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NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY

Writing Manuals for the Masses

The Rise of the Literary Advice Industry
from Quill to Keyboard
Edited by
Anneleen Masschelein · Dirk de Geest
New Directions in Book History

Series Editors
Shafquat Towheed
Faculty of Arts
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

Jonathan Rose
Department of History
Drew University
Madison, NJ, USA
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of
maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the
goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish mono-
graphs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new fron-
tiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its
scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to
all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including
studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book
History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will
experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives,
debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected
subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic
fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiog-
raphy of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book
scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three
formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single
or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s
e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the
innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two
series editors.

Editorial Board
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA
Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14749
Anneleen Masschelein · Dirk de Geest
Editors

Writing Manuals
for the Masses
The Rise of the Literary Advice Industry
from Quill to Keyboard
Editors
Anneleen Masschelein Dirk de Geest
University of Leuven University of Leuven
Leuven, Belgium Leuven, Belgium

ISSN 2634-6117 ISSN 2634-6125 (electronic)

New Directions in Book History
ISBN 978-3-030-53613-8 ISBN 978-3-030-53614-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53614-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access
publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative
Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material
is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain
permission directly from the copyright holder.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Pictures Now/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

Although Belgium to this day does not have an M.F.A. program in

creative writing, the writing scene is flourishing. While neither of us
harbors any literary ambitions, we have both been energized by giving
literary advice. Dirk has been teaching poetry writing and creative writing
classes in the 1980s, and Anneleen enjoys working as a story editor for
the film industry when she has the time. These “serious leisure” activ-
ities broadened our minds to the world of literary advice, which we
subsequently explored in two research projects. One project, “Litera-
ture between Creativity and Constraint: The Case of Handbooks for
Creative Writing,” was part of Literary and Media Innovation (LMI), a
broad Interuniversity Attraction Pole program funded by Belspo, Belgian
Science Policy. The program consisted of a consortium of four Belgian
research groups, MDRN (University of Leuven), CLIC (University of
Brussels), CRI (University of Louvain-la-Neuve), and CIPA (University
of Liège), and two international research groups, Project Narrative from
the University of Ohio and Figura from the University of Montreal. We
would like to thank all the members of the consortium for four stimu-
lating years, especially Jan Baetens, who was the mastermind behind it all,
and whose intellectual generosity is without compare. We also would like
to thank the researchers on the project, Heidi Peeters and Arne Vanraes,
as well as the colleagues from another project in the program, with
whom we closely collaborated on “The Literary Interview”: Stéphanie
Vanasten, Christophe Meurée, and David Martens. For our research, we

v
vi PREFACE

have received invaluable feedback from Julia Watson, Jim Phelan, Angus
Fletcher, and the participants of the Project Narrative Summer School
in Ohio in 2015, especially Pedro Ponce who pointed out Andrew Levy’s
book to us. Anneleen has fond memories of a shopping spree for a suitcase
full of second-hand writing handbooks with Julia Watson in Ohio. Julia’s
hospitality, friendship, and support to this project have been invaluable.
We also received a project grant from FWO, the Research Fund of Flan-
ders for the project “Paperback Writer: A Comparative Study of Norma-
tive Poetics in American and French Handbooks for Writing Narrative
Prose in the twenty first Century” which funded the Ph.D. research of
Gert-Jan Meyntjens as well as this book. A number of other people have
helped us along the way. Jim Collins and Mark McGurl both came to
Leuven, respectively for the Hermes Summer School and for an inter-
national seminar in the MLS program. This led to unexpected encoun-
ters, graciously hosted by Ilke Froyen at Passa Porta, which have made
their way into this book, and to very useful bibliographical information
about the world of self-publishing. The cooperation with Bozar’s Are You
Series festival helped us to explore the world of screenwriting manuals
and allowed us to invite Bridget Conor, Ian MacDonald, and Vincent
Colonna, who shared their knowledge of handbooks in the film industry
with us. Anneleen would also like to thank Jean-Michel Rabaté for his
unwavering support in the past years and the colleagues of cultural studies
who have supported this research in very busy times. Most of all, though,
we are grateful to all the contributors to this book. Some of the authors
in this book we’ve known and worked with for many years have become
friends. But we’ve contacted the majority of the scholars on the basis of
their research, and in many cases, we have not yet had the chance to meet
in person. Their expertise has made the book possible and it was a truly
pleasurable experience working with all of them. Finally, we would like
to thank Jenny Herman for her help in editing this volume, at very short
notice, and for bringing us into contact with Andrés Franco Harnache,
who brought another piece to the puzzle. Last but not least, Anneleen
would like to thank her parents and sisters, and her partner Laurens, for
helping with editing and especially for being a wonderful plus parent to
Elliot.

Leuven, Belgium Anneleen Masschelein

Dirk de Geest
 PREFACE vii

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Belspo, Belgian Science Policy, and

FWO Flanders for funding the research for this book and making it available to
the public in Open Access.
 Praise for Writing Manuals for the
Masses

“This exciting and comprehensive range of essays assesses the contribu-

tion of advice handbooks to prose writing, conceived variously as prac-
tice, creative self-expression, and mode of self-construction for literary or
pop-culture marketplaces. In a field that tends to celebrate developing
‘authentic’ autobiographical expression, the contributors’ focus on not
only describing but probing, and in some cases questioning, the advice in
writing handbooks is a provocative intervention in life narrative studies.”
—Julia Watson, Professor Emerita, The Ohio State University, USA

“A fascinating study of ‘how to write,’ a fundamental trend in literary

culture that has longtime remained under the radar, bringing together
key aspects of the meaning of literature in society, far beyond the indi-
vidual needs or desires of all those eager to start writing and end up
publishing. It combines careful historical reconstruction of literary advice
and smart contextualization of the advice culture in its informal as most
business oriented models, unearthing many aspects of the blurring of
boundaries between professional and amateur, reader and writer, indi-
vidual and community, workshop and market, that profoundly reshape
our thinking on the institution of literature.”
—Jan Baetens, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Leuven,
Belgium

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction: Literary Advice from Quill to Keyboard 1

Anneleen Masschelein

Part I From Fictioneering to Wattpad

2 Learning Fiction by Subscription: The Art

and Business of Literary Advice 1884–1895 47
John S. Caughey

3 “You Will Be Surprised that Fiction Has Become

an Art”: The Language of Craft and the Legacy
of Henry James 79
Mary Stewart Atwell

4 “Your Successful Man of Letters Is Your Successful

Tradesman”: Fiction and the Marketplace in British
Author’s Guides of the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries 107
Paul Vlitos

xi
xii CONTENTS

5 “Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?”: Author Interviews

as Literary Advice 129
Rebecca Roach

6 “Stand Out from the Crowd!”: Literary Advice

in Online Writing Communities 153
Bronwen Thomas

Part II Case Studies of Literary Advice

7 Tools for Shaping Stories? Visual Plot Models

in a Sample of Anglo-American Advice Handbooks 171
Liorah Hoek

8 The “Ready-Made-Writer” in a Selection

of Contemporary Francophone Literary Advice
Manuals 199
Françoise Grauby

9 Taking Self-Help Books Seriously: The Informal

Aesthetic Education of Writers 217
Alexandria Peary

10 A Pulse Before Shelf Life: Literary Advice

on Notebook-Writing as Event 241
Arne Vanraes

11 “Writing by Prescription”: Creative Writing

as Therapy and Personal Development 265
Leni Van Goidsenhoven and Anneleen Masschelein
 CONTENTS xiii

Part III Adopting and Resisting Literary Advice Culture

12 Reproduction as Literary Production: Self-Expression

and the Index in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative
Writing 291
Ioannis Tsitsovits

13 Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt

at Creating a Minor French Literature 309
Gert-Jan Meyntjens

14 “Mostrar, no decir”: The Influence of and Resistance

Against Workshop Poetics on the Hispanic Literary
Field 325
Andrés Franco Harnache

15 Work and the Writing Life: Shifts

in the Relationship Between ‘Work’ and ‘The
Work’ in Twenty-First-Century Literary-Advice
Memoirs 345
Elizabeth Kovach

16 “If You Can Read, You Can Write, or Can You,

Really?” 367
Jim Collins

Index 389
 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Anneleen Masschelein is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leuven,

Belgium, and is program director of the M.A. in Cultural Studies. She has
published widely in the field of literary and cultural theory, cultural studies
and intellectual history. Her book, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny
in Late-Twentieth Century Theory (State University of New Press, 2011),
is an intellectual history of the conceptualization of the uncanny. Among
her most recent publications are Fifty Keywords in Contemporary Culture
(with Stijn de Cauwer and Joost de Bloois, Pelckmans Pro, 2018), a
special issue of Biography on Interviewing as Creative Practice (with
Rebecca Roach), and “Why Anzieu Now: Stretching the Shared Skin of
the Work of Art” in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and
Film (ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Routledge, 2020).

Dirk de Geest is Professor in Dutch Literature at the University of

Leuven, Belgium. He has published widely in the domain of modern
Dutch literature and of literary theory. He has written numerous articles
on genre theory, systems theory, and functionalist approaches of literary
phenomena. He co-edited Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to
Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) and contributed to Dutch
and Flemish Literature as World Literature (ed. by Theo D’haen, Blooms-
bury Academic, 2019). His recent book with Gillis Dorleijn and Pieter

xv
xvi EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Verstraeten, Literatuur (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), offers a

broad perspective on literature, both from a historical and a theoretical
point of view for a broad audience.

