Review: Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965)

Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


First, a warning: it is very 1965 in this book. There's only one racist joke, but the misogyny is everywhere, both in Swain's assumption that all characters and writers are male by default, and in the off-hand treatment of wife-beating. He's also writing for a market environment that largely isn't there anymore.

Second: for most of the book, Swain is laying out the formula that he says will result in "good" stories. (I put "good" in quotation marks because I'm not sure Swain and I agree on what a good story is.) His formula is a successful one (I recognize it in the Marvel movies, for example), but it is definitely a formula and it only really leads to writing the one kind of story. (Swain thinks there IS only one kind of story.) It's like a recipe, and the recipe for Key Lime Pie is all well and good unless what you're hankering for is German Black Forest Cake. Or beignets.

Third: and then at the end he goes and offers some really good practical advice about being a writer and motivating yourself to work and things like that, and that part is both insightful and useful.

So, on average, three stars.



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Review: Weinstock, Scare Tactics (2008)

Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, with a New Preface by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Specifically in the subtitle he means American women between 1850 and 1930, when apparently there was this enormous output of ghost stories by American female authors. One of the OTHER things I learned in reading this book is how many American female authors of this period there were that I had never even heard of. These are women who were prolific and who enjoyed tremendous critical and popular success during their own lifetimes but who somehow just...got erased. I had heard, of course, of Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Harriet Prescott Spofford, Anna M. Hoyt, Madeline Yale Wynne, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Helen Hull, and Gertrude Atherton? (And those are only the women whose stories Weinstock discusses.) It's a truism, often trotted out---or at least it was when I was getting my degrees, lo these mumblecough years ago---that 90% of Victorian fiction was unremarkable: popular disposable fiction. But I wonder to what degree that "unremarkable" meant either "fiction by women" or "supernatural fiction"---both of which were sneered at by the academy for most of the twentieth century---or both.

I am not original in wondering this, I know. But wow.

This is a book of academic criticism, so it's a little dry. It is, however, readable rather than suffocated beneath the weight of its own critical jargon, and I found the subject fascinating. (Possibly, full disclaimer, because I am also a female writer of ghost stories.) Weinstock argues that American women writers between 1850 and 1930 used supernatural fiction as a vehicle/stalking horse for discussions and/or critiques of the ideology of women's roles in Victorian and Edwardian society, particularly motherhood; the failings of capitalism; lesbian desire; and the Gothic written by men. I particularly liked his reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Giant Wisteria" as a critique of The Scarlet Letter.



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