Published in 1965, Dwight V. Swain’s “Techniques of the Selling Writer,” some feel, is a bit outdated. Written before the ubiquitous word processor, Google, and AI gives the book some age; however, after reading the book once and studying through it a second time, I think the book has good information. It is still in print, which speaks about the book’s endurance. The book has information for a freshman writer, like myself, or a senior writer. I’ll be studying through the book again and presenting some of my observations.
Dwight Swain (1915-1992) began his writing career in the 1930s. From publishing short stories, his writing evolved to include mysteries, westerns, and action-adventure stories. He was also a screenwriter.
Swain taught in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma, where he oversaw the development of student writers. Students in the program submitted writing assignments. From these submissions, Swain drew many illustrations used to support his points in his nonfiction books about writing, such as Techniques of the Selling Writer, the focus of this discussion.
Writer’s Trap Three – Learning the Hard Way
According to Swain, the third trap is that a writer must learn the hard way. Several decades ago, my three sons wanted to build a go-cart. I committed to help them, but only to supervise. They would have to do the actual work; I would just look over their shoulders and point the way. They learned several mechanical skills—the hard, hands-on way. With the ubiquitous presence of AI programs, teachers are facing the new pedagogical issue of students submitting work generated by a computer program instead of the gut-wrenching hard work of educating themselves.
It’s wonderful to have textbooks to study, published works to examine, and teachers to point the way, but writing is still grunt work. Sure, skilled writers, widely published authors make the work look easy, tricking novices like me into thinking there’s really no skilled involved. Studying a published novel is a good exercise, Swain argues, but one still has to learn, the hard way.
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