According to the Iowa Series in Creativity and Writing guidelines, “Each Muse Book will present what a seminal literary figure had to say about ages-old questions of reading, writing, and creating, in essence shaping a literary guide and writer’s handbook.” It’s a clever premise, and one can immediately imagine all sort of writers’ guides culled from the work of everyone from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson. To date, however, only four books have been published—on Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, William and Henry James, and John Keats.
The first, Robert D. Richardson’s First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (2009) follows the premise most closely. Perhaps that’s because Emerson often sounds very much like a contemporary teacher of creative writing, preaching the maxim of Show, Don’t Tell. “Skill in writing consists in making every word cover a thing,” he writes. Elsewhere, Emerson enthuses, “what a sensation a historical fact, a biographical name, a sharply objective illustration makes!” Emerson tells writers to read extensively, to write frequently, to pay attention to their audience—advice students will find in current textbooks—and Richardson’s chapter headings further emphasize this handbook element with titles like “Keeping a Journal,” “Practical Hints,” and “More Practical Hints.” Overall, the book, while brief (85 pages without notes), delivers on the series’ promise.
Eric G. Wilson’s My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing (2011) contains some writing advice, but the book is more preoccupied with Blake’s complex system of symbols, his “infernal method.” The writing is perceptive, and in chapters such as “Work,” “Play,” “Experience,” and “Minute Particulars,” we can learn a great deal by inference. Still, one wishes Wilson had more frequently and explicitly made Blake “a literary guide” for novice writers. When he does, My Business Is to Create is most successful, as in Wilson’s observation on Blake and revision: “To be freed from the notion that first drafts even exist, to understand that you’re already revising the minute you put word to page: this makes it easier to modify those initial sentences. There’s nothing special about them. They’re yesterday’s news.”