Writing Manuals for the Masses

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 monographs 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 information 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 international 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

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