I'm currently caught between the sensible and romantic sides of my personality. I got a 2.2 Geography BSc from Leeds 4 years ago, and since then have been working in a job I hate, unconnected to my degree. I know that the sensible thing to ensure a reasonably happy life would be to do a masters in a geography / environmental discipline, to enable me to work in that kind of field. However, my real ambition is to be a writer, so I'm inevitably drawn to looking at creative writing masters.

Does anyone know whether a creative writing masters is of any real benefit to a prospective writer? Surely there are plenty of published authors who haven't done such a course. I haven't done any English literature since GCSE, although I read a lot for pleasure, so would I be floundering on a course which will inevitably involve analysis of literature? (Some of the courses seem to accept people with degrees in unconnected disciplines).

Whenever I allow myself to wonder about seriously persuing a career as a writer, I'm brought up short by the obvious facts that only a tiny proportion of prospective authors are actually published, that many published writers do not make enough money from their work to actually live on, that I have no assurance of my skill beyond comments from the small number of friends who have read things that I have written, that seeing some of the tripe that is published reduces my confidence in publishers' ability to discern quality when they see it (or rather, the reading public's ability to discern quality, hence determining what there is a market for).

It's all so confusing. Partly this post was just the chance to rant for a bit when I should be working, but if anyone has any ideas about anything I've mentioned, that would be helpful!