The Mystical Cachet of Writing Manuals

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, September 14, 2007
|
Permalink

 
When I was a boy, I discovered a leather duffle in my dad's closet, and inside was a cache of paperbacks by Dale Carnegie, including How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was fascinated. This secret power of influencing struck me as a good thing to possess, and any book that taught it must be worth reading. So I did. My expectations weren't exactly met, but that didn't stop me from believing that, whatever arcane skill one might like to acquire, its mysteries were revealed in a book. It was only natural, when my interests turned to writing, for my shelves to fill with how-to manuals.

Again, my expectations were unmet. There are excellent books on fiction, and there are mundane ones. My guess is that you can learn quite a bit from them all. Two new ones sit unread on my desk: Sandra Schofield's The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer and Peter Selgin's By Cunning and Craft. A couple of others are en route -- I went on a bit of a buying spree recently. For whatever reason, I have always found it impossible to read more than a few pages of a how-to manual without putting it down and writing -- and that's a great problem for a writer to have!

Reading these books, I'm always struck by how much I don't know. Just flipping through The Scene Book, for example, convinced me I know nothing about writing scenes. On the other hand, the manuals often reduce the writing process to something formulaic, mechanistic. This makes it easier to talk about and teach, but it's not really how it works. The process is organic. Even so, my organic process has benefited greatly from reading other people's formulaic, mechanistic books on writing.

Here's the thing. Like Dale Carnegie, the writing manuals don't deliver on what they seem to promise. They can't. But they serve a purpose all the same. A steady diet of these things can be motivating. The really great ones can be much more than that. While it's probably true that you can learn more about writing from reading great books than reading how-to books, I still keep buying and flipping through the things, because they still retain the mystical cachet I attributed to them in childhood. Books about writing fiction have become one of my favorite genres of nonfiction, and for all the wrong reasons.