What colleges are best for becoming a published author?

I'm a professional writer, so let me tell you this. College won't help you become published. You can learn the basics, all the rules and many things you need to know. But being published comes after much work. You learn to write by writing. It's estimated you have to write around a million words of crap before you write something publishable. By all means, go to college. I went to UCLA myself. Learn the basics, learn the rules, learn how to plot, how to create characters and worlds, how to tell a story. Learn the history of whatever genre you want to wrirte in. But more than anything else, set aside a time for yourself to write every day. It doesn't matter what you write, just that you do write and establish a self discipline which says 'this is my time to work'. Writing is a career of low pauy and many sacrifices. We do it because, honetly, we have to, we love it, and we can't really do anything else very well. Becoming a writer isn't a matter of wanting to, it's a matter of NEEDING to. Because it is NOT an easy or comfortable career. Out of every 1000 people that want to become writers, maybe 100 will actually finish a story. Out of those 100 maybe 10 will get published. Out of those 10 maybe 1 will get published a second time and become a professional. And people will still ask you when you're going to get a real job, or will think you are what you write about.

Hi Janaedoctorwho:

The road to nowhere is vast for the uneducated writer.  Any college can teach the needed basics of elementary rules of usage, composition, sentence structure and form.  It's the professor's instruction delivery that becomes important and is very subjective.

What is difficult to teach is the serious difference of what is needed in the highly insane and creative marketplace of competition...taking sentences of correct form but dead words and giving them what editors and publishers look for. . . style with the right slant, untrammeled individuality and the injection of a play on words, "word magic."

Continued "tacit" secrets one develops outside the halls of collegiate learning fosters the growth of a writer's talent so it becomes an innate burning passion, not easily doused like the flicker of a candle-lit flame.

Only through the self-disciplined repetition of daily writing can a writer trigger a dependable communication flow from the conscious and subconscious, teaching a writer how to breath "life" into the penned word, not by what is said, but how it is said, keeping a fountain of flowing ideas prevalent.

It is the consistent effort through trial and error and hanging-in, that helps one produce that which is hidden deep inside, in an impeccable way keeping a reader emotionally connected and turning pages.

Things like tacit understanding of how research, a writer's bible of action, gives a writer a distinct advantage over others, can add pizzazz, credibility, clarity and impart mystery.

Knowing the implicit "self-imposed" demon of writer's block and being privy to its "taming" is part of the author's ladder of success.

Bottom line:  These few examples show, after college exists another world of self-education and experience is to be had.  Know matter how good one may believe his or her writing to be, the opportunity to screw up is right around the corner, up the stairwell to the door of a reluctant editor or publisher.

What matters is what you do with what you have learned after you finish your MFA, and enter the real world of authorcraft.  . . .Know the well-rounded ropes, and how to use them to make your mark, they are a writer's life-line.   

CeCe Day Hill, Copyright (c) 2009
Jane Doe Chronicles

http://www.janedoechronicles.typepad.com
For further info: click on Art of Writing