Contributors

Mary Stewart Atwell is Assistant Professor at the Virginia Military Insti-

tute in the Department of English, Rhetoric and Humanistic Studies. She
is the author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2012). Her short fiction
has appeared in Epoch and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other jour-
nals, and in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best American
Mystery Stories. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York
Times and Poets & Writers. She defended her Ph.D., The Craft of Fiction:
Teaching Technique 1850–1930, in 2013 at Washington University, St.
Louis.
John S. Caughey is English Department Chair at UCLA Geffen
Academy. Jack has published scholarly articles, including “A Zombie
Novel with Brains: Bringing Genre to Life in the Literature Classroom,”
and has contributed to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. He
defended his Ph.D. dissertation, How to Become an Author: The Art and
Business of Literary Advice Handbooks, in 2016 at UCLA.
Jim Collins is a Professor of Film and Television at the University of
Notre Dame where he teaches courses on media theory and digital
culture. His most recent book is Bring on the TsBooks for Everybody:
How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke University Press,
2010). He is also the author of Architecture of Excess: Cultural Life
in the Information Age (Routledge, 1995) and Uncommon Cultures:
Popular Culture and Postmodernism (Routledge,1989), editor of High-
Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment (Blackwell, 2002), and
co-editor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (Routledge,1993). His current
book project is entitled Playlist Culture.
Andrés Franco Harnache is a writer and scholar. He holds an M.F.A.
in Creative Writing from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona
(2014) and a M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the Université Grenoble
Alps and the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (2019), where he defended
a thesis on the reception of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. He has published
several short stories in magazines such as Sombralarga and Matera. His
 EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xvii

current research and writing interests explore the boundaries and possibil-
ities of the interplay between literature and photography in contemporary
Hispanic, French, and American literature.
Françoise Grauby is Associate Professor of French Literature at the
University of Sydney, with a focus on nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century literature. She has published three books: La création mythique à
l’époque du Symbolisme (1994), Le corps de l’artiste (2001), and Le Roman
de la création: Ecrire entre mythes et pratiques (Rodopi/Brill) (2015). This
last book is a study on the impact of creative writing classes in France. She
is currently working on a project on writing and creativity.
Liorah Hoek is a creative writing professional in Utrecht, The Nether-
lands, who has published various short stories in magazines like Deus
Ex Machina. She has completed Master in Cultural Studies and an
advanced Master in Literary Studies at the University of Leuven, where
she conducted research on plot models in contemporary creative writing
handbooks.
Elizabeth Kovach is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Coordinator of the
international Ph.D. program Literary and Cultural Studies at the Justus
Liebig University Giessen. Her doctoral dissertation, Novel Ontologies
After 9/11: The Politics of Being in Contemporary Theory and U.S.-
American Narrative Fiction, was published in 2016 by WVT Trier. Her
postdoctoral research focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of work in
US-American fiction.
Gert-Jan Meyntjens is a Research Fellow in the Department of Literary
Studies at the University of Leuven. He defended his Ph.D. on the influ-
ence of American literary advice handbooks on French advice culture in
2018. He has published widely on the topic, among others in Journal
of Creative Writing Studies and Nottingham French Studies. He currently
works at a reception center for refugees in Belgium, where he coordinates
a pod-cast project based on refugee stories.
Alexandria Peary (M.F.A., M.F.A., Ph.D.) maintains a dual career in
creative writing and composition-rhetoric. She is the author of six books,
including Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing
(Routledge, 2018), Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First
Century (with Tom C. Hunley, Southern Illinois University Press, 2015),
and The Water Draft (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). Her scholarship and
xviii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

creative pieces have appeared in journals including College Composition

and Communication, Rhetoric Review, the Yale Review, New American
Writing, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and the Journal
of Aesthetic Education. Her 2019 TEDx talk, “How Mindfulness Can
Transform The Way You Write,” is available at https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=3yxnFac7CNA. She is the History Editor for the Journal
of Creative Writing Studies and a Professor in the English Department at
Salem State University. In 2019, Alexandria was appointed Poet Laureate
of New Hampshire.
Rebecca Roach is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the Univer-
sity of Birmingham; her work examines Anglophone literature and new
media, broadly conceived. Her first book, Literature and the Rise of
the Interview, appeared with Oxford UP in 2018. She published widely
in journals including Biography, Contemporary Literature, MFS: Modern
Fiction Studies and Textual Practice. Prior to joining University of Birm-
ingham, Rebecca was a Postdoctoral Fellow on the ERC-funded project
“Ego-Media: The Impact of New Media on Forms and Practices of
Self-Presentation” at King’s College London.
Bronwen Thomas is Professor of English and New Media Studies at the
University of Bournemouth. Her recent publications include Narrative
(Routledge, 2015), based on her experience of teaching on BU, and a co-
edited volume of essays, Dialogue Across Media (John Benjamins, 2017).
Most of her current research interests are based on exploring creativity
and storytelling in digital spaces, and she is currently writing a book on
literature and social media (Routledge, 2018). She has been a Principal
Investigator on three AHRC funded projects exploring how digital tech-
nologies are transforming reading. The latest, Reading on Screen (www.
readingonscreen.co.uk) will capture the experiences of readers making the
transition from print to screen through the creation of a series of digital
stories.
Ioannis Tsitsovits is a Ph.D. Researcher in the Literary Studies Depart-
ment at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where he is working on
a project titled “Creative Writing and the Uses of Theory: Forms and
Institutions of Contemporary US Literature.” He is a graduate of the
M.F.A. in Art Writing at Goldsmiths, London, and of the M.A. in Western
Literature at the University of Leuven.
 EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xix

Leni Van Goidsenhoven defended her Ph.D. thesis on autism narratives

in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Leuven in
2017. Her book, Autism in Plural: The Potential of Life Writing for Alter-
native Forms of Subjectivity (in Dutch), will be published by Garant Press
in 2019. She has published widely on autism, literature, and art, in jour-
nals like Life Writing and Qualitative Inquiry, and is currently a Post-
doctoral Research Fellow on the ERC project NeuroEpigenEthics at the
University of Antwerp.
Arne Vanraes is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leuven, working
on artists’ and writers’ notebooks. He has published on the aesthetics
of Butoh, Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial theory and performance, affect
theory, the philosophy of crisis, and the physicality of notebook writing.
Paul Vlitos is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of
Surrey. Paul Vlitos studied English Literature at the University of Bristol
before undertaking graduate study at University College London and the
University of Cambridge. He has taught English Literature and Creative
Writing at a variety of institutions, including the University of Oxford, the
University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths, and Tohoku University in Sendai,
Japan. Since 2011, he has been Program Leader for the English Literature
with Creative Writing program here at the University of Surrey. His most
recent book is Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Consuming
Passions, Unpalatable Truths (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
 List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Left: underlying structure of most linear plot models,

with fictive plotline; Right: the most common appearance
of linear models only features a plotline, without context
or axes 176
Fig. 7.2 Freytag’s original version (Freytag [1863] 1911, p. 183) 177
Fig. 7.3 Burroway’s version of Freytag’s Pyramid (Burroway 1982,
p. 44) 178
Fig. 7.4 Field’s Paradigm (Field 1979, p. 21, revised version) 178
Fig. 7.5 Gardner’s refined version of “Fichtean Curve” (Gardner
1983, p. 188) 180
Fig. 7.6 Polar model by McKee (2004, p. 123) 182
Fig. 7.7 More common linear version with fictive plotline,
as for instance used by Kurt Vonnegut in a film
about the “shape of stories” (Vonnegut 2004) 183
Fig. 7.8 Campbell’s version of The Hero’s Journey (Campbell
2004, p. 227) 183
Fig. 7.9 Circular version of Hero’s Journey by Vogler (Vogler
2007, p. 9) 184
Fig. 7.10 Three-act linear version of Hero’s Journey by Vogler
(2007, p. 8) 185
Fig. 7.11 Mountain Model by Vogler (2007, p. 158) 186
Fig. 7.12 Mountain Model by Alderson (2011, pp. xii–xiii) 186
Fig. 7.13 A commercial plot according to Bell (2004, p. 14) 189
Fig. 7.14 A literary plot according to Bell (2004, p. 15) 189

xxi
xxii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.15 Freytag’s Pyramid as Mountain Model (Burroway 1992,

p. 46) 190
Fig. 7.16 Three-act structure as a Mountain Model (Dancyger
and Rush 2007, p. 6) 191
Fig. 7.17 Hero’s Journey as a geographical map of possibilities
(Source Image by Marijn van der Waa and Liorah Hoek) 193
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Literary Advice

from Quill to Keyboard

Anneleen Masschelein

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, handbooks1
as well as “other commercial dispensers of advice: writer’s magazines
more analogous to the hobby press than to literary reviews; correspon-
dence schools; and manuscript criticism and placement-advice services or
‘bureaus’” (Hilliard 2006, p. 20). Today, 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. Writing workshops

A. Masschelein (B)
University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

© The Author(s) 2021 1

A. Masschelein and D. de Geest (eds.), Writing Manuals
for the Masses, New Directions in Book History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53614-5_1
2 A. MASSCHELEIN

are spreading across the globe, both inside and outside universities, and
magazines about writing, both for amateurs and professionals, are widely
available.
What truly boosted the advice industry is the Internet. The correspon-
dence courses and manuscript advice services of the early days have moved
online, as have the self-publishing venues. Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, for
instance, offers possibilities to publish on Kindle, in print and audio
formats, leading to the emergence of what Nick Levey calls a “post-press
literature” (Levey 2016; McGurl 2016). How-to treatises (self-published
and others) are available to even the most inexperienced budding author
to navigate this new world. Add to these writing communities like
Wattpad and the oldest fanfiction community, fanfiction.net; writing
support groups like Absolute Write Water Cooler or The Insecure Writers
Support Group; writing blogs like Selfpublishing.com, Writer’s Digest or
Write to Done; podcasts such as Writing excuses, The Creative Penn,
Australian Writers’ Centre, and The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt; YouTube
tutorials and software for creative writers (e.g., Scrivener, Dramatica, and
Save the Cat! Story Structure Software 4.0); and so on. To paraphrase
Michelene Wandor’s study of creative writing in Britain, The Writer Is
Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (2008):
The literary advice industry is very much alive and kicking, and continues
to spread, leading us to wonder to what extent contemporary online and
offline literary culture is being “advicified.”
Still, no matter how omnipresent, literary advice is, not unlike
Wikipedia, often depreciated by “real” authors and literary professionals
because of the reductive and stereotypical systems and theories it seems
to promote. At the far end of the academic institution of creative writing,
the industry is associated with a commercial genre circuit outside the
confines of “Literature,” with the formulas of Hollywood storytelling
gurus, and with its big brother, the self-help or self-improvement industry.
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 next 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.
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 3

