After we spent so much time with Elinor Glyn and her list of prohibited clichés, a reader might be forgiven for wondering what is left to write about. For that reader we have good news: there is a wealth of writing advice to be had for the asking.

Of course you could ask the Internet, and it would come back with all kinds of writing advice. If you asked your favorite AI bot, you could learn to write just like your favorite AI bot. You may have noticed, however, that AI bots tend to write for writers, not for readers. That is to say, we have trained them to produce the text that people who want to push some information out into the world want them to produce; we have not trained them to produce the text that readers who want something to read would want to read. This is the natural result of the way they are used: they get all their feedback from the people who use them to produce text, and none from the people who have to read the text they produce.

You could ask Reddit for writing advice, and then you would get advice from real people. In the same way, you could ask your hairdresser how to fix your plumbing problem, and she might have some ideas.

But let us wander back in time to an age that knew no Internet. If we go back a century or more, we may even meet some people we know.

How would you like to have Edith Wharton teach you the art of fiction? Or, if that is not to your taste, how about Ring Lardner? Lardner will admit

that you can’t find no school in operation up to date, whether it be a general institution of learning or a school that specializes in story writing, which can make a great author out of a born druggist.

But a little group of our deeper drinkers has suggested that maybe boys and gals who wants to take up writing as their life work would be benefited if some person like I was to give them a few hints in regards to the technic of the short story, how to go about planning it and writing it, when and where to plant the love interest and climax, and finally how to market the finished product without leaving no bad taste in the mouth.

Perhaps the best advice, however, comes not from the great authors but from the successful hacks. Edith Wharton was too much a born novelist: she knew by instinct how to bring out the story that had formed in her brain, and instinct is incommunicable. You may find her teaching a little impractical. The hack who depends for his living on selling a certain number of stories every month, however, does not wait for inspiration. He has a method, and it works, and he can break it down into steps.

As you might guess, this little essay serves as an introduction to another page in the Eclectic Library. We have gathered together a good collection of writing advice, and no matter what kind of writer you want to be, you are likely to find something there that will help you be it. And, of course, if you are already a successful writer, then this collection will give you much to sneer at, and sneering is good exercise that keeps the mind supple and limber.

Writing Advice at Dr. Boli’s Eclectic Library.

Conclusion.

A while ago we decided to run through a list of “nineteen hackneyed themes to be avoided” that Elinor Glyn compiled for aspiring writers. Our goal is to come up with a workable treatment for each theme on her list, in spite of Glyn’s advice. We are now at our final installment, which should bring some cheers from the gallery.

The next piece of advice is expressed with unusual definiteness, even for Elinor Glyn:

15. Do not under any circumstances build a play around a pair of baby shoes.

This sounds like the howl of a scenario editor who has built a pile three feet high of submissions titled “The Baby Shoes” and is ready to chew off her own toes if she has to read one more. We may assume that the general plot of every story had the baby shoes indicating the incipient arrival of a baby, and from there they might be divided into farces in which the conclusion that a baby is on the way is a mistake with consequences meant to be comical, and marital dramas in which the conclusion is a correct one with consequences meant to be heartwarming or tragic.

Since the meaning of the baby shoes is not specified in Glyn’s list, however, we are free to assign them any meaning we like, and we choose to assign them no meaning at all. Our story will be a psychological horror tale.

There is a single young woman, let us say a mid-level executive in some generic corporate office; we establish that she is devoted to her career and particularly dislikes children, especially the idea of having children of her own. One day she finds a pair of baby shoes on her desk. She is annoyed. She demands to know who put them there, and then tosses them in the garbage in view of everyone who works with her, many of whom seem disturbed by the gesture.

Leaving work, she drives out of the parking lot with a lead foot and is on the road before she notices the same pair of baby shoes on the passenger seat. Angrily, she throws them out the window.

When she reaches home, she opens her front door and finds the same pair of baby shoes neatly laid on the floor just inside. This time she calls the police, since someone obviously broke into her apartment. The police think it’s the stupidest call they’ve been on all week and don’t hesitate to tell her so, but they write down her story anyway, although she notices them smirking and winking at each other when they think she isn’t looking. After the police leave, she tosses the baby shoes in a Dumpster outside her building. Worn out, she heads for bed, and finds the same pair of baby shoes on her pillow.

From here the protagonist makes increasingly desperate attempts to rid herself of the baby shoes, destroying them in obviously permanent ways, but she always finds them again in some unexpected place. Meanwhile her colleagues are gently hinting that she needs some professional help, which only makes her furious: why are they gaslighting her? Only near the end is it revealed that no one else can see the baby shoes, even when she points directly at them.

