Introduction: Literary Advice from Quill to Keyboard

Anneleen Masschelein

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-53614-5_1

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.

Highlights

Literary Advice from Quill to KeyboardAnneleen Masschelein
Advice authors are said to encourage amateurs who lack genuine talent to churn out memoirs, genre fictions, or fanfiction, in the hope of writing the bestseller, of achieving stardom in a limited niche of the world wide web, or just some peace of mind by unloading their thoughts on paper or a blog. Apart from these popular connotations of literary advice—which, as we will see, do not do justice to the diversity of the phenomenon—the overtly prescriptive aims and normative poetics of literary advice sit uneasily with the attitudes fostered by academic literary studies, narratology, and serious literary criticism
For all its self-effacing and disposable qualities, literary advice is frequently used by would-be and by established authors and critics, and it has left its traces not just in literature, and in well-known narratological treatises

Summary

Introduction

The “writing advice industry” is one of the most enigmatic and, until recently, most overlooked areas of literature. Christopher Hilliard coined the term to indicate a number of different services offered in the early twentieth century to amateur writers and aspiring authors, handbooks as well as “other commercial dispensers of advice: writer’s magazines more analogous to the hobby press than to literary reviews; correspondence schools; and manuscript criticism and placement-advice services or ‘bureaus’” There is still a large array of practices on offer, ranging from commercial how-to books to creative writing manuals and textbooks, highly specialized volumes addressing specific aspects of a text or a genre (such as beginnings, middles, and ends (Kress 2011) or an encyclopedia of poisons for detective writers (Stevens and Klarner 1990)), self-help books, therapeutic writing manuals, and writing memoirs, in which established authors mix autobiography from the vantage point of the writerly lifestyle with advice.

Masschelein (B)

INTRODUCTION