And yet, 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, but also in well-known narrato-
logical treatises.2 As a popular form of poetics, literary advice constitutes
the most democratic level of access to creative writing, which (regardless
of whether it is valued as literature) is one of the most accessible forms
of (self)expression, at a low cost of entry and open to ordinary experi-
ences (Caughey 2016, p. 143). Literary advice embodies a practical, what
Jerome Bruner calls an “interactionist” knowledge of literature, i.e., a
knowledge that is acquired by doing. At the same time, it also perpetu-
ates a seemingly self-evident set of norms, the “unmentionable reference”
of literary doxa.3 Or, as Andrew Levy put it in The Culture and Commerce
of the American Short Story (1993), it is because the “axioms” codified
in handbooks are “so central that the handbooks remain so invisible”
(Levy 1993, p. 104). Like the school manuals studied by Pierre Bourdieu,
literary advice—for all its repetitiveness, reductionism, and simplifica-
tion—provides an unexpected insight into the residual, dominant, and
even emergent trends of writing culture. Closely scrutinizing the field
for the rise of new literary genres and trends, literary advice outlines the
basic (and supposedly universal) components of a literary text. It also
takes stock of the mores and customs of the literary world, and describes
different authorial subject positions and myths that circulate in a given
period and system, often in a very detailed manner (Grauby 2015). More-
over, a wide number of techniques and exercises to stimulate creativity,
and overcome “fear of the white page” and “writer’s block,” literary
advice also feeds the “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) that a “good”
writerly life (i.e., a successful literary career) is attainable for everyone
who is willing to put in the work.
It is not surprising, then, that from the early 2000s onward, scholarly
interest in literary advice has greatly increased within various subfields
of literary studies: the study of nineteenth-century English and Amer-
ican literature, the history of creative writing (in the wake of disciplinary
histories of English studies), book history, literary sociology, and cultural
studies. Thus, handbook author Douglas Bement’s advice from 1931
turned out to be prophetic: If twenty-first-century literary scholars want
to understand “the writing hysteria of the twentieth century” (Bement
in Levy 1993, p. 77), literary advice might be a good place to start.
At the same time, the growing body of research is dispersed, with a lot
4 A. MASSCHELEIN

of information in unpublished dissertations, in book chapters, and arti-

cles. Moreover, scholars focus predominantly on the early days of literary
advice in the USA and in the UK. Although these traditions are not the
same, they are to a large extent intertwined (as there was a lot of cultural
exchange at the time). Moreover, the Anglo-American is generally consid-
ered to be the first, and, until today, dominant paradigm of commercial
advice, all the more so because the international dissemination of the
academic creative writing program as a model for fiction instruction and
as a successful academic discipline of its own has turned many of its early
premises into unquestioned “lore.”4
The aim of this book is to enlarge the scope of the scholarship, by
bringing together historical analyses with studies of more recent forms
of literary advice, and by relating it to some of the important schol-
arship in the field of creative writing. Moreover, we want to open up
the research toward other advice traditions, in other cultures or in adja-
cent fields. The present chapter will outline the development of literary
advice from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present, zooming
in on important landmarks, discussing the types and contents of literary
advice, and its tangential relation to literature. The narrative is roughly
chronological, with occasional flash-forwards and flashbacks highlighting
the remarkable consistency of literary advice, as well as indicating how
certain tendencies have evolved in its history. This brief history is based
on the existing scholarship: First of all, an important part of the history
of the advice tradition has been unearthed, especially in the long nine-
teenth century, and in the interwar period. Secondly, various types and
subgenres of advice, in different media, have been examined—magazines,
letters, handbooks, correspondence schools, etc.—including the specific
audiences they address. A third focus of scholarship is the content of
the advice: What topics are treated, the rules and suggestions, advice
for specific genres, the discourse and types of address, and the ideology
behind it. Finally, there is some research on the relation between literary
advice and literature, in parodies for instance, but also in novels.
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 5

The “Origin” of Literary Advice (Antiquity–1846)

Preliminaries: From Classical Poetics to Professional Advice
Instruction about literary genres and composition has been around since
Antiquity. Aristotle’s Peri Poetikès (335 BC) is probably the most well-
known treatise about writing until today. The (incomplete) text has
influenced both the Western and the Arabic philosophical and poetic
tradition, and gave its name to a genre of writings about writing liter-
ature: poetics. Aristotele’s poetics famously describes the existing genres
of his time as well as the role of literature and the poet in society. It
defines the constituent parts of genres and formulates the rules to which
good literature must conform. A lot of the terminology is still used in
literary studies today, for instance, mimesis (imitation), catharsis (purifi-
cation of the emotions, especially pity and fear, through identification
with the tragic hero), hubris (pride), peripeteia (reversal), and ethos (char-
acter). Other poetics from Antiquity, both in Greek and Latin, have been
rediscovered and translated in various periods, influencing contemporary
literary production and reflection. The manuscript of the anonymous
essay “Peri Hupsous,” attributed to Longinus or Pseudo-Longinus (first
century BC), for instance, was discovered in the tenth century. The essay
discusses good literature and famously introduces the aesthetic notion
of “the sublime”. A new English translation in the eighteenth century
brought the text back into prominence and since then, it has been
regarded as a precursor to the theories of the sublime by Edmund Burke,
Immanuel Kant, and François Lyotard. Quintillian’s Institutio Oratio (ca.
95 BC), a multi-volume Latin work on the theory and practice of rhetoric,
remained highly influential from the Italian Renaissance until the eigh-
teenth century, and was quoted by numerous European authors, from
Petrarch, to Erasmus, Montaigne, and Alexander Pope, to name but a few.
The most influential Classical treatise from Antiquity, besides Aristotle’s,
is probably Horace’s Ars Poetica (19 BC). This epistolary poem about
poetry and drama also introduced a significant number of literary terms,
like deus ex machina (a god from the machine or an unbelievable sudden
resolution), in medias res (starting the middle of things), ut pictura poesis
(as is painting so is poetry), and utile dulcique (the combination of the
practical and the aesthetic).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, academies for national
languages and literatures were founded all over Europe. They primarily
sought to define the standard vernicular language, but also saw it as their
6 A. MASSCHELEIN

task to define the literary canon, and to act as judges in literary disputes
and later on contests (Guillory 1987; English 2005).5 Whereas popular
playwright Lope de Vega pleaded for an update of the rules in his 1606-
address to the academy of Madrid “El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en
este tiempo” (New Rules for Making Plays in This Time), his French
colleague Pierre Corneille circumscribed the three unities of place, time,
and action (1660) in tragedy in a much stricter way than the rules issued
by Horace. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the tradition
of prescriptive poetics flourished in European literature. New translations
of Aristotle and Horace were distributed widely after the invention of
the printing press and were reinterpreted in different literary traditions.
Literary creation was conceived in terms of imitation and emulation of
existing canonical examples, and composition was regarded as a process
that follows well-defined steps and rules. One of the most well-known
French poetics of this period was Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art poétique (1674).
In 1100 alexandrines, Boileau offers an overview of the writing process,
the rules of poetry, and the hierarchical genre system.
The genre of the essay (named after Michel de Montaigne’s Essais
[1572–1592]), both in prose and in verse form, was well-suited for
reflections about writing, because it combined a poetical and a personal
standpoint. In his didactic poem “An Essay on Criticism” (1711), for
instance, Alexander Pope starts from the example of Horace and the Clas-
sical tradition of poetics to critically examine the contemporary state of
literature, and to define the rules of good criticism. In the same period,
Joseph Addison’s essay on “The Pleasures of Imagination” (1712) shows
the gradual shift from defining strict, universal rules for good literature,
to poets offering insight in the processes of literary creation, and exam-
ining the problems of imagination and fiction in the Enlightenment and
Romantic period. In the early nineteenth century, William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge further explored these issues in their meta-
physical poetry, with chapter XIV of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria;
or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (1817) intro-
ducing “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Somewhat later, adding to
the rhetorical tradition of poetics, a rich Western tradition of self-reflexive,
personal writings about writing and advice by “Great Authors”—from
Wolfgang Goethe, to Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Virginia
Woolf, to name just a few examples—emerged which remains widely in
print until today.
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 7

Although all these classics undeniably constitute the backdrop of the

larger history of the phenomenon of literary advice, there is a crucial
divide between the older tradition of poetics and literary advice, which
has to do with the advent of modern capitalism and democracy as well
as with the commercialization and professionalization of literature in the
nineteenth century. Classical poetics were addressed and accessible to
a relatively small, highly educated elite and deal with literature as art.
Literary advice, by contrast, has a different target, and primarily caters
to authors interested in writing literature as entertainment. When in the
nineteenth century, due to the ongoing developments of the printing
press, the commercial press took off in the Western world, this had an
enormous impact on the demand for fiction. Shorter and serial formats
of fiction were sought by journals, weeklies, and by literary or so-called
“little” magazines. The concomitant democratization of education and
rise of literacy had made reading and writing accessible to people from
the middle and lower classes, and women, who did not have the cultural
upbringing that traditional—white, male, and upper-class—readers and
authors had hitherto enjoyed. These new groups of readers turned to new
genres such as the gothic novel, romance, science fiction, mystery, horror,
adventure, and erotic tales, that were associated with sensationalism and
escapism. This type of fiction was mass-produced in the heydays of “pulp
fiction,” named after the cheap pulpwood paper used for the magazines
(Locke 2004, 2007), from the end of the nineteenth century until the
Great Depression. This period coincided with the era of literary profes-
sionalism (Wilson 1985; for Britain, see Keating 1991), and with the first
peak of literary advice.
The professionalization of authors was facilitated by both philosophical
and legal changes. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, academies
and salons brought together artists from various disciplines, constituting
networks around patrons and stimulating artistic mentorship. For the
visual arts, music, and dance, this led to the institutionalization of training
in academies. The fact that such an institutionalized pedagogical system
was much less established in the field of literature is usually explained
by the individualism inherent in the Romantic conception and cult of
the poet as genius. However, as Dawson points out, in the eighteenth
century the concept of the poet as genius was also associated with the
faculty of the “creative imagination” (Dawson 2005, pp. 29–32). This,
paradoxically, enabled nineteenth-century authors to see writing not just
8 A. MASSCHELEIN

as a mysterious gift, accessible only to the happy few, but also as a voca-
tion and ultimately a profession. The idea was strengthened by successive
copyright acts in Britain and in the USA in the 1880s, which helped
protect the authors’ income derived from their work, and encouraged
aspiring authors from diverse backgrounds to try their luck at writing.
In the rapidly changing literary landscape, these authors were looking
for guidance, not just about writing, but also about legal and economic
matters. However, they faced a gap due to the lack of academies and other
forms of professional education, for instance in universities or colleges.
By the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, a newly formed class
of literary “middlemen,” who mediated between the aspiring author and
the publishing industry—agents, editors, tutors, manuscript bureaus, and
author societies—began providing literary advice as a commercial service.