16. Stories built on well-known criminal cases.

“Then where will we get stories at all?” three dozen Hollywood hacks shout in unison. But we can probably make use of what we might call the Shakespearean exception: a criminal case is a good subject if it is old enough that no one is left alive who could sue us for libel. What Bill Shakespeare did with Macbeth and Brutus we could do with Aaron Burr. We could do it several times over, because Burr offers us a wide choice of crimes. His Wikipedia article should give us enough material to keep our pens scratching for a while. We could build a whole franchise on it.

17. The poor lonesome character, usually friendless, moneyless, homeless—and, I almost said, brainless—at Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Most of these stories probably stink like the Dickens, but of course that will not discourage another generation from trying to repeat Dickens’ success. We, however, might look at the situation from a different point of view. There are many unsocial people in the world—people whose greatest joy is getting away from the crowd and settling in with a good book or binge-watching Gomer Pyle or some such thing. They dread Christmas and Thanksgiving as times when they are expected, and often required, to be cheerfully social. Our protagonist will therefore be the unsocial type, and it is his curse to have colleagues and neighbors who believe with dogmatic inflexibility that he needs cheering up. The plot then consists of their attempts to assure him a merry Christmas and his counterattempts to outwit them. But since these plays go over better with a love interest, we add a shy young woman who is carried along with the conspirators by being too shy to resist them. Eventually, having escaped the jolly Christmas revel planned for them, she and our protagonist spend a very merry Christmas Eve in a nearly deserted 24-hour diner, and—we are led to assume—live happily ever after.

18. The hard-working young man who finally gains an interest in “the business” and wins the “hand” of the employer’s daughter. The opposition in such a play generally is the foreman or a scheming partner.

If we make the hard-working young man our villain, we might blow a fresh breeze through the formula. Our young man is obsessed with getting ahead and piling up money; he works twelve-hour days six days a week and considers anyone who puts in less work a traitor to the company and to the sacred principles of capitalism. The obstructive foreman is a boss who believes that employees can accomplish their work within contractual hours, and indeed that they perform better that way. In the end, the hard-working young man is taken on as a partner by the CEO; the foreman and all the employees under his supervision leave to found a competing employee-owned corporation that rapidly becomes the market leader. The new partner receives his just punishment when he has to marry the CEO’s grasping daughter, whose passion for spending money exceeds even her new husband’s passion for accumulating it.

19. The hero having a duty to perform, generally an arrest to make, who falls in love with the evil one’s daughter, and—this is the “crool” thing—has to choose between love and duty. Why, there’s the title! “Love and Duty.” These plays are turned out by the million.

Sticking to this prohibition would cut out one episode from every season of every police procedural on television. That would be a good start; then we would have only to find a rule that got rid of the rest of the episodes, and we could call it a job well done.

But since we have taken upon ourselves to defy all these prohibitions, we can make our hero a mob assassin whose duty is to remove a certain prosecutor. The prosecutor has a beautiful daughter who—just to rub salt in the wound—is a cop. But there’s a happy ending! Both the father and the daughter are amenable to bribery. A wedding ensues, and the two families are joined in mutually beneficial corruption.

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Thus we come to the end of Elinor Glyn’s list of nineteen hackneyed themes, and if we have not always succeeded in our goal of making a good story from bad cloth, at least we have had the chance to compare the hackneyed themes of a century ago with the hackneyed themes of today.

That brings us to an obvious question: if we were compiling a similar list today, which hackneyed themes would it include? Here Dr. Boli is at a disadvantage, because his knowledge of popular culture of the twenty-first century is limited. But perhaps readers may have some ideas. Which overused plots would you like to see permanently banished from novels, movies, or television? The comments are open, and rants are always welcome.

As we have been running through Elinor Glyn’s list of Nineteen Hackneyed Themes to Be Avoided, we have been working on a certain assumption: that it is desirable to avoid tired clichés, because they make our narrative less plausible.

Some authorities on fiction would say that our goal is realism, but that is where Dr. Boli must disagree. Our goal is plausibility, which is quite different.

These thoughts were provoked by a recent experience. Paying a visit to someone at a large city hospital, Dr. Boli had to pass through a check point where two uniformed police officers sat facing each other checking visitors’ bags. They were the most stereotypically rotund cop archetypes you could imagine, practically spherical, and—having to sit facing each other all day—they were naturally deep in the middle of a conversation. The conversation was all about doughnuts—doughnuts in great detail, with all their subtleties: which varieties are really the most delicious, where such varieties may be obtained, how you have to go early to get them at that place on the South Side because they sell out by nine in the morning.

Now, a fiction writer who included such a scene would be told that it was was an implausible cliché: that she should make more believable cop characters instead of reaching for the laziest generic stereotype and hoping for a cheap laugh. And the editor who told our writer that would be correct. No writer should lean on the lazy stereotype, because readers will reject it. They will be thrown out of the story: they will see the writer behind the curtain and think she could have put a bit more work into her minor characters.

