A Manual of the Short Story Art
by
Glenn Clark
Overview
This 1922 how-to textbook, intended for teachers and students, includes exercises to get a writer started; lessons in visualization, dialogue, and theme; a list of thirty-six plot situations; and, as examples, short stories by Anthony Hope, Gertrude Hamilton, Edna Ferber, O. Henry, Beatrice Walker, and Wilbur Daniel Steele.
A Manual of the Short Story Art by
Glenn Clark (1922). This book was written with an eye on the student,
not on the rules of composition and rhetoric. It conceives of the
student as a creature who loves to use his eyes and ears, and who takes
delight in playing the amateur detective and in raveling and unravelling
plots. It assumes that a young man or a young woman is filled to
overflowing with warm, living interests and desires and aspirations
which, taken together, constitute a greater driving force toward success
in writing than anything which the textbooks and teachers can give him.
By taking advantage of these natural desires and instincts and not
working against them it is believed that the teacher may best "draw out"
the student to the fullest self-expression. One of these deep-seated
instincts of the student is to see things in the concrete. For that
reason the method of presenting exercises commonly used in this book is
the so-called "projective method." Instead of being asked to describe a
city street, the student is asked to read a sentence that helps him to
visualize a street and then to write down what he sees.
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