The Disputed Origin of Literary Advice: Edgar

Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition”
Before going into more detail about the golden age of the literary advice
industry from the 1880s until the 1930s, it is worth taking a closer look at
the origins of literary advice. These are generally situated in the first half
of the nineteenth century, more precisely, in 1846, the publication date of
Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” in Graham’s Magazine.
“The Philosophy of Composition” is the “magazine paper” Poe himself
had, in vain, been waiting for: “written by any author, who would –
that is to say, who could – detail, step by step, the processes by which
any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion”
(Poe 1846, p. 163). Dispensing with the Romantic myth of inspiration,
Poe emphasizes how literature works with language in order to create
maximum dramatic effect. According to Levy, the importance of this
text for the ensuing literary advice tradition lies first and foremost in
the scientific approach to writing adopted by Poe (Levy 1993, pp. 100–
101). Although Poe’s advice is based on a detailed technical description
of the composition of one of his poems, “The Raven,” the rational style of
advice has been especially influential for advice about short stories, which
are in Levy’s view the first real target of literary advice, for two main
reasons. Firstly, short stories are the most lucrative literary genre in the
burgeoning magazine market. Secondly, because of its compactness, the
genre is considered to be best suited for beginners.
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 9

In recent years, the “Philosophy of Composition” as the origin of the

advice tradition has been qualified. As John Caughey demonstrates in this
book, “The Philosophy of Composition” was not immediately successful
in the US advice market, rather its canonization occurred belatedly. In
fact, it was Brander Matthews, a literature professor at Columbia, who
with his “Philosophy of the Short-story” (1885) “resurrected” the work
of Poe. Matthews not only draws attention to short fiction as an Amer-
ican genre, outlining a straight lineage from Poe and Hawthorne, to the
present,6 but he also returns to Poe’s insights in composition, primarily
the “unity of effect,” in order to define the short story as a self-contained
whole (Levy 1993, p. 125). According to Caughey, in his dissertation
How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Hand-
books (2016), literary critics in the early twentieth century—especially the
New Critics—who wanted to enlarge their scope from poetry to prose,
both recuperated and dismissed the “pre-theories” found in the earlier
short story advice tradition from the mid-nineteenth century.
The dissertation of Paul S. Collins, Imaginary Subjects: Fiction-Writing
Instruction in America, 1826–1897 , traces the origins of the advice tradi-
tion further back, to 1826, by imagining what type of advice would
have been available to the seventeen-year-old aspiring writer Poe (Collins
2016, p. 9). This leads him to uncover a number of eighteenth-century
works on poetry and rhetoric, that were still available in the early nine-
teenth century, as well as various series of advice articles in magazines,
directed not just toward budding authors in general, but to women in
particular. In the 1830s already, Collins points out, there were how-to
series about popular genres available, by Frederick Marryat, and by Sir
Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In the same year, 1838, Poe already published
his first advice article in American Museum.7 Collins goes on to map
the mid-century marginal American advice scene, that consists of high
school instruction manuals, university literary magazines, and early author
manuals. This offer prefigures the advice industry proper which emerges
at the end of the century with correspondence courses and writing schools
offered to female writers, as Caughey also discusses in his contribu-
tion to this book. In a dissertation from 2013, The Craft of Fiction:
Teaching Technique, 1850–1930, Mary Stewart Atwell studies the early
stages of literary advice in British literature, bringing to the fore—
among other things—another important early source of literary advice,
i.e., the correspondences of established authors like Charles Dickens and
Bulwer-Lytton with the (female) authors whom they mentored.8
10 A. MASSCHELEIN

Thus, in spite of the relative consensus among researchers about the

origin of literary advice, this origin has been contested in two directions.
Several scholars have shown how Poe’s essay was very much embedded in
an earlier tradition of poetics as well as in a much less visible practice of
literary advice linked to the emerging market of literary journals. At the
same time, the impact of Poe’s essay has only been felt later, toward the
end of the nineteenth century, mediated by other handbooks. Further-
more, in the scholarship, we find a later landmark for literary advice that
is associated with the golden age of literary advice, the late nineteenth,
early twentieth century, i.e., the debate between Sir Walter Besant and
Henry James on “The Art of Fiction.”

The Era of the Literary Advice Handbook

The Bifurcation of Literary Advice: “The Art of Fiction”
Already in 1923, Fred Lewis Pattee dubbed the first decade of the twen-
tieth century “the era of the short-story handbook” (Pattee in Dawson
2005, p. 62, see also Caughey in this book). A foundational event was a
lecture on “The Art of Fiction” given by Sir Walter Besant—at the time
a successful novelist and one of the founders of the British Society of
Authors (1884) as well as editor of its mouthpiece, the professional maga-
zine The Author (1891)9 —at the Royal Institute in London in 1884. The
publication of the lecture was followed by a response from Henry James,
with the same title, which would, much later, eclipse not just Besant’s
original lecture in literary history, but also the many other voices that took
part in the discussion. The intricacies and ramifications of “The Art of
Fiction” are examined in great detail by Atwell and Caughey in this book.
In a nutshell, the debate hinges on two different positions. According to
Besant, fiction is an art on a par with other arts, and therefore, it can be
taught, like music, painting, or sculpture. Subsequently, he lays out some
rules to define good fiction. James, by contrast, responds that precisely
because fiction is an art, there are no a priori rules that should or even
can be taught, except for the notion that fiction should be interesting.
“The Art of Fiction” sparked a debate on whether fiction is an art,
and therefore unteachable, or whether it is a craft, leading to a profes-
sion, which has continued into the present. It also marks the beginning
of two traditions of literary advice. On one side, there is the scientific
ethos found in what Locke and Caughey call “fictioneering”: a body of
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 11

practical knowledge about the construction of a literary text from the

point of view of the maker. This knowledge also extends to the more
practical side of literature and getting published. Here, it is Besant who
set the tone with The Pen and the Book (1900), a guide to publica-
tion and the customs of the literary world (that also includes some of
his earlier writing advice). As Paul Vlitos shows in his chapter, focusing
on handbooks in the British tradition, Besant was part of a flourishing
British advice scene, where many handbooks of this type were available.
At the other end of the spectrum, and increasingly opposed to the first
type of advice, was the Jamesian tradition of handbooks, typically repre-
sented by Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921). These handbooks
focused on form and technique, and via their adoption by the New Critics
later on, they evolved into the academic creative writing textbooks of the
1950s–1960s, exemplified by R. V. Cassill’s Writing Fiction (1962).10
In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, these two types
did not yet completely diverge, as Lubbock’s title already indicated. Most
short story handbooks were “mongrel textbooks” (Levy 1993, p. 80)
for several reasons. First of all, they consisted of a mixture of older
insights from poetics, rhetoric, and composition; definitions of contem-
porary genres; practical insights about writing offered by authors and
the industry’s middlemen, such as editors, publishers, and agents; and
information about publishing, copyrights, and promotion. Secondly, they
were written by very diverse authors, from established fiction authors, to
scholars and professors, hacks or failed novelists, editors, and publishers.
Thirdly, they addressed equally diverse audiences. Both in the UK and the
USA, university students at prestigious institutions—American Ivy League
universities that foster creative pedagogies, like Harvard and Chicago
(Myers [1996] 2006; Collins 2016) and Oxford and Cambridge, that
were introducing English literature in their curriculum (Wandor 2008;
Caughey 2016)—were as interested in learning how to write, as middle-
and lower-class authors, young girls and women, workers and soldiers
(Hilliard 2006; Atwell 2013; Collins 2016). These aspiring authors could
buy specialist magazines devoted to writing, but they would also find
articles in more general publications.
12 A. MASSCHELEIN

Form and Content of Literary Advice Handbooks

from the Era of the Handbook and Beyond
Levy provides the most elaborate description of the form and content of
the advice handbooks from the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
Initially, handbooks were often collections of shorter pieces (articles,
series, lectures, surveys, or interviews), which had been revised or repub-
lished several times (Levy 1993, p. 79). Later on, monographs that
constituted a mixture of scholarly description and advice were devoted
to specific genres, not just to the short story or novel, but also to popular
genres such as the mystery (Masschelein and De Geest 2017), the photo-
and radioplay. According to Levy,

(t)he short story handbook could justifiably be described as a literary form,

where the author was expected to employ or respond to certain rhetorical
and structural strategies. Most followed the example of Aristotle’s Poetics ,
and contained a brief introductory section describing the history of the
genre, followed by a larger body where the act of writing was divided into
elements – plot, character, style, dictions, titles, and endings, et al. These
books either invoked an academic pose […] or were designed to appeal
to business people, advertising personnel, and psychologists. (Levy 1993,
p. 87)

He further explains that most handbooks began by establishing the

author’s authority and by positioning themselves in the debate between
art and craft, navigating the contradiction that while everyone can write,
publication and authorship are not for everyone. When describing the
characteristics of a genre, the frequent use of examples reinforced the
author’s credentials as connoisseur of a genre.
With regard to the elements of fiction, Levy pays attention to the
importance of plot models which were often visualized, a tendency that
continues until today as Liorah Hoek shows in her chapter in this book.
These plot models reflected both the scientific ethos of the handbooks
and the emphasis on action, which can be traced back to the Classical
inspiration of narrative theories. Paul Vlitos provides an in-depth analysis
of the discursive elements found in nineteenth-century British handbooks
in his chapter in this book. In our own research on mystery handbooks,
we found that handbooks generally treated the writing process in terms of
the different phases of the creative process described by Classical rhetoric:
invention, arrangement, style, and delivery (Masschelein and de Geest
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 13

2017, p. 102). The first phase, invention, has to do with preparation,

which can consist of reading, doing research, and using exercises to stim-
ulate creativity. The second phase of arrangement entails the choice and
elaboration of story elements, such as plot, character, setting, and point of
view. The application of style is predominantly understood as positioning
your work in relation to the conventions of a genre or subgenre. The
final phase of delivery includes writing, revision, and rewriting. In addi-
tion to this, most handbooks, especially on the more commercial end of
the spectrum, also devote some chapters to the market: finding an agent
and a publisher, contracts and advances, preparing the manuscript, and in
the case of publication, promotion of the book.
To anyone familiar with contemporary literary advice, it will be clear
that much of this basic content of handbooks has remained constant
since the late nineteenth century. A tension that marks both older and
contemporary creative writing handbooks is that between the tendency
to dehistoricize a limited conception of storytelling (Dawson 2008), on
the one hand, and the handbooks’ attunement to new trends and to
local specificities of a genre, on the other hand (Masschelein and de
Geest 2017). The universality of writing advice is perhaps most evident
when looking at the limited number of adagios used to characterize
creative writing pedagogy as a whole, “Show don’t tell,” “Write What
You Know,” “Find Your Own Voice,” and “Read like a Writer.”11 Usually
presented as timeless truths, these motto’s are nonetheless of relative
recent coinage. Many scholars attribute “Show don’t tell” and the prefer-
ence for action and dramatic storytelling over description to the influence
of Flaubert and of realist poetics on early fiction theories (e.g., Dawson
2005, pp. 98–103; Griffith 2013). “Write what you know,” or the impor-
tance of observation of daily reality, is alternatively traced back to Besant’s
“Art of Fiction,” or to the teachings of innovative English Composition
pedagogues, such as Barrett Wendell, who worked with “daily themes” in
order to stimulate observation powers (Myers [1996] 2006, pp. 46–49).
The third dictum, “Find your own voice,” captures the importance of self-
expression and voice in creative writing pedagogy, examined by Alexandria
Peary in her chapter in this book. It is most often associated with the more
self-help style of advice arising in the 1930s, which we will discuss in more
detail below. In the eyes of many contemporary scholars, the phrase is
related to a highly individualistic ethos that overemphasizes personal expe-
rience, at the expense of rewriting and craft (Wandor 2008, pp. 115–117),
of more political forms of writing (Westbrook 2009), and even of fiction.
14 A. MASSCHELEIN

