“Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?”: Author Interviews as Literary Advice

This chapter examines the relationship between author interviews and literary advice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on case studies in the form of two interview series: the interwar “How Writers Work” series, published in the British periodical Everyman, and the “Art of Fiction” series, published in the American magazine The Paris Review from 1953 onward. It also discusses the explosion of author interviews in the era of online media. The chapter argues that the author interview is an expansive form, encouraging readers of all types to bring their own agendas and reading styles to the text, including but not limited to reading for advice. The very ambiguity of the relationship between author interviews and literary advice has in fact worked in the former’s favor: enabling it to gain both popularity and prestige in an era of professionalized literary studies.

Tools for Shaping Stories? Visual Plot Models in a Sample of Anglo-American Advice Handbooks

This chapter examines the “storyology” in writing manuals, focusing on the verbal and the visual plot models in a corpus of sixteen mainstream creative writing handbooks on plot, novels, and screenplays, still in use today. We will focus on the prevalence of dramatic writing and the predominance of the “Mountain Model,” a model which combines earlier linear models, such as the “three-act structure,” “Field’s paradigm,” “Fichtean Curve,” “Freytag’s Pyramid,” and the polar model, built on the alternation of good and bad fortune, along with Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” The Mountain Model visualizes a concept of writing particularly suited for stories capable of being resolved within a limited time frame, combining the perspectives of protagonist and reader. While this model is usually presented as ideal and universal, changing the representation from a linear to a topographical model alters the kinds of plots which can be imagined.

Introduction: Literary Advice from Quill to Keyboard

This chapter presents a brief history of the dominant, Anglo-American literary advice tradition from the nineteenth century to the present as well as a state of the art of the existing scholarship on literary advice. We focus on several key moments for literary advice in the USA and in the UK: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), the debate between Sir Walter Besant and Henry James surrounding “The Art of Fiction” (1884), the era of the handbook (1880s–1930s), the “program era” (McGurl 2009) and postwar literary advice, the rise of the “advice author” in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally advice in the “digital literary sphere” (Murray 2018). The overview captures both the remarkable consistency and the transformations of advice, against the background of changes in the literary system, the rise of creative writing, changes in the publishing world, and the rise of the Internet and self-publishing. It highlights the role of some specific actors in the literary advice industry, such as moguls, women, and gurus, and draws attention to a number of subgenres (genre handbooks, self-help literary advice, and the writing memoir), as well as to counter-reactions and resistance to advice in literary works and in avant-garde manuals. Advice is regarded both in the context of the professionalization of authorship in a literary culture shaped by cultural and creative industries, and of the exponential increase of amateur creativity.

Work and the Writing Life: Shifts in the Relationship Between ‘Work’ and ‘The Work’ in Twenty-First-Century Literary-Advice Memoirs

This article focuses on memoirs that grapple with how to resolve tensions between ‘work,’ labor performed for a wage or salary, and ‘the Work,’ a creative pursuit performed for reasons beyond material necessity. Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (1934) and Wake up and Live! (1936), like many self-help publications of their kind, position writing and other creative pursuits as acts of living that stand in opposition to the necessity of making a living. Recently, however, a number of publications on “the writing life” have begun to complicate this opposition. When considering works ranging from Annie Dillard’s 1989 The Writing Life to Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) and The Cost of Living (2018) and Alexander Chee’s How to Write and Autobiographical Novel (2018), it seems that the dichotomy of work vs. writing life is not simply undergoing demystification but also reconceptualization. These contemporary literary-advice memoirs thematize dissolutions between work, personal, and writing lives, thereby also disrupting generic patterns in issuing literary advice. They push the literary advice genre away from technicalities and visions of artistic autonomy and toward accounts of creative production that is subject to the demands placed on creative workers throughout the white-collar labor market of late capitalism.

The “Ready-Made-Writer” in a Selection of Contemporary Francophone Literary Advice Manuals

This chapter explores the concepts of discursive and non-discursive ethos, as well as the notion of authorial stance (posture) as defined by Jerôme Meizoz (2007; 2011) in order to analyze the figure of the “ready-made-writer” in French manuals and writing guides at the beginning of the twenty-first century. “Authorial stance,” “ethos,” and “persona” are all terms that take stock of the way in which authors declare themselves writers in the literary field. For Meizoz, posture begins at the moment of publication, that is, at the moment of the official recognition of the author. A close reading of some recent French writing manuals, however, reveals the outline of an implicit portrait of the author budding into a legitimate artist and credible writer, and contains indications on how to carve out a space of creation for oneself. The identities presented by the manuals are shaped by literary models and invested by a collective imaginary. They conform to culturally accepted archetypes, because “becoming a writer, and doing the work of a writer are part of the same phantasm” (Ducas 2002). Learning the craft of writing thus also entails acquiring a corporeal dramaturgy or an “auctorial scenography” (Diaz 2009) which is a prerequisite for creation. This can be achieved by going through various authorial stances, from “visionary” to “apprentice” and “manager of one’s own small enterprise.”

