A decade ago, in a bank-centric city full of MBAs, Queens University launched Charlotte's only Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

The two-year program cost students nearly $20,000. It didn't pretend to guarantee a job promotion or a pay raise. It was an instant success.

The Queens program joined an explosion of MFA creative writing programs across the nation - from 64 in 1994 to more than 180 today. Queens' program, along with nearly 50 others, are low-residency models, which use long-distance instruction and short campus stays. Only five existed when Queens set up shop.

Why the boom? Maybe it was just good timing. Lots of Americans longed to be writers and the new programs filled a need.

Today, the MFA in creative writing may be the planet's most-written-about graduate degree.

Poets & Writers magazine publishes annual program rankings. The Huffington Post includes blogs about MFAs. And every so often, some writer disses MFA programs, comparing them to conservative medieval guilds or arguing they produce same-sounding, cookie-cutter fiction.

While writers and critics debate whether MFAs have improved or ruined literature, one thing is certain: The MFA boom has transformed the way America produces many of its best writers.

"If you were graphing it," says Mark McGurl, author of "The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing," "a higher and higher percentage of writers are products of creative writing programs."

Expanding market

At Queens, business professor Cathy Anderson had the idea for the MFA program. Anderson realized Charlotte was among the largest U.S. cities without one.

So, in 1999, Queens English professor Michael Kobre asked novelist and professor Fred Leebron to create a low-residency program, which combines distance learning with time on campus, usually one or two weeks twice a year.

Low-res programs, which attract older students, were a growing market. North Carolina had one of the best - Warren Wilson College near Asheville. The 35-year-old program has produced many successful authors, including David Wroblewski, whose novel, "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle," was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

Queens welcomed its first 27 students in May 2001. About 10 instructors taught poetry and fiction.

Today, Queens' 50 part-time instructors include a PEN/Hemingway award finalist, North Carolina's poet laureate, a former New Yorker writer and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. Also on the faculty: Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel "Olive Kitteridge," and Jonathan Dee, a finalist for this year's Pulitzer fiction prize for his novel, "The Privileges."

Students work one on one with advisers to produce book-length manuscripts as their graduation theses. And at Queens, like most creative writing programs, the heart of the curriculum is the writing workshop, where classmates critique each other's work. Tuition now tops $25,000, and the school offers creative nonfiction and writing for stage and screen as well as fiction and poetry. Fiction still claims the largest enrollment.

This year, Poets & Writers magazine ranked Queens seventh out of 46 low-res programs. The rankings have been criticized as unscientific, however. They're based partly on prospective students' impressions - a measure described as akin to asking diners to review a restaurant before they've eaten a meal.

'Peculiarly American' pursuit

As concepts go, creative writing is a new one. The term wasn't even coined until the 1920s, at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In 1936, the University of Iowa launched its Writers' Workshop, the first program to award MFAs.

It took time for the idea to catch on. "Early creative writing teachers were trivialized as aesthetes," says David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. "Departments of English preferred their writers to be dead."

After World War II, creative writing programs multiplied. Among the first was UNC Greensboro's MFA program, launched in 1965.

But the creative writing MFA remains "peculiarly American," Fenza says. Only a couple dozen programs exist outside the United States.

Today, you could fill a contemporary American fiction syllabus with writers who spent time in writing workshops: Flannery O'Connor, John Irving, Gail Godwin, Rita Dove, Raymond Carver, Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, David Foster Wallace.

"Out of all the hot young writers, an absurd percentage are coming out of MFA programs," says Leebron, Queens' MFA program director.

Not everyone, however, is bullish on the MFA era. Former New York Times Book Review Editor Charles McGrath wondered in 2009 whether there's a Ponzi element to the whole setup, in which many American writers "make a considerable part of their living not by writing, in fact, but by teaching others how to write and how to teach writing."

Critics have accused some universities of using MFA programs as cash cows. They say the profusion of programs gives false hope to low-talent students. Some even wonder if we should teach creative writing. Aren't great writers born, not made?

Of course, you can't teach people to have great ideas. But most people agree that a good creative writing program, just like MFA programs in art and music, can hone skills.

McGurl, author of "The Program Era," argues that the impact of creative writing programs goes beyond nurturing new writers. They've also made academia the nation's biggest literary patron - by creating teaching jobs that give writers steady incomes.

Our literature has benefited, he believes, because that income gives writers the freedom to write what they want, not necessarily what will sell.

Pushed to write

North Carolina has five MFA programs, and competition for slots is fierce.

Warren Wilson's acceptance rate is about 10 percent. For its fall class, UNCG recently chose nine students from nearly 300 applicants. Queens' program is the largest, with 80 to 90 students, most from outside the Carolinas. Its acceptance rate is 30 percent to 35 percent. That means it rejects twice as many students as it accepts.

Some people pursue an MFA for the credential, usually required to teach college-level writing. Most simply want to become better writers.

Many graduates say they acquire better writing skills. Some get teaching jobs, and some get published.

Peter Reinhart, a baking instructor at Johnson & Wales University, was an established cookbook author who wanted to become a better writer when he began Queens' program.

"I just inhaled everything they had to offer," he says. "I couldn't wait for the residencies."

Like Reinhart, Queens alumna Susan Woodring says the program gave her what she wanted.

"I don't know any other way," she says, "that I could have learned to read and evaluate my own work."

Woodring, who lives in Drexel, is one of many published alumni. She's the author of a novel and book of short stories, and in 2012, St. Martin's Press will publish "Goliath," a novel about an N.C. town losing its furniture industry.

She had written fiction for years when she attended her first Queens workshop in 2001. She listened nervously as classmates dissected the short story she submitted for critique.

The program, she says, required discipline.

"You knew you had a deadline every other month, and had to turn so many pages in, and you knew people would be talking about it," she says. "So it pushed you to do your best."

Discipline and community are among the most valuable parts of an MFA program, says novelist Jill McCorkle, who teaches in N.C. State University's program.

"It's kind of like the way I say I'm going to do yoga at home," she says. "I don't. I need to go to a class."

We seek story

Clearly, the MFA isn't the most practical degree.

Even Poets & Writers magazine describes it as a "nonprofessional, largely unmarketable degree whose value lies in the time it gives one to write."

But consider a recent survey. It found that 81 percent of Americans thought they had a book in them. Lots of people want to be writers.

"We're living in an age when people's desire and ability to express their own personal truth is stronger than it has probably ever been," says Philip Gerard, chair of UNC Wilmington's Creative Writing Department.

Think about blogs and Facebook posts, self-published e-novels and tweets. Think about reality television, where tales of housewives and hoarders become can't-miss viewing.

"The idea of story is so central to the idea of being a human being," Woodring says. "We seek story constantly."

Demand exists. MFA programs are filling it.

"Self-expression," Leebron says, "is a very American thing."