As Paul Dawson points out, in many handbooks voice conflates the notion
of personal style and originality with “point of view” in New Critical and
narratological theories of fiction (Dawson 2005, pp. 110–111)). A final
cornerstone of “workshop poetics,” which Dawson attributes to Dorothea
Brande (1934), is “Read like a Writer.” This motto must be regarded in
opposition to “critical reading” and can have two meanings: reading in
order to see how a text is constructed, or rereading your own material
in view of revision (ibid., p. 92).
In their study of late-twentieth handbooks for romance fiction, De
Geest and Goris (2010) show how reading is a necessary prepara-
tory phase of writing in which authors familiarize themselves with the
constraints inherent in a genre. De Geest and Goris’s analysis of the
normative discourse in popular handbooks for romance reveals how hand-
books have to reconcile a strong emphasis on norms, related to genre
and to the industry, which must be interiorized through reading, specific
rules (do’s) and especially pitfalls to avoid (don’ts), with a more encour-
aging attitude, aimed at stimulating creativity within the constraints of
a genre. Obviously, these constraints and some advice differ from genre
to genre. In the field of mystery for instance, we found that one of the
typical elements, which has remained fairly constant, is the concept of
(fair) play: A mystery must be conceived as an intellectual puzzle that the
reader must be able to solve, hence the importance of the right amount of
clues (Masschelein and De Geest 2017). In handbooks for memoir, which
have become very popular since the 1990s and the so-called “memoir
boom,” other things are important. On the one hand, an exploration of
the motives for memoir writing; on the other hand, an array of techniques
and prompts to stimulate memory (Smith and Watson 2001, p 160). To
this, we can add an emphasis on the possible ethical pitfalls of memoir.
One of the most notable changes in literary advice handbooks has to
do with tone and layout. Most of the handbooks in the late nineteenth,
early twentieth century appeared as bound monographs. In the twentieth
century, the look of handbooks changed considerably, under the influence
of trends in publishing, such as the popularity of the paperback in the UK,
Germany, and France in the 1930s and somewhat later in the USA, and
of front-list publishing (i.e., the rapid selling of cheap hardbacks) in the
1980s. In the commercial tier of the market, genre handbooks nowadays
adopt a softcover textbook-style layout, with frames, bullet-points, and
exercises, which coincides with a hands-on, colloquial, and motivational
tone and a procedural structure: following the steps and the exercises
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 15

in the book will deliver a finished product. The shift in handbook titles
from notions of “art” or “craft” in the first part of the twentieth century
toward more active verbs like “writing” or “becoming” reinforces the
activating dimension of handbook discourse (ibid., pp. 101–103). Hand-
book covers feature either stereotypical writer’s attributes—from quill,
to pen, typewriter, or notebook—or images that refer to typical genre
elements, e.g., guns or magnifying glasses for detective handbooks, gothic
fonts for thrillers, or spiraling pathways or winding roads for the memoir.
As Françoise Grauby has shown in her study of French literary advice
handbooks and in her chapter in the present book, these objects play an
important role in what is in French discourse analysis called “authorial
stances (postures ),” i.e., images of authors that are both self-created by
authors (in their works, interviews, and photographs), and attributed to
them by other actors in the field (e.g., the media and publishers). Taken as
a whole, authorial stances are part of a “scenography” of images, objects,
places, and acts, which make it possible to conceive of yourself as an
author in a given historical moment.

The Expansion of the Literary Advice Industry

As the century progressed, a number of new actors came on the scene
(or took on a more prominent role), who have exerted a lasting influ-
ence until today. First of all, literary advice “moguls”—to use Caughey’s
term—built “empires” of literary advice for a wide range of genres and
differentiated audiences. Secondly, literary authors began incorporating
advice in their often parodic sketches of the literary field of the period.
Thirdly, women, who had been present from the very beginning of
literary advice, played an increasingly prominent role in the industry,
especially in relation to a third type of advice—besides the commer-
cial fictioneering handbooks and the more academic “counterhandbooks”
(Levy 1993, p. 88)—which arose in the 1930s, i.e., literary advice/self-
help. Because the topic is too large to discuss encyclopedically, we will
shift in our discussion between different advice cultures, the USA, the
UK, and France. Although the exact development of advice cultures is
obviously particular, we observe similar tendencies in these traditions.
16 A. MASSCHELEIN

Literary Advice Moguls

One of the first publishers to turn advice into big business in the USA was
Joseph Berg Esenwein, a minister and English teacher from Pennsylvania,
who also wrote religious poetry. In the first decades of the twentieth
century, Esenwein became the managing editor of several magazines:
Booklovers’ Journal, Lippincott’s , the Poetry Journal , and The Writer’s
Monthly. He also set up the “Home Correspondence school” and “The
Writer’s Library,” a series of handbooks for over a dozen genres or audi-
ences (Levy 1993, p. 93). Esenwein himself authored and co-authored
handbooks for poetry, the short story, the mystery, the photoplay, and
public speaking, and lent his authority to the other books in his library by
writing the prefaces. His Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook
on the Rise, Structure, Writing, and Sale of the Modern Short-Story (1909)
epitomizes the “science-oriented ethos” of the early handbooks (ibid.)
and contains an impressive repertory of the story handbooks of the time
(ibid., p. 86). While this and other guides from Esenwein’s catalog knew
numerous reprints (and are still available in print-on-demand formats), it
seems that by the 1920s Esenwein’s empire was in decline. Besides some
volumes on public speaking and writing good English, the last book he
edited was a book on sport and adventure in 1937 (Esenwein died in
1946).
In 1920, a serious competitor came to the market: Ed Rosenthal, who
founded the magazine Writer’s Digest in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the
company is still located today.12 The magazine’s subtitle, “A Monthly
Journal of Information on Writing Photoplays, Short Stories, Verse, News
Stories, Publicity, Advertising etc.,” clearly demonstrates its commercial
orientation (Rosenthal in Sexton 2007, p. 5). In the 1920s and 1930s,
Writer’s Digest was one of the “writers’ mags,” magazines divulging the
trade secrets of the “pulp fictioneers” (Locke 2004, 12). These maga-
zines offered advice to professional writers of popular genre fiction in the
1920s, and they continued to chronicle the demise and final death throes
of the pulp market throughout “the Depression and World War II, and
long-term paper shortages” (ibid., p. 13). At the same time, as Sexton’s
anthology Legends of Literature (2007) shows, Writer’s Digest featured
articles by successful authors in all genres of literature. Indeed, the maga-
zine prided itself on closely following the market, featuring articles on
new trends.
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 17

Apart from the magazine and its yearbooks, Writer’s Yearbook and the
annual Writer’s Market , publisher F+W also built a hugely successful and
diverse catalog of handbook titles under the brand Writer’s Digest Books.
The first title listed in the Library of Congress catalog was L. Josephine
Bridgart’s How to Write Short Stories (1921), a full-length monograph.
In those early years, there were also courses for photoplay and volumes
on the “cardinal elements of short-story writing” (Reeve 1929) and
the “elements of plot construction” (Abott 1929). After a long gap,
the catalog picked up again in 1961, with Aron M. Mathieu’s Creative
Writer, followed by Jerome Judson’s Poet and the Poem (1963). From
this period onward, there was a steady stream of new writing handbooks
about a range of genres—from cartoon gags, to poetry, the novel, confes-
sion writing, and the mystery—along with regular reprints of Mathieu
and Judson. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a veritable explosion
of guidebooks in Writer’s Digest Books (including a volume on How to
Write “How-To Books” and Articles (Hull 1981)) targeting different audi-
ences, but primarily focused on commercial writing. This tendency toward
specialization became even more pronounced in the late 1990s and early
2000s, with series like Elements of Fiction Writing, Genre Writing Series,
and Write Great Fiction. The Writer’s Guide To series featured, besides
the above-mentioned book on poisons for detective writers, volumes on
crime-scene investigations (Wingate 1992), on everyday life in the 1800s
(McCutcheon 1993), and character-traits, including profiles of human
behaviors and personality types (Edelstein 2006), two of which written
by PhD-holding authors.
Today, all the big publishing houses as well as numerous smaller
presses and academic presses have some type of advice book or series
in their catalogs, and numerous self-published handbooks and websites
contribute the further growth of the genre. However, the century-old
empire of Writer’s Digest, which now also boasts a solid online presence,
continues to offer—like the advice industry in the olden days—articles,
interviews, courses, workshops, manuscript services, competitions, and
self-publishing. After its original publisher F+W filed for bankruptcy in
2016, the brand was purchased by Penguin Random House.

Advice in Literature
As the literary advice industry grew more prominent, authors started to
respond to it in literature. This can be related to what systems theory sees
18 A. MASSCHELEIN

as an important characteristic of the autonomy and professionalization of

a literary system, i.e., self-reflection. In The Program Era (2009) McGurl
famously studied American postwar fiction as a self-reflexive, literary
response to the rise of creative writing, which evolved from a pedagogy
into a massive form of sponsorship of literature by neoliberal research
institutions, and a new literary institution. In our comparative study of
the rise of the literary interview as a hybrid genre in the French, German,
and English literary fields in the same period that saw the arrival of
literary advice, we came across something similar: When a new form or
practice intrudes or emerges in the literary system, literary authors will
respond to it, either by mocking it (and the new actors it entails), or by
experimenting with it as a new literary form. (Masschelein et al. 2014,
pp. 37–39).
A first strategy employed by authors to respond to literary advice is
incorporating it into literary fictions. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, a lot of British and American fiction—from Charles
Dickens to Henry James, to name just some of the most well-known
names—featured author-characters, who comment on literary life in the
period. Atwell draws attention to a short story by Scottish author J. M.
Barrie, in which a number of dead authors discuss the contemporary
literary situation, including the emerging scene of literary advice. One of
the most explicit novels on the rise of the commercial literary scene and
the concomitant literary advice industry in the UK was George Gissing’s
New Grub Street (1891). The novel introduces Mr. Whelpdale, a literary
advice author who, in Paul Vlitos’s contribution to this book, will serve as
a guide to the British advice scene from the period. As several chapters—
by Elizabeth Kovach, Jim Collins, and Andrés Franco Harnache—in this
book demonstrate, today authors from all literatures still resort to fiction
to make sense of the omnipresence of writing culture and creative writing.
A second common reaction to the rising advice industry, and a
strategy used by some advice authors, starting with Poe, is parody. In
his dissertation on contemporary literary advice in France (2018), Gert-
Jan Meyntjens studied the French tradition of conseils , which followed a
comparable path of professionalization as the Anglo-American world in
the nineteenth century. Meyntjens singles out two examples from the
early advice period. The Symbolist poet, Remy de Gourmont, in his
Conseils familiers à un jeune écrivain (1896, Familiar Advice to a Young
Writer), advised readers that it is better not to write than to write, because
the literary world is depraved and mercenary. In Introduction à la l’étude
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 19

