Researching the history of creative writing

Margaret Armstrong, an undergraduate student at the University of Delaware, remembers sitting in her fiction writing class and hearing her professor tell the class there weren't any restrictions on what the students could write. No topic was off limits. She also knows that aspiring writers in the early 20th century heard vastly different advice about how to be successful.

Armstrong, an honors English and Spanish double major, is a 2024 Summer Scholar researching the evolution of advice for "good" writing, getting published and having your work seen, through examining archival issues of Writer's Digest, an industry publication that began in 1920 aimed at helping writers improve their craft.

Her project covers the first 25 years of Writer's Digest, from 1920 through the World War II era, tracking how advice to aspiring writers reflects American culture, economics and politics of the time, and how it shaped American writing.

Project beginnings

Last spring, Armstrong began working with Siobhan Carroll, associate professor of English, on her research project examining the development of character agency in novels from 1791-1859. To establish relevance between her research and modern scholarship, Carroll wanted to know how writers in the early 20th century understood the concept of character agency, the term for how a character's motivation and actions direct the story, and she tasked Armstrong with reading old issues of Writer's Digest magazine.

While Carroll asked Armstrong to document advice and trends specific to character agency, she was also free to note other ideas she found in the old issues, and this is where things got more interesting. Magazine issues from 1920-1945 said little about character agency, but Armstrong identified trends in plot development, Hollywood influence, government propaganda and censorship in the issues spanning 1920-1945.

"Margaret has a good eye for the archive. She's curious about what she reads and is able to make connections on her own," Carroll said. "It became very clear that she was starting to take ownership of the project and think about what was happening in the world of creative writing."

From Hollywood to the War Department

The earliest Writer's Digest issues from the 1920s spoke about "photoplays," a term for silent movie scripts. With their lack of dialogue, photoplays were purely driven by plot and action. As Armstrong found, this emphasis on action carried over to other genres, as writers were encouraged to immediately place their characters in situations that would cause conflict. Character motivation wasn't an important element, as characters would merely react to the situation writers placed them in.

Hollywood's influence was also apparent in the 1930s, but the advice concerned censorship, as Writer's Digest of the era echoed Hollywood's Hays Code, implemented in 1934, that urged "moral" and "wholesome" storytelling, with prohibitions against excessive alcohol use and overt sexual situations, especially for female characters.

By the 1940s, Writer's Digest included articles written by the U.S. War Department urging writers to include pro-American, anti-German themes in their work. It's hard to imagine a modern government agency encouraging such blatant propaganda, but Carroll explained that writers face similar pressures today.

"Realistically, censorship is all around us. The majority of writers want to sell their work, and that makes them attentive to what will be easy to get published versus not," she said. "News sources and social media offer writers important direction on what is acceptable or not. It's internal censorship."

Action and impact

Armstrong has already applied some of the advice for writing she has found, including lists of stock characters and formulas of successful stories from genres like pulp fiction and crime stories, to her own creative writing.

"It's made me want to start the action off immediately by dropping characters into situations that create conflict for them," she said.

She also noted that having relatable characters has always been important.

"I think everybody wants to read about characters that they relate to in some way," she said. "In the early research I found that usually meant people want to read about good people and relate to good things. Now I see people relating to more complex characters."

Armstrong is used to editing and adapting her own work, skills she's developed in her creative writing courses at UD, where students share their writing with the class.

"The whole point is getting comfortable with sharing your work, and receiving and listening to criticism, too. Any feedback is good feedback," she said.

She took a similar approach this year as a student editor for Caesura, UD's student-run literary magazine. The decision of whose work to publish was challenging, but also rewarding.

"I think it's just good practice to notice what you like and don't like in other people's writing, and then see how that influences your own too. It can also help show you new ideas," she said.

Armstrong's work this summer builds on research she began last summer and continued throughout the past academic year. She presented her initial findings at the Winter Showcase of Undergraduate Research and will present her additional research at the Summer Symposium in August.

Literature, creativity and practicality

Armstrong's guidance counselor in Clark Summit, Pennsylvania, recommended UD for the Department of English, and Armstrong said it was the right decision. She said she appreciates all the department has to offer and that students can specialize in certain areas or take diverse classes.

"It's a very free major," she said. "We have creative writing classes and literature classes, but there are also really practical options like grant writing."

When she's not writing her own work, Armstrong enjoys horror fiction and the poetry of Pablo Neruda, and her project has sparked an interest in pulp fiction, too.

"At the end of the day, I want to enjoy what I'm reading, and I think that should be the goal for everybody," she said. "If you're focused on reading for some specific reason, are you always enjoying it?"