How the thing is actually made — structure, character, dialogue and voice, and the revision where most of the work happens.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
An Autobiography
Anthony Trollope · 1883
Treats novel-writing as a trade rather than a visitation — so many words before breakfast, every morning, earnings disclosed to the pound — and…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Art of Fiction
Henry James · 1884
Argues that a novel's only real obligation is to seem true to 'felt life,' making psychological plausibility of character the test of fiction rather…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations
Georges Polti · 1895
Claims that every dramatic and narrative situation in world literature reduces to one of thirty-six recurring types, offering a taxonomy for testing…
11 works
Anthony Trollope
Treats novel-writing as a trade rather than a visitation — so many words before breakfast, every morning, earnings disclosed to the pound — and argues that waiting for inspiration is what stops most books being written.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mark Twain
Uses Cooper's clumsy plotting and unbelievable dialogue as a comic case study to argue that a novel must at minimum make its characters talk the way real people actually talk.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mark Twain
Distinguishes the humorous story, which depends entirely on how it is told, from the merely comic story, which depends on what happens, arguing that manner of telling is itself the content.
about 30 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ezra Pound
Lays down rules for Imagist poetry — use no superfluous word, treat the thing directly, compose in the sequence of the musical phrase — that were quickly adopted well beyond poetry as a general standard of economical writing.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026William Strunk Jr.
Argues that vigorous writing is concise — omit needless words, prefer the active voice, put statements in positive form — and reduces the case to a short list of enforceable rules.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry James
Argues that a novel's only real obligation is to seem true to 'felt life,' making psychological plausibility of character the test of fiction rather than adherence to formal or moral convention.
about 6.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Arthur Quiller-Couch
Argues across a series of Cambridge lectures that vigorous prose has a single aim, direct expression, and that jargon and vague abstraction are moral failures of style as much as aesthetic ones.
about 4.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026George Orwell
Names four competing motives behind all writing — ego, aesthetic pleasure, historical impulse and political purpose — and argues his own prose only became clear once he stopped hiding the last one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nancy Sommers
Compares how student and professional writers revise to argue that inexperienced writers treat revision as local error-correction while experienced writers treat it as re-discovering the argument itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Linda Flower & John R. Hayes
Built from think-aloud protocols of writers at work, argues that composing is not a linear sequence of prewriting, writing and rewriting but a set of recursive, goal-directed processes — planning, translating and reviewing — under the control of an active monitor that can interrupt any of them at any moment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Georges Polti
Claims that every dramatic and narrative situation in world literature reduces to one of thirty-six recurring types, offering a taxonomy for testing whether a plot is doing anything structurally new.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026