Writers on Writing: Credentials

I spotted Swain across a crowded elevator and called out one of his old pulp titles "Bring Back My Brain!" It set the old guy off laughing... 
---Con attendee from way back

Years back, Janny Wurtz came to Edinburgh and did a reading of what - I think - turned out to be her least readable and most self indulgent series. (A pity really, because up to that point she'd done some pretty good stuff.)

Anyway, I asked a couple of technical questions regarding writing, and she pointed me to Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. She's not the only pro to recommend this chap.

It is - I think  - a damn good book on writing. It covers everything from paragraph structure, through scenes, to story structure. He even has a section on testing story ideas. It's all the stuff you need to know to build a story of any genre. You could probably even use the techniques for literary fiction. 

And, he's about techniques, not formulae.

The thing about How To Write Books is there are a hell of a lot of them, and most of them aren't written by successful writers - they're too busy writing fiction! 

End result is a procession of books by literary non-entities: creative writing teachers with a handful of short stories in print, editors and agents who don't actually write, and people who once sold a novel once. You'll find lots on inspiration and fighting the internal editor, combating writers block yadyadya, a little on structure culled from dramatic theory  - Guess what? Stage is different from prose! - and the usual chapters on manuscript preparation and how the publishing industry worked at the time of writing.

So, how does Swain rate as a pro? The bio in his book claims he wrote a zillion words and so on. But this is hardly unbiased evidence. This sort of thing, however, is: 


Better yet, a trawl through catalogues specialising in vintage SF yields plenty of examples of his work from the 1940s and 50s, the last, frantic, days of the true pulps, when stories had to jostle for the reader's attention, and the printed word competed with TV and the movies. 

From what I can gather from googling, Swain was a true professional who loved his work, and understood it well enough to articulate it for us wannabes. I sometimes think it's a pity he didn't write more on writing, but then... well what makes the book so good is that it says it all.