord of the Rings) are much more well received. But for as different as they were in their approaches to writing, they both were immersed in the writing world entirely.

However, there are many writers without writing degrees who are equally interesting. Ray Bradbury, Maya Angelou, Truman Capote, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and Jack London are the first in the list returned by google/pastemagazane.com who did not complete any kind of writing degree, let alone collegiate degree.

Regardless all of these people loved literature, had a passion for reading and writing it. And eventually were surrounded by those with like minds. It's not so much that you need to go to school to learn the rules of the road; it may help if you do, it may also close your mind off to the possibilities you would otherwise consider. It depends on who you are, who you are surrounded by and who is passing on what they pitch as 'wisdom'.

You do not need to go to school. You do not need to avoid school. You need to love writing and you need to hone your craft so that it is appealing to readers, consumers, and those in the business that would absorb your work. Schooling is but one method of learning what it might mean to do that. It would not surprise me to find publishers who prefer people with writing degrees to those without; though I've yet to hear of anything quite like that. It would greatly surprise me to find publishers who prefer bad writers with writing degrees to good writers without.

At the end of the day a publisher is going to take any book they think they can sell better than any other book they are being offered at the moment. How you become the person that writes that book is a personal journey and history tells us there's many possible journeys that lead to such a result.

But...

Note, I do know that some short story submissions recommendations and even query letter recommendations suggest listing your prior successes and education. And it used to be the case, but no longer appears to be the case, that publishers wouldn't consider novelists until they'd acquired a mass of published short stories and had "proven" themselves. Nowadays, my understanding is that what people want is a gripping read (whatever that means to a publisher) that a target audience will be receptive to.

It has been the case that an education has helped some people become published. It has also clearly been the case that the opposite is true.

So, to answer your question succinctly. No, it's not required; but, you might want to consider it if you think you can get into a prestigious school as it may open doors more readily for you (it may also bankrupt you and force you to get a "real" job so that you can pay off your student debt and then you won't have time to write; I'm not jaded. I'm not.)

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