“You Will Be Surprised that Fiction Has Become an Art”: The Language of Craft and the Legacy of Henry James

As some scholars have noted, the technical principles that modern creative writing workshops identify as “the craft of fiction” owe a great deal to Henry James and the prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, later published in a single volume as The Art of the Novel. However, James, far from setting out to help aspiring writers to develop their technical knowledge, was in fact fairly hostile to the very idea of craft, famously declaring that he “cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks.” The prefaces were instead intended to provide a sort of Cliff’s Notes to his own work, naming the tricks of his trade for the edification of his most dedicated readers, and it was these readers, most notably including Percy Lubbock, Joseph Warren Beach, and Caroline Gordon, who adapted James’s principles in some of the first literary handbooks used in the creative writing classroom. Though Lubbock, Beach, and Gordon borrowed significantly from James, they balanced his emphasis on aesthetics with the more accessible and egalitarian approach of earlier authors of fiction-writing handbooks, including the work of Walter Besant. This essay argues that a scholarly examination of the historical development of the discourse of the craft of writing serves not only to correct an over-emphasis on James’s influence, but also to address the equally erroneous assumption that principles of technique are eternal and universal, and thus exist apart from subject position and historical contingency.