The more things change the more the…

You know the rest. This old bit of folksy wisdom has stood so long that few of us who use it regularly could tell you where it came from. The same can be said about books about writing. Those extraordinarily meta volumes of text that are designed to teach you how to generate better text.

These days there are thousands of them floating around with advice about everything from creating better characters to developing compelling endings.

Well How To Write books may have no thing up on old cliches, given a little bit of time we can trace something resembling an origin. In the case of Fiction, it takes the form of Sherwin Cody’s 1895 treatise, “How To Write Fiction.”

How To Write Fiction, though, was the genre’s first avowed how-to guide. Like so many aspirational books, it had its origins in America: it had already appeared in cruder form in Chicago, and priced at an eye-watering $10. That took nerve—and as an orphan who rose from a Michigan log cabin to the editorial offices of Chicago and London, nerve was what Sherwin Cody had. Perhaps that’s why How To Write Fiction retains a certain shrewd cunning even today. There are lines to remind you that it’s 1895: Guy de Maupassant is lauded for his “scientific method” of fiction, and Cody opines that “men most often take a good theme which they then treat badly, and women a poor theme which they treat well.” Writers were ill-advised to write about anything disturbingly peculiar (“the special and queer in human nature ought to be eliminated”) or peculiarly disturbing (“legitimate art does not admit controversial theology or science”). Yet much of Cody’s advice remains startlingly recognizable: It’s Writer’s Digest with a handlebar mustache.

What’s really fascinating about this book is how similar the advice is to what you might find in a modern How To. While some of to social mores are very, very Victorian a lot of the calls to avoid alienating potential audiences have become staples of commercial fiction writing.

Every once in a while you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, instead you can settle on turning it a few degrees.

Read How To Write Like a Victorian (Via Slate) (Images)

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