de la stratégie littéraire (1912, Introduction to the Study of Literary

Strategy), Belgian author Fernand Divoire presented an overt satire of the
literary world, in order to strategically guide the aspiring author on how
to network (Meyntjens 2018, pp. 73–76). Contemporary advice authors
also resort to parody to make their work stand out. Sandra Newman and
Howard Mittelmark’s How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid
at all Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published (2008), for instance, is
according to the blurb “hilarious” but “extremely useful,” whereas How
Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author by David Armstrong
(2003) summarizes each chapter with a warning: Either “Don’t be an
author,” or simply “Don’t do it.”13 In more sophisticated cases, like
French author François Bon or American avant-garde poet Kenneth Gold-
smith—respectively the subjects of Meyntjens’s and Ioannis Tsitsovits’s
chapters—parody is not simply used to distinguish one’s method of advice
within the market, as in the negative advice books cited above, but as an
avant-garde strategy to resist dominant advice cultures, and as an antidote
to self-expressive literary culture as a whole.
A third literary form that will become increasingly more important for
literary advice, as we will elucidate below, is autobiography or memoir.
Atwell draws attention to the importance of Anthony Trollope’s Autobi-
ography for the development of literary advice (Atwell 2013, pp. 23–28).
Published in 1883 in London, Trollope’s candor about the business of
literature and his decidedly unromantic, “secretarial” descriptions of his
writing habits (ibid., p. 24) shocked his readers, but the book prefigured
the Besant-lineage of mixing writing advice with advice about the customs
and practicalities of the literary world. One of Trollope’s great examples
was his mother, Frances, who at the age of 50 started writing in order
to support her family, and wrote more than 40 novels between 1830
and her death in 1863. Although extraordinary in her late and prolific
career, Frances Trollope was in fact not that much of an exception, as
many scholars have shown how the newly professionalized literary field
was remarkably open to the entry of women as freelance authors.

The Role of Women in the Advice Industry

Women had been targeted by both the commercial publishing world and
the literary advice industry from the mid-nineteenth century onward, not
just as readers but also as aspiring authors. Moreover, women played,
from the early days of the advice industry to the present, an important
20 A. MASSCHELEIN

role as authors. In the existing scholarship on the early period of literary

advice, many female advice authors have been unearthed. In the present
book, Caughey discusses the case of Atalanta, a popular British maga-
zine aimed at girls and young women, founded by L. T. Meade, an Irish
feminist, in 1887. The magazine offered both short stories and serials
by respected authors as well as essays on literature, literary advice, and
competitions for the aspiring author. In the USA, Collins describes the
case of Eleanor Kirk, “one of the unheralded pioneers of the American
how-to writing guide” (Collins 2016, p. 140). Like Meade, Kirk was a
suffragette, a working woman, and a single mother who published an
early advice guide Periodicals That Pay Contributors (1888). She set up a
Bureau of Correspondence that offered manuscript advice (ibid., p. 144),
as did Flora Thompson, who founded The Peverel Society in the 1920s
in Britain (Hilliard 2006, pp. 62–66).
Beyond the realm of amateur writing, women were also present in the
more professional advice industry, both in the UK and in the USA. In
the genre of early mystery advice, quite a number of prominent literary
actors were active, like Carolyn Wells, who wrote one of the first hand-
books for Esenwein’s Writer’s Library in 1912, and Marie F. Rodell, a
literary agent, editor, and writer, whose highly specialized and “busi-
nesslike” advice targeted both the American (in 1943) and the British
market (in 1954) (Masschelein and De Geest 2017, p. 100). In the
emerging academic field of English composition, D. G. Myers mentions
Adele Bildersee, an American pedagogue, whose proto-feminist Imagina-
tive Writing (1927) “is recovering() a lost women’s tradition” through
the many model authors she discusses in her book (Myers [1996] 2016,
p. 141).
Two American advice authors of the 1930s and 1940s, Dorothea
Brande and Brenda Ueland, stand out, not only because they have
remained consistently in print until today, but also because they embody
a particularly successful type of literary advice which could be regarded
as a third way, besides advice on literary technique and practical advice
about publication, namely advice about creativity and “literary lifestyle.”
This type of advice brought literary advice close to self-help, which,
as Beth Blum argues in The Self -Help Compulsion (2020), is in many
ways linked to the literary culture of the era, including so-called high
modernism. Moreover, as Alexandria Peary shows in this book, the teach-
ings of Brande and Ueland have become part and parcel of the “informal
aesthetic education of writers” because of their practical focus on the
 1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ADVICE FROM … 21

psychological aspects of composition and voice, and the emphasis on

creativity as a general human capacity.
Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (1934) was a mixture of
Freudian-based pop-psychology with practical advice about unlocking
creativity and about leading a writerly life. Brande goes into extraordinary
detail about which writing tools to use, what kind of friends to have, and
even what to drink. At the same time, she explicitly distanced herself from
technical writing advice and from insights about the publishing world, to
focus instead on techniques to unleash creativity, which are used until
today: writing daily for a certain amount of time without inhibitions, and
“reading as a writer.” Both practical and inspirational, Becoming a Writer
was rediscovered in the 1980s, when both in the US and the UK new
editions appeared with prefaces by established authors and creative writing
teachers of the time, John Gardner (in 1981) and Malcolm Bradbury
(in 1983), who would both go on to write advice books of their own.
Brande’s approach was moreover regarded as a precursor to the tech-
nique of freewriting, later popularized by Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow,
which remains an important staple in writing advice to this day (see Peary
in this book). According to one of the leading figures in the therapeutic
writing movement, Celia Hunt, “Brande’s book, although dated in some
respects, is still one of the best on writing and the creative process” (Hunt
2000, p. 22).
Despite her continued popularity, Brande is not without her detractors.
Michelene Wandor sees Brande’s self-help style of writing as the ideo-
logical precursor of contemporary how-to books that advocate looking
inward, and focusing on self-expression and self-improvement, while
deliberately concealing the critical work involved in writing (Wandor
2008, pp. 109–110). Moreover, cultural historian Joanna Scutts (2013)
draws a link between the self-help discourse propagated by Brande,
who also published Wake Up and Live! (1936)—a self-help title which
the notorious modernist author Ezra Pound “is said to have chanted
[…] every day for forty years” (Blum 2014, p. 21)—and the values of
American fascism, to which she had personal ties.14
A similarly re-edited self-help/advice classic is Brenda Ueland’s If
You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (1983),
which more explicitly than Brande addressed a female audience. Basing
her notions of creativity and poetics on William Blake and on Russian
nineteenth-century novelists, the book urged writers to “Be Careless,
Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When you Write” and encouraged
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
though not an enlightened conscience, and has obeyed its
dictates and been a law unto himself. If only the gospel
message could be brought home, first to his ears, and then
by the blessed influence of the Holy Spirit to his soul, what
a different life would Adam Livesey's become! Oh that into
his heart might shine the light of the glory of God, in the
face of Jesus Christ.

"And," he added the silent but heartfelt prayer, "oh that

I might be made the instrument in leading him to the one
and only Saviour!"

If the baby had waked up in a very short time, all this

talk would have been impossible, but the words which take
long to write are quickly spoken.

"I cannot help thinking, Adam, that it is not too late for
you to better your position. I know you can in one sense, if
not in another."

"It's no good talking, sir. What's done is done. I'm forty

years old, and I'm just where I was at twenty-five, as far as
wages go. I had two to feed then. I've eight now. Things are
past mending for me. I'm o' no account in the world, and I
shall never be of any."

"Of no account! I cannot agree with you there. You are

of account, as a workman. What would become of
Rutherford's if all such as you were withdrawn? There are
many idle, useless people in the world, who could be better
spared in a batch, than one man who does as honest a
day's work as Adam Livesey."

In spite of himself, Adam's deep set eyes were kindled

into an expression of pleasure, but he did not speak.
 "Are you of no account to the wife and little woman at
home? To the playing children, whose voices sound very full
of music to me, as the breeze wafts them this way? Are you
of no account to that sweet little sleeper who rests so
trustfully and safely in her father's arms? Adam, your heart
must tell you that there are many by whom you could be ill
spared."

"Yes," he answered, simply. "They would want me."

"And though poor Maggie may not have cheeks as

round and rosy, and her voice may not often be raised in
song, I daresay she has a warm heart at the bottom.
Depend on it, Adam Livesey, she keeps the best corner of it
for you, though many cares prevent her saying much about
it. Would she let anybody call you names behind your
back?"

The striker's face assumed a look of positive

amusement, as he said, "It wouldn't be good for 'em to try
that game on with Maggie."

"Does she ever keep the best bit for your dinner, and try
to go without any of it herself? I say 'try,' Adam, because I
know you would not let her."

"To be sure she does. That's just Maggie. Why, sir, you
might have seen for yourself."

"And do you think, if it could be possible for any one to

say, 'Mrs. Livesey, if you would like to go back twelve years,
you can. You shall be the girl Maggie again, only you must
say "good-bye" to Adam and these six little plagues who
make you so much work, and are so full of wants. Say the
word, take back your youth and your roses, on condition
that you part with husband and children.' Would she say the
word, Adam?"
 The man was strangely moved. The rugged features
worked again, and showed the effect of Mr. Drummond's
questioning. "No, no," he cried, "Maggie may scold a bit and
say sharp words, then wish she hadn't, but nobody would
drag that word out of her."

"Here's a nice man to say he's of no account. Why,

Adam, you are a regular fraud, to set up as a person that
nobody would miss."

Mr. Drummond laughed cheerily, and his hearer caught

the infection. "I'm afraid I haven't come out very well in this
line," he said. "I shall be getting conceited just now, and
forget to give up."

This was the effect the manager wished to produce. He

wanted Adam to take a higher and more just view of his
calling and responsibilities. He wanted first to raise his self-
estimate, to encourage efforts at self-improvement; above
all, to lead him to a knowledge of his spiritual need, and the
all-sufficiency of Christ to meet it. But this last part of the
subject would have to be carefully approached. There must
be no plunging recklessly into it. He must prove his good-
will to Adam, and thus secure his confidence, and he was a
good deal astonished at the progress already made.

The manager had no thought of meeting Adam when he

did, but he had been longing for such an opportunity, and
was thankful for such a fulfilment of one of the desires of
his heart.

"You think, then, I did not do wrong by marrying

Maggie?" said Adam, interrupting Mr. Drummond's thoughts
by the inquiry.

"I imagined that question had been settled a few

minutes ago."
 "I'm glad you think so, sir. It has troubled me for a long
time, ever since her mother went away to live beside her
elder daughter. She used to be next door to us, but the
children began to run in and out too often, and Maggie was
p'raps a bit too having, seeing her mother was independent
like. Maggie will have a matter of three hundred pound
when the old lady dies, so I may well wonder she married
me."

Adam was relapsing, and would be o' no account again

directly.