Taking Self-Help Books Seriously: The Informal Aesthetic Education of Writers

Aesthetic education with a writing focus has occurred in the United States through two vehicles: textbooks in classroom-based instruction or self-help books in extracurricular instruction. Writing self-help books, or texts which address a readership interested in learning about writing independent of a teacher or university, played a significant role in guiding countless individuals during the twentieth century and continue to do so today (For the purposes of this article, “self-help” refers exclusively to self-help literature offering advice about the act of writing and not to any of the myriad of other self-help topics [dieting, relationships, and so forth]). The evolution of these self-help books paralleled the development of college and university writing courses that arose early in the twentieth century: indeed, a powerful informal aesthetic education has been occurring through self-help books. In this chapter, I perform a textual analysis of five twentieth-century self-help books, all attracting substantial readership: Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (1934); Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write (1938); Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (1973); Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (1986); and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (1995). An examination of these popular twentieth-century self-help books reveals four areas of overlapping content. Collectively, self-help books on writing address the role of the unconscious in composing, issues of control, the holistic nature of composing, and failures in traditional teaching, and they all formulate a broader argument about the universal ability of humans to be creative.

Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature

This chapter analyzes literary advice culture from a transnational-comparative perspective. It sheds light on the reception of the American poetics of creative writing in contemporary France by examining the specific case of Outils du roman: Avec Malt Olbren sur les pistes et exercices du creative writing à l’américaine (2016, Tools of the Novel. Exploring American Creative Writing with Malt Olbren) by the experimental prose-writer François Bon. This text represents a broader dynamic in which French authors of literary advice resort to a repertoire of American writing techniques in an attempt to revive French literature. To conceptualize this process of transfer, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature.” This notion conveys how literary advice in France must constantly position itself vis-à-vis its American counterpart, but also how it appropriates and transforms this same body of ideas and techniques. More generally, this chapter makes a case for an increased consideration of supranational transfers in the domain of literary advice when studying processes of local literary change.

“Stand Out from the Crowd!”: Literary Advice in Online Writing Communities

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the different levels of advice online writing communities offer aspiring writers, from the overt provision of “writing tips” and guidelines, to the role of authoritative intermediaries such as moderators and beta readers, and the peer-to-peer feedback provided by way of ongoing informal comments. Case studies will be taken from bespoke writing platforms such as Wattpad, but will also consider the role of fan communities and the kinds of support structures they offer. Analysis will focus on the extent to which advice is predicated on the traditional formal features of the writing (dialogue, characterization) or on reader engagement and self-promotion. It will also explore whether such advice is prescriptive and reflective of practices and norms inherited from traditional cultural gatekeepers, and the degree to which the work produced within these communities can ever be described as experimental, playful, or subversive.

Reproduction as Literary Production: Self-Expression and the Index in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing

This chapter discusses Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, a collection of essays that includes an account of his Uncreative Writing course at the University of Pennsylvania. Championing various forms of literary automatism and appropriation, which are often treated as a much-needed response to our contemporary digital environment, the book is offered as a counter-model to established notions of authentic, self-expressive writing. The article takes this position as a springboard into thinking about Goldsmith’s writing exercises in relation to a longer history of indexical artistic practices, most notably analog photography. Despite its own positioning vis-à-vis the digital, I claim, Goldsmith’s writing model can best be understood as an extension of a proto-photographic logic into the ambit of contemporary literature. At the same time, as I show, the use of textual reproduction central to his project has been a longstanding ingredient of self-expressive literary advice. I conclude by arguing that Goldsmith’s model is just as tied to a form of personal expression, albeit one following a less obviously self-expressive logic that resonates with online forms of indexical performativity.

Learning Fiction by Subscription: The Art and Business of Literary Advice 1884–1895

This chapter examines the rise of literary advice in Anglo-American periodical culture from 1884 to 1895. Capitalizing on a moment when fiction became both more self-consciously artistic and more potentially lucrative, literary advice of this era addressed the full range of literary practice and the attendant practical activities that made it possible. The chapter resituates the landmark “Art of Fiction” debate (1884)—an event crucially sponsored by the magazines—as the opening of an era of practical discussion that was soon after taken up in trade journals devoted specifically to authorship. The practical advice dispensed by these journals—including tools, tricks, tips, and gossip—focuses on the form of the short story, creating a loop with a form that was itself a magazine staple. This interactive looping is considered in the conclusion, where the chapter examines a systematic course in literary art offered by Atalanta, a late-Victorian “Girl’s Magazine.”