Do you need a degree?

Do you have to graduate to be a best selling Author? If you don’t, how do you get better to become one?

Being a graduate helps, but not necessarily a degree in Creative Writing. Any degree makes you, the student, have to research something in depth, form an opinion on it , then write about it. This process is a foundation stone of what makes a writer. Writing is seeing the physical world and the people in it, internalising that, looking at it in a fresh or interesting angle, then sitting down to communicate that in writing day after day. I’d rather have a degree in Physics than Creative Writing, and rather the latter than no degree at all. Having a degree makes it easier for you to write at the level the world expects of you.

My day to day work used to involve finding potential non-fiction authors and offering some of them a book contract. Most of the time I looked for people with degrees. When there’s so many people that have, why would I go for someone that hasn’t?