"No doubt she was, and is, very fond of you, Adam. You
have proved this by your own evidence, and I was sure of it
almost without that. I do not think I durst have felt certain
if you had been like some of the men whose wives are
waiting for them at pay time. You do the best you know how
to do, and Maggie must respect you."

At this instant the baby opened her dark eyes, then

looked into Adam's face, and began to laugh and struggle to
be on her feet. Just then, too, the other four children, tired
of the swings and wanting a change, approached the bench
on which they had left their father.

The sight of the gentleman checked their rapid advance,

and they hung shyly back. But Mr. Drummond encouraged
them, saying that he wanted to see Adam's flock, and at the
father's call they came to be inspected.

The manager congratulated Adam on their healthy

looks, and the signs of a mother's care to be seen in their
neatly mended clothing. Then he asked, "What school do
you go to on Sundays?"

Adam answered for the children. "They don't go

anywhere, sir. They get schooling enough on week days,
when they must go. I'm glad for them to learn, but they
want their little heads to rest one day in the seven."

It was a good thing that baby became obstreperous,

and insisted on joining her elders on the ground. So they
formed themselves into a bodyguard for the youngest
darling, and led her to the soft grass on the other side of
the walk, where they enticed her to join in gambols
contrived for her special benefit.

"We fathers like to look on such pictures," said Mr.

Drummond, still lingering by Adam's side, and pointing to
the children.

"We do, sir."

Mr. Drummond, by coupling his own interests with those

of Adam, had forged another connecting link between them.

"By the way, Livesey, where do you and your family go

on Sundays?"

The man's first inclination was purposely to

misunderstand the question and say, "Sometimes to this
place, but mostly we stop about home." But the striker's
nature was a true one, and he hated himself for thinking of
such a paltry subterfuge. So he replied,—

"To say the truth, sir, we don't go to church or chapel

any more than the children go to school. I never was in a
religious way myself, and Maggie, though she had been
used to go to a place of worship when she was in service,
never had much heart for it. She liked better to take a walk
with me, and show her pretty face beside my ugly one. She
wore pretty bonnets too, in those days. If we did not
trouble about church before, we weren't likely to put
ourselves out when there was a baby to mind. So we keep
to a church with a chimney, though by that we don't mean
what your public-house men do. It's just our own little place
you would find us in, mostly."

"I wish you would go for a time or two to hear a

gentleman I know something about," said the manager.

"I don't know why you should trouble about where we

go, sir," said Adam, with the least pleasant manner Mr.
Drummond had noticed. "What matter does it make
whether a poor chap like me spends his Sunday at home or
in the streets, so long as he isn't doing any harm, or
drinking himself into a—"

"Do not say 'beast,'" remarked Mr. Drummond, with a

good-humoured smile.

"I won't. I was stuck for a word, and didn't like to say
that, seeing it isn't fair on the beasts, that only drink when
they're thirsty, and know nothing about reeling zig-zag to
their kennels. Maybe I might ha' said drinking till they have
to stay from work on Monday, to sleep themselves sober. I
reckon I've a right to spend my Sunday as I like, so long as
I'm always up to time at Rutherford's."

It would have been strange if there had not been a

spice of doggedness somewhere in Adam Livesey's
composition. The man who had all his life manifested such
firmness in resisting the temptations to self-indulgence,
such steadiness and industry in his humble calling, such
patient consideration for mother and wife in turns, was
almost certain to carry some of these excellencies to the
extreme. His very firmness was sure to have a stubborn
side, and Mr. Drummond detected its whereabouts.

Adam held strong views with regard to outside

interference from his employers, and, to use a homely
phrase, "his back was up" the moment the manager made
an allusion to the mode in which he and his family spent
their Sabbaths. His tone was alike resentful and expressive
of injury received, and the conversation had reached this
point when Adam uttered almost the identical words with
which this account of his life begins.

"I am never a minute behind my time, and I work as

long as any man does in all the place. I never stopped a job
by being off a single day when there was anything to do,
and for what need this new man be poking and prying into
what I do on Sundays? I've a right to do as I like, and I
shall too, for all his meddling."

These were Adam's thoughts, and Mr. Drummond had

little difficulty in reading them, though he answered only
the words.

"It does not matter to me, in one sense," he said, "but

it does in another. We have had a very pleasant talk
together, and you have been kind enough to tell me a good
deal about yourself and those at home. I know you are not
reckoned a great talker, and so I felt your frankness the
more. I cannot help seeing what a life of constant toil it has
been, and, as a man who feels for and sympathises with his
brother man, I thank God you have not made worse of
things, either for yourself or those who depend on you for
bread. I honour you for your patience, steadiness and
industry, but you must not be offended if I wish for you
something better still. Do not think me a meddler for
speaking of what is outside Rutherford's."

Adam felt a little ashamed. Mr. Drummond's politeness

rebuked his ungracious manner and dogged utterance. He
seemed to have read his thoughts too, and answered them,
for had he not felt very angry with him for interfering with
his freedom of action outside the works? He was, however,
too confused to reply, and the manager added, "Once I was
like you. I thought it was enough to give six days' work to
my employers, and to be just in all my dealings, doing harm
to no one. But I was led to see that I had to answer for
more than my six days' work, that there were duties to
God, my neighbour, and my own soul, that called for my
urgent attention. I was very proud of the work done, but I
forgot to be humble on account of what I left undone, or did
amiss. There were calls which I had not answered,
opportunities neglected, privileges despised, gifts received
without thankfulness, and Sabbaths misused. Perhaps I
turned them to more account than you do, for I was restless
and eager to get on in the world. I often spent them in
calculations and plans for bettering myself. I did not even
rest, but I brought all the anxieties of the other six days
into the Sunday. Then I was led to think and act differently."

Adam's dogged manner was all gone, charmed away he

hardly knew how, and he was eager to hear more. But the
children were coming, and the boom of a great clock was
borne to their ears by a favourable breeze. This told the
striker that Maggie would be expecting their return, and
there was a good mile between the park and home.

Mr. Drummond rose from the bench also. "No time now
to tell you what brought new life and light and joy to my
life, Adam. But it was through a message which God was
pleased to send me. And it is because my whole being has
been changed and made glad by it, that I want everybody
else to have the same joy. The man who brought me the
message is in Millborough now, holding some mission
services. I wish you would go and hear him, Livesey. His
name is Kennedy, and the room is in Aqueduct Street.
Good-bye."
 Mr. Drummond held out his hand. Adam was so
astonished that at first he did not hold out his own, though
not from unwillingness.

"Will you not shake hands, though I have been stepping

on forbidden ground? I am not 'the manager' here, but with
you as man to man."

If Mr. Drummond had after cause for fault-finding, it

was certainly not on account of want of heartiness. The
effects of Adam's grip, made his fingers tingle for some
time. Then, after a farewell pat to the baby, and an
acknowledgment of the striker's lifted cap, the manager
walked rapidly away.

CHAPTER VII.
MAGGIE, HER BEST SIDE OUT.

Two pairs of eager eyes had long been on the watch,

and two eager tongues loudly announced that "father" was
coming, as Mr. Drummond approached his own doorstep.

Then there was a rush of the two pairs of feet belonging

to the aforesaid, and the hall resounded with welcoming
kisses and alternate expressions of delight that he had
come at last, and of reproach that he had been so long
absent.
 The children's faces and voices were not the only ones
that told of gladness when Mr. Drummond made his
appearance. Their small hands, which had seized both his,
were disengaged again. The father had plenty of loving
caresses for his little people, but he did not overlook the
mother's claims. Putting them aside for a moment, he
passed his arm tenderly around her, as he said with a laugh,
"Don't be greedy, darlings. Mother must have her share,"
and then affectionately kissed the fair face in which he
could read a whole volume of glad welcome.

"You have thought me long, Edith, though you do not

scold me for having kept you waiting."

"I sometimes make up my mind to lecture you, Robert,

but when you come, I am so glad to see you that I forget
the words I meant to say, and tell you this instead."

Mrs. Drummond's sweet face was so irresistible that

again her husband bent his tall head to kiss it. The flush
that overspread her cheeks was as bright as that on a girl's,
but the colour faded too quickly. It was Robert Drummond's
greatest trouble that his wife was not strong. Apart from
this, no wedded couple could well be happier.

"Is Mr. Kennedy here?" asked the manager.

"No, but he will be before six o'clock. He must leave

again by seven, to be ready for the service. So far, he says,
few men have been at the room, though many women have
attended. To-night, he hopes it will be the other way, as the
men have their half-holiday, and could well spend a portion
of it at the mission service."

"If they would. But it is not easy to get them to think

so. I have been trying hard to enlist one recruit, but I fear
with little success."
 Here the children put in their claim to the father's
attention, and, as usual, not in vain. Mr. Drummond and the
small people were soon in the midst of a romp, and it was
hard to say whether they, he, or the mother who looked on,
enjoyed it the most.

Then the youngsters were sent off to the nursery, and

just after their departure, Mr. Kennedy arrived, and tea was
brought in.

During the meal they said little. The mission preacher

was tired, and needed to rest both voice and body before
the evening's work should begin. But knowing Mr.
Drummond's wish to be of use to the large body of
workmen placed under his orders, he was most anxious to
hear whether he had made any progress. He listened with
deep interest to all the manager had to tell, and especially
to his account of the recent conversation with Adam
Livesey.

Mrs. Drummond's sympathies were also enlisted,

especially by what Adam had said about his wife, and the
change wrought in pretty Maggie. "You would be just the
one to comfort the poor fellow, Robert," she said. "You
could enter into his feelings as few men could. He is the
same as that silent, rugged-looking workman about whom
you told me, as having such a strange attraction for you. It
was singular you should meet with him so unexpectedly,
and have a chance to talk quietly about so many things."

"It was. We got on very well until I mentioned Sunday,

and asked how he spent it. However, we parted good
friends, and I have broken the ice between manager and
man."
 "You will not let it close up again," said Mr. Kennedy,
and then he rose to take leave of his hostess.

Mr. Drummond was going with him to the Mission Room.

When there, he looked eagerly at each new arrival, but was
disappointed in his search for the face of Adam Livesey.

Adam's arrival at home was not marked by such

pleasing features as that of Mr. Drummond. He was rather
late, and the children, weary with play and the walk to and
from the park, were getting fretful, baby included.

"If you didn't want your tea, you might ha' thought
these poor little things would, let alone Maggie and me,
after being at work all day," said Mrs. Livesey in no amiable
tone. "You may well cry, baby. You're almost famished, and
father has given you nothing, I'm sure."

Mrs. Livesey might well be sure on this point, for, seeing

that Adam had taken no eatables in his pocket, and had
handed every farthing of wages into her keeping on the
preceding evening, it would have been difficult for him to
feed the children.

He was going to say so, but he checked the inclination

to defend himself, as he had done on many similar
occasions. "She knows as well as I do," thought he. "It's
only her way. Least said's soonest mended, and naught said
needs no mending."

