When I was a teenager, at some point I picked up a hefty volume of writing advice at a used bookstore. The Writer’s Handbook, edited by A.S. Burack and published in 1956, contains 79 short chapters on writing technique, followed by 140 pages of markets.
Inside the dull blue covers you’ll find the usual topics like characterization, dialogue, and plot, as well as articles on specific genres like detective fiction and light verse. But as you might imagine, this book is particularly interesting when it comes to the way writing and publishing has changed over the decades. There are chapters on “The Modern Magazine Article,” “The Free-lance Television Playwright,” and “Do’s and Dont’s of Radio Writing.” You’ll even find lines like this: “Start a story with the sentence, ‘The girl in the blue convertible pulled up to the curb.’ You don’t have to tell [the reader] she’s gorgeous — he knows it. Plain girls, fat girls, dull girls don’t drive blue convertibles, at least not in magazines.”
In recent years The Writer’s Handbook has been sitting unopened on my bookshelf, but today I pulled it out to share some nuggets with you.
From “What Every Writer Knows” by James C. G. Conniff:
“A lady writer goes at it this way. She sets down a paragraph on paper just to get it down. Then she rewrites the whole thing to put in stuff she left out the first time. Then she rewrites it again to take out stuff that doesn’t belong. Then she writes the whole paragraph over a fourth time to make it read as though she just tossed it off.”
From “The Short Short – Story Concentrate” by Mona Williams
“There are various names for the total effect or impression or mood induced by the reading of any story — we speak of the theme, the message, the lift, the point. The one reaction that no good story must ever leave in a reader’s mind is the so-what? reaction. And it’s especially true of short shorts. It’s got to be — so this.”
“Story Sense” by Ruth-Ellen Storey
“First, let’s try to define what it means to have story sense. To me it means that a writer is able to discern a certain dramatic quality in some pattern of observed life or events, which, when rounded into a written story, becomes a matter of universal interest and meaning to many people.”