Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Writing 110 years ago...We're so, so lucky!

Last night, I finished reading The Writing of the Short Story by Lewis Worthington Smith, A.M, a teacher from Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. The copyright date of the book was 1902. Can you believe!

I read the book on Kindle, which is also free online, because curiosity killed the kitten, and I wanted to see what people thought about writing more than a century ago. While this teacher came up with algebraic name calling, for example, using the different visuals as V1, V2, V3 and moods as M1, M2 etc. and lost me in the equations, he also made one thing perfectly clear: A strong character and a good story plot won. The rest was debatable.

Point of view seemed non-existent, except for the author’s. That is, he considered the author’s bias as “subjective,” which also meant that the author could butt in, a definite no-no in today’s understanding. If the author just told the story, it was “objective.”

But what made me feel so…so…lucky was the research. Internet and today’s technology should be worshipped, I thought. For research Prof. Worthington-Smith advised his students to study everything, everything that had to do with history, literature, even chemistry and sciences, giving long lists of books. One of those A Day in Ancient Rome by Edgar S. Shumway looked interesting to me. So I have it in my Kindle now.

Then, of course Shakespeare, too and lots of him, “but not for dialog,” the Prof. said, just for other stuff like characters and construction. IMHO, Worthington-Smith’s best teaching to his students was alerting the critical eye while reading a story or a novel.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t learn much of anything that seemed new or usable to me. Still, a lot felt interesting and different enough that I may read further on the subject of old thought on writing. What I took away from reading this is the realization of how so monumentally lucky we are with all that we are given. This was worth my few days of reading the book, and of course, reading lists at the end of the book has captured my attention big time.