This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft.

1. Introduction: Literary Advice from Quill to Keyboard, Anneleen Masschelein.- 2. Learning Fiction by Subscription: The Art and Business of Literary Advice 1884-1895, John Caughey.- 3. “You Will Be Surprised that Fiction Has Become an Art”: The Language of Craft and the Legacy of Henry James, Mary Stewart Atwell.- 4. “Your Successful Man of Letters is Your Successful Tradesman”: Fiction and the Marketplace in the British Author’s Guides of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Paul Vlitos.- 5. ‘Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?’: Author Interviews as Literary Advice, Rebecca Roach.- 6. “Stand out from the Crowd!”: Literary Advice in Online Writing Communities, Bronwen Thomas.- 7. Tools for Shaping Stories? Visual Plot Models in a Sample of Anglo-American Advice Handbooks, Liorah Hoek.- 8. The “Ready-Made-Writer” in a Selection of Contemporary Francophone Literary Advice Manuals, Françoise Grauby.- 9. Taking Self-help Books Seriously: The Informal Aesthetic Education of Writers, Alexandria Peary.- 10. A Pulse Before Shelf Life: Literary Advice on Notebook-writing as Event, Arne Vanraes.- 11. ‘Writing by Prescription’: Creative Writing as Therapy and Personal Development, Leni Van Goidsenhoven and Anneleen Masschelein.- 12. Reproduction as Literary Production: Self-expression and the Index in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, Ioannis Tsitsovits.- 13. Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature, Gert-Jan Meyntjens.- 14. “Mostrar, no decir”: The Influence of and Resistance Against Workshop Poetics in the Hispanic Literary Field, Andrés Franco Harnache.- 15. Work and Writing Life: Shifts in the Relationship between ‘Work’ and ‘The Work’ in Twenty-First Century Literary Advice Memoirs, Elizabeth Kovach.- 16. “If You Can Read, You Can Write, Or Can You, Really?, Jim Collins. 

This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft. Often dismissed as commercial and stereotypical by authors and specialists alike, literary advice has nonetheless remained a flourishing business, embodying the unquestioned values of a literary system, but also functioning as a sign of a literary system in transition. Exploring the rise of new online amateur writing cultures in the twenty-first century, this collection of essays considers how literary advice proliferates globally, leading to new forms and genres.

“This exciting and comprehensive range of essays assesses the contribution of advice handbooks to prose writing, conceived variously as practice, 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 individual 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 theadvice culture in its informal as most business oriented models, unearthing many aspects of the blurring of boundaries between professional and amateur, reader and writer, individual 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) 

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Maps the role of Anglo-American popular writing and advice culture by examining its origins in the mid-nineteenth century Examines literary advice’s transformation in the twenty-first century in its multiple forms including manuals, How-To books, memoir, podcasts, YouTube, and more Fills a gap in contemporary histories of creative writing by focusing on the literary advice industry in the context of commercial writing culture, popular amateur writing culture, and the self-help industry

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