Edgar Allan Poe On Writing

I knew of Edgar Allan Poe's The Philosophy of Composition but it wasn't until I got access to the VOA's computer lab that I had an opportunity to find the essay online.

I am not so sure after ten years of being in what KH calls a writing program with this thought as it applies to novels as opposed to short stories. I find the novel has a way of changing its course, that it is more like a river while the short story is more like a pond.

I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure on the part of Godwin - and indeed what he himself acknowledges, is not altogether in accordance with Mr. Dickens' idea - but the author of "Caleb Williams" was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

While I think the following paragraph still applies:

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would - that is to say, who could - detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say - but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought - at the true purposes seized only at the last moment - at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view - at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable - at the cautious selections and rejections - at the painful erasures and interpolations - in a word, at the wheels and pinions - the tackle for scene-shifting - the step-ladders, and demon-traps - the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

What we may like to portray as being hatched is more often cultivated - often enough then what does appear is not what we thought was coming into being.

Poe spends more time discussing poetry and particularly his construction of The Raven. If poetry is to your interest, I leave that that to you.