So, having carefully rubbed his shoes and seen that the
youngsters did the same, he went through into the little
lean-to scullery to wash his hands. When he sat down at the
table, he found his wife full of curiosity about the gentleman
who, the children said, "had been sitting talking to father
nearly all the time."
 "Tom says he was a gentleman from Rutherford's, and
that he saw him twice, on days when he brought your
dinner. But I told him he must be wrong. No gentleman
from Rutherford's would sit talking to a poor labourer like
you."

"Tom was right. It was Mr. Drummond, the new

manager."

"Well, I never! What's going to happen now? Whatever

had he got to say?" inquired Mrs. Livesey, brimming over
with curiosity.

"I can hardly tell you, Maggie. He said how pretty baby
was, and he kissed her little face, and told me he had one
like her at home, and he'd lost the next oldest, same as we
did. I told him she favoured her mother, and what a bonny
lass you were when I first knew you."

Mrs. Livesey stared in utter astonishment. What could

possess him to begin talking such nonsense as that—he that
went about in a general way as if he couldn't say "Bo!" to a
goose. In the very depths of a heart not yet cold and dead,
she was pleased at the nonsense, though she gave a little
groan and replied, "You might well say 'was.' My pretty days
have been over this long while."

"That's as folk think, Maggie;" and the poor fellow

looked at her with a world of kindness in his eyes. Mr.
Drummond's words had stirred him strangely, and made
him see Maggie in a new light. He had made up his mind
that she did not regard him as the thief who had stolen her
youth and beauty by bringing her to his own poor home,
but as the husband whom she still loved better than herself,
and as the father of her children.
 Maggie plied him with many questions, but there was no
longer any sharpness in her tone or unkindness in her
words. Finally, she concluded that the new manager must
be a very nice gentleman, and that something good might
come of the meeting. Like Adam, she did not think much of
being interfered with out of working hours. The very fact of
Mr. Drummond's having talked about going to a place of
worship, and such-like, inclined her to be suspicious. "If he
had promised to raise your wages, there'd ha' been
something to think about. Even a shilling a week would ha'
been better than nothing."

"I don't suppose he could give me a rise, Maggie,

though I daresay he would make things better for
everybody if he could. You see I'm only a labourer, and I get
same as the rest that do the same work."

"You do more and better, for you stick to it," said

Maggie. "But there, it's no good talking."

At this moment, a smart rap at the door interrupted the

speaker, and she went to open it. There stood two decently
dressed men, strangers, one of whom said, "You'll excuse
us disturbing you, missis, please, but there's a lot of us
going round in twos, to ask our neighbours to come to the
mission service to-night. You'll be kindly welcome, if you'll
come, and your master, too. You'll hear something good."

"Eh, dear! It's all very nice, I daresay," replied Maggie,

who was quite her best side out, "but I couldn't do it. To-
morrow 'll be Sunday, and Saturday night's the busiest in
the week, with six of 'em to tub, and ever so many things to
do beside."

"Well, missis, I'm glad you see to keeping their little

bodies clean and wholesome. It would be a good job if
every house we'd looked into were as tidy as yours is. Folks
say, 'Cleanliness is next to godliness,' but it don't do to stop
at the cleanliness, does it, mate?"

The other man said, "No, that would be a bad lookout,"

and, turning to Adam, "Will you come along with us,
mister?"

Adam shook his head, and Maggie said, "Thank you,

we've both enough to do for to-night."

"Well, then, I'll just leave you this little paper. It will tell
you all about the mission services. Time and place, and
preacher, and everything. If you go to a church or chapel
regular, I don't ask you to give up your own service for this.
But if you don't happen to be fixed, look in at our place to-
morrow. You're safe to have time, and you too, missis,
when you have your Saturday's work done so early, and
your kitchen floor so as one might eat one's dinner off it."

There was no being angry with such good-tempered,

pleasant-spoken visitors. So Maggie took the little handbill
and thanked them for it, saying, they would "see about it."

Not that either Adam or his wife had the smallest

intention of going near the Mission Room, but they would
not say so. They only wanted to rid themselves of their
callers in a civil way, and without giving offence by a direct
refusal.

So when, after a kindly "good night," the door closed

behind the men, they considered they had done with them
and their errand also.

But they were mistaken.

 CHAPTER VIII.
CALLERS AND COGITATIONS.

MR. KENNEDY, the mission preacher, had found out long

before his visit to Millborough that those who would rouse
spiritual sleepers to anxiety about the well-being of their
souls, must carry the gospel invitation to their very doors.
For this work messengers were needed. Moreover, these
required special qualifications. The message must be
lovingly delivered by persons who had themselves
experienced its importance and knew its preciousness.

There were doubtless many such who were longing to

be of use, and willing to carry it into the dark lanes and
alleys of Millborough; but mere willingness was not enough,
neither was the experimental knowledge alluded to. Both
these things were indispensable, but more was wanted.
There must be love for the souls of others, as well as
thankfulness for personal salvation. There must be
readiness of speech, pleasant looks and manners that would
manifest good-will and bespeak a hearing, courage that
would not fail under difficulties and disagreeables, and the
charity that "suffereth long and is kind, seeketh not her
own, is not easily provoked."

There were a few such, and the two that called at Adam
Livesey's door were of the number. They were of the sort to
whom the roughest found it hard to give a rude reply.
 When tea was over, Adam took up the little handbill left
by the visitors, and read what was printed thereon.

"Why?" he exclaimed. "This preacher must be the one

Mr. Drummond told me about. The name is Kennedy, the
room is in Aqueduct Street. They're having meetings all
next week, beside to-morrow and the Sunday after."

"They're welcome to have 'em for a month o' Sundays

for me," said Maggie, promptly. "I've enough to do without
going to such places. How would the dinner be got ready,
and the house cleaned, and the washing done, to say
nothing of the children being seen to, if I were to be
running off to meetings morn, noon, and night, as some of
'em do?

"There's Mrs. Jackson, she goes to some meeting or

another nearly every day, and she's always talking about
her soul, while she's neglecting her home and her
husband's body. It's a good job she has no children, but
poor George came home this very day just before you did.
The house was all in a litter, dinner things on the table, fire
out, and no kettle a-boil. I believe she was off to this very
room in Aqueduct Street. Poor George came across here
with a little teapot in his hand, to beg a drop of boiling
water, because he had to go back, and would be working till
eleven."

"New boiler," jerked in Adam. "Rutherford's made it."

"Yes, he said so. And there he had to sit down in that

kitchen, with everything on heaps, and drink his drop of tea
and eat his bread with hardly a scrape o' butter. She hadn't
had time to buy any before she went off to the meeting. He
left his wages for me to give her, all but a shilling, and I was
to tell her he would be late, and he would get a threepenny
pie for his supper. He gets half as much more wages as you
do, Adam, and not a bit o' comfort out of them, though
there's only two to keep."

Adam shook his head in sorrowful sympathy, remarking,

"George is a skilled mechanic. He gets twice what I do, as a
regular thing."

"More shame for Sarah Jackson to serve him as she

does. If you'd been at home, you should have asked him to
bring his tea and have it here."

"You might ha' asked him, Maggie."

"Not I," she returned, with some severity of speech.

"You don't catch me having other folk's husbands here
unless their wives are with 'em, or you are at home. I don't
believe in giving gossiping tongues anything to talk about. I
took George Jackson's key and the money from him on the
doorstep, and when Sarah came, I passed them on to her. I
did not ask her in, any more than her husband. I can tell
you, Adam, if that woman had begun talking about her
'beautiful meeting,' I should have said something to her
that wouldn't have sounded very beautiful, so I cut her off
short."

Maggie did not trouble herself to wait for any comment

from Adam, but bustled off to begin her preparations for the
"tubbing process," which would take some time. Her
husband's thoughts were, however, busy enough, though
they did not find vent in words.

Adam had often heard his wife rail against Sarah

Jackson, who was to be found, as a rule, anywhere but by
her own fireside. He had heard her speak of other women
too, who went from meeting to meeting, "for the sake of
what they could get." Maggie believed they had no better
motive than to meet with neighbours in the class-rooms, to
pass an idle hour or two, to gossip on the road, to be
brought into company with ladies, and be made pets of by
them. There were many attractions in connection with such
gatherings, and Mrs. Livesey's firm conviction was, that
some of her neighbours put up with the Bible readings and
lecturings, because of sundry substantial helps, and the
annual trips and tea-meetings.

No doubt she was right in her judgment in a few cases.

She saw some who never seemed to be the better for what
they were taught, and who made attendance at various
religious ordinances an excuse for the neglect of their
homes and families. Her standing sample of the class was
her near neighbour, Sarah Jackson, and she regarded her
with unmeasured contempt.

"If that woman was worth her salt, she'd have her
house like a little palace, and save a fortune out of what he
gives her! It's a wonder the man's alive, the way he has to
scramble for his meals," Maggie would say, as she looked
with pardonable pride on her own surroundings.

These sayings were, however, all reserved for Adam's

ear, not proclaimed from the threshold or to her neighbours.

"They can see for themselves, without me telling them.

Besides, there's George to think about. He has enough on
his mind without any dinning from outside."

It was Maggie's misfortune that she should have been

brought into contact with a sham Christian instead of a real
one, an idle, who had learned the letter of the gospel
message, but whose heart and life had not been reached by
it. Maggie knew, for others had told her, that Sarah Jackson
had been heard to express regrets at Mrs. Livesey's
darkness and hardness of heart. As in duty bound, she had
invited her to many "means of grace," and offered to be her
companion, but always in vain.

No wonder Maggie regarded Mrs. Jackson's invitations

as uncalled-for meddling, and an insult to her own common
sense. At each renewal she would say to Adam, "That
hypocrite's been at me again, but I think I've settled her for
a bit. I was cleaning my windows when she began at me,
and I looked straight at hers, that you can't see through for
dirt, and said I didn't know how she found time. I had to be
on the go all the while, to keep straight. I shouldn't like my
windows to be made up so that if I wanted to see who was
passing, I must come outside. Then I came in and shut the
door."

In spite, however, of all this talk on Maggie's part, and

the fact that Mrs. Jackson's example had done both
husband and wife harm, Adam was not satisfied that it was
fair to judge by one only.

Every person, whether man or woman, who talks glibly

about religion, the soul's need, and the Saviour's all-
sufficiency, without showing a life influenced and purified by
the spiritual experience spoken of, must cause the enemies
of the gospel to triumph, and the doubter or indifferent to
remain so. But, while Adam listened to Maggie, it was only
in a half-hearted way.

He thought of the two men whose pleasant words and

manners had left a favourable impression, along with the
printed handbill. He remembered words uttered by that old
workman at Rutherford's, who had long been a professed
follower of the Lord Jesus, and who was one of the happiest
men he knew. This individual had said that for a long time
he had walked one way and his wife the other, but that now
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