But reality is not bound by constraints of plausibility. Reality is proud and stubborn, and if you tell reality that she should create more plausible characters, reality will stick her tongue out at you and tell you she isn’t a child anymore and she can do what she wants.

The lesson for fiction writers is this: reality is a good source of ideas, as long as those ideas are properly adapted. Reality must be carefully edited before it is plausible enough for our fiction. We must take out the rank implausibilities and tired clichés on which reality so willingly leans, and we must substitute characters and situations that strike our readers as believable. If we do it well, our readers may even tell us that our story is realistic. We, of course, shall smile and accept the compliment as the praise it is intended to be—but we know better.

If you are including Latin quotations in your podcasts, you’re probably pronouncing them wrong. But it is not difficult to learn to pronounce Latin correctly for every context. You just have to recognize that there is a context, and that the pronunciation depends on the context.

In the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, there were almost as many systems of Latin pronunciation as there were European languages. Scholars spoke Latin according to the rules of their own languages. When they got together, they spent the first half hour or so laughing at each other’s funny accents, but after that they adapted and managed to communicate.

By our own time, the number of correct pronunciations for English speakers quoting Latin has settled down to a manageable three, and it is not difficult for a Latin scholar to know all three of them and use the correct one for the situation. (Yes, even in Latin there is “code-switching.”) Most mistakes in pronunciation come from mixing up the three different systems, producing something that is neither fish nor fowl nor cheeseburger.

1. The classical pronunciation. This is the simplest of the three to learn, and it is the one you were taught if you learned Latin in a school outside the Roman Catholic orbit. It is a reconstruction of what linguists believe was the pronunciation prevalent in the time of the Roman Republic. The reconstruction is based on good evidence, and it is likely to be substantially correct, but a truly pedantic scholar would point out that it is not a continuous tradition. It is like the Capitol at Williamsburg, where the pedant points out that the original was destroyed long ago and the current building constructed in the 1930s, and the average tourist says, “Yeah, whatever.”

In this system, every letter has only one sound.

Consonants are the same as in English, except that

• C and G are always hard: centum is pronounced KEN-toom, not SEN-toom, and genus is pronounced GHEH-noos, not JEH-noos.

• J is pronounced like our Y.

• V is pronounced like our W.

The vowels are given their usual values in European languages—a=ah, e=eh, i=ee, o=oh, u=oo. “Short” and “long” vowels are distinguished by quantity, meaning how long it takes to pronounce them: the ancient rule was that long vowels take twice as long to say as short vowels. This is the only difficult thing for English speakers, most of whom completely ignore the rule, but it is the basis of all classical poetry, and ignoring it makes a mockery of Virgil.

The diphthong æ is pronounced like the pronoun I, and œ is pronounced like the oy in joy.

Some Latin courses will make subtler distinctions between short and long vowels, but you can get by with these rules.

When to use it. The classical pronunciation is appropriate for quoting classical literature, but nothing later.

2. The ecclesiastical pronunciation. This is the pronunciation used by Roman Catholics who are native English speakers; it is derived from the Italian pronunciation, and letters are generally given their Italian values. It is more complex than the classical pronunciation, because some consonants have multiple sounds depending on their position. Instead of boring you with the complexities here, we shall send you to the Wikipedia section on the ecclesiastical pronunciation, which has a good chart. You can also find a good guide at the site of the Catholic network EWTN.

When to use it. The ecclesiastical pronunciation is necessary for quotations from the Catholic liturgy. It is proper for quotations from medieval sources, where it would be a jarring anachronism to use the classical pronunciation, and for Latin literature of the Renaissance and after, especially if it is not written by English speakers.

3. The English pronunciation. This was the pronunciation taught in schools in the English-speaking world until about 1900. It applies the rules of English pronunciation to Latin. Since students of today are taught as dogma that there are no rules of English pronunciation, it will be necessary for you to learn those rules before you can apply them to Latin. This is, therefore, the hardest system for modern English speakers to learn, because we are willing to admit that Latin and Italian have rules for pronunciation, but we are ignorant of our own language.

A quick and serviceable guide to the English pronunciation of Latin can be found at the very beginning of A Short Latin Grammar: Forming Part of a Popular System of Classical Instruction, on the Plan Recommended by Mr. Locke (London: John Taylor, 1827).

When to use it. This is the correct pronunciation in English for scientific names of organisms and for legal terms derived from Latin. It is also necessary for Latin quotations in English poetry before the middle twentieth century, since the rhyme may depend on the pronunciation. It is good and proper for works in Latin by English authors, such as Milton or Johnson. It is correct and reasonable for any quotation from Latin except the Roman Catholic liturgy, where it would sound odd. (Unless you are speaking of the Roman Catholic liturgy in historic times in which the English pronunciation was used; but if you have descended that far into pedantry, you probably have no need of these hints.)

