The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

Student Loans

65 Student Loans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There are numerous kinds of student loans available to graduate students, and since the terms change from year to year, I won’t go into each and every kind, but do know that they are available. The most common student loans for graduate students are the Perkins, which allows you to borrow up to eight thousand dollars annually, with a cap of sixty thousand dollars; the Subsidized Stafford, which allows you to borrow eight thousand and five hundred dollars each year with a cap of sixty-​ five thousand and five hundred; and the Unsubsidized Stafford, which allows you to borrow up to twelve thousand dollars (depending upon several factors), with a cap, for all Stafford loans, including subsidized and unsubsidized as well as undergraduate and graduate education, of one hundred and thirty-​ eight thousand and five hundred dollars. The money is there if you need it. However, you should carefully read over my section on employment before taking out a hundred and thirty-​ eight thousand dollars. I couldn’t have gone to college without student loans, but I probably could have gone to college with fewer student loans, and I certainly could have managed them better after I had graduated if I hadn’t taken out so many. I’m in my forties now, and I owe more on my student loans than I owe on my house. I took out my first loans during the Reagan presidency , which means that they came with usurious conditions. For instance, the interest on all of my student loans continued to be capitalized while in deferment. By the time I was earning enough to start making payments, I ended up owing twice what I had actually borrowed because of these terms. Twice! And that’s not counting how much interest I’ll be paying over the thirty years I’ll be making payments . (Many of the more usurious rules were dropped during the Clinton years, but since the borrower is typically held to whatever rules were in place when he first took the loans out, these new conditions came too late to do me any good.) I’m telling you all of this because it’s important for you to know how much student loans—as wonderful as they can be—can rule your life after college. The sad reality is that I need a certain income —a sizable income—in order to make my minimum monthly stu- 66 Education and the Writer dent loan payments. Those monthly payments give me a hell of a lot less flexibility than I would like to have as a writer. Let’s say I pay off my house and now make enough money with my writing each year to live modestly, and let’s say that I want to dedicate more time to my writing and am willing to chuck my teaching position in favor of, say—oh, I don’t know—a half-​ time job in a used bookstore . (Believe me, I’ve thought of it.) With my minimum monthly student loan payment, this isn’t an option. The income from a half-​ time bookstore job simply isn’t going to be enough for me to make my minimum monthly payments. A full-​ time job at a bookstore wouldn’t be enough. I would have to use all of my bookstore earnings , plus some (or all) of my monthly writing earnings, in order to make the payments. If I decide to defer the payments, the monthly interest is added onto the principal, which means that when I do decide to pay them again, my student loans will be comparable to the national debt. One of the best pieces of advice for writers I’ve ever heard was from Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, who said, “Keep your overhead down.” Once you start owing a lot of money, he went on to say, you end up taking writing jobs you don’t want to take because you don’t have a choice. If you want your freedom , not to mention your artistic integrity, then keep your debts low. Rubin was talking about buying a second house and expensive cars, but for fiction writers and poets that overhead may mean taking out loans for which you can’t afford the minimum monthly payment, or it may mean taking out loans and frivolously spending the moneyon a newcar, an expensive apartment, or too many nights out at the bar...