Once you have mastered these three systems, you will be the most pedantically correct of all podcasters. But if you master only one of them, make it the English one. It is incorrect to use the classical pronunciation of Latin for legal terms and scientific nomenclature, whereas it is perfectly correct to use the English pronunciation for quotations from classical literature.

Don’t forget to instruct your viewers to smash that like button.

Part Four.

We have been running through Elinor Glyn’s list of nineteen hackneyed themes aspiring writers ought to avoid, and—in spite of all advice to the contrary—trying to make viable plots out of them.

We’re up to number 11, which may prove unusually difficult.

11. All stories based on peculiar “influences,” or other uncommon sources.

How we respond to this suggestion depends on how we define “peculiar influences.” Some fine stories have been written under the influence of absinthe, an influence that would strike the average American as mighty peculiar.

However, it seems most likely that our author means “influences” of a literary character. If you are enraptured with the peculiar psychological theories of that Viennese quack Sigismond Fraud, or whatever his name is, then it would be an unsaleable mistake to base a scenario on them.

So that is just the sort of thing we must do if we are to defy Glyn’s advice. Instead of Sigmund Freud, we shall take William James as our peculiar influence, and in particular his hypothesis that physical expressions cause emotions instead of the other way around—that smiling makes us feel happy, scowling angry, and so forth.

This should give us at least enough material for a two-reeler. Our heroine, convinced by the Jamesian doctrine, tries to manipulate her own emotions accordingly, but is plunged into a series of difficult situations in which it would be desirable for her to feel different emotions from the ones naturally produced by the situation. It will be a showcase for our best silent performer. A few title cards at the beginning will be sufficient to establish the premise; after that, the situations and the heroine’s facial gymnastics will tell the story well enough without the intervention of titling.

12. The burglar who enters a house and is prevented from stealing by a child, sometimes even his own, adopted by the family. This type of play usually ends with a rapid-fire reformation, very unconvincing, to say the least.

By combining this theme with number 9, the mischievous little boy, we come close to the plot of the movie Home Alone, which we do not care to repeat. In order to be faithful to the hackneyed situation, however, we need to include the rapid-fire reformation; but perhaps we may take the liberty of not placing it precisely at the end.

We shall therefore make our burglar rather stupid and our child a con artist. She is an adorable little girl who manages to convince the burglar that she is probably his daughter, adopted into this wealthy family where she is not understood or appreciated. If only she had a real father who really cared about her! She has just brought the burglar to the point of promising to reform when the police, whom the girl had summoned earlier, burst into the room. The girl laughs as cops handcuff the burglar and tells him was a sucker he is, to which he can only respond, “Why, you little—” Iris out.

This is probably only a one-reeler, or even a split reel, but no director wants to have to wrangle a child actor for much longer than that anyway.

13. The escaped convict, who steals another man’s clothes and gets the other party “in bad.”

This might give us enough for a feature or a novel if we give it the obvious O. Henry twist. The escaped convict steals a distinctive set of clothes and is immediately mistaken for their owner. At first he is delighted to find himself living in luxury, but soon he discovers that the man he replaced has problems far worse than merely being on the lam: multiple people want to kill him for multiple reasons, and some of them are quite devious about it. Eventually, realizing he cannot live long this way, he turns himself in to the authorities. They laugh at him. The man whose clothes he stole has taken his place in prison and refuses to renounce his assumed identity, having discovered that prison is comfortable and safe.

14. The hero who assumes another’s crime because he loves the heroine.

The “other” whose crime is to be assumed must necessarily be someone important to the heroine, which practically limits the candidates to a parent, a sibling, or the heroine herself. It would be a striking demonstration of selfless love if the hero were to assume the crime of the heroine’s preferred lover because he truly desires her happiness; but, though there are such fools in real life, in fiction they make for squishy protagonists whom we just want to slap a few times to bring them back to their senses.

But we might have something if we combined this situation with hackneyed theme number 3, two men in love with the same girl competing in some task. The heroine has committed a minor crime; her two admirers calculate that a few months in jail will buy the heroine’s affections. When they discover that they both have the same plan, they spend the rest of our story trying to undermine each other, sabotaging each other’s carefully planted evidence. At last they both go to prison for incidental crimes committed while trying to establish their guilt; the heroine, having served her six months, marries her accomplice.

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We stop once again at four. That has the effect of heaping up five hackneyed situations in our upcoming final installment, but, on the usual American principle of planning for the short term, we ignore that difficulty until we run up against it.

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Continues in Part 5.