Taking Self-help Books Seriously: The Informal Aesthetic Education of Writers

This article examines self-help literature that focuses on helping individuals improve their writing as an important vehicle for informal aesthetic education. In the United States, aesthetic education in writing has occurred through one of two ways: through formal classroom instruction or through informal learning independent of any degree-bearing institution or teacher--the extracurriculum of composition. This extracurriculum occurs through either writing groups or self-help books; to date, scholarly attention has been given to writing groups but little to the impact of self-help books on informal aesthetic training. In this article, I examine five self-help books from the twentieth century and identify areas of shared content: the role of the unconscious in composing, issues of control, the holistic nature of composing, failures in traditional teaching, and a broader argument about the universal ability of humans to be creative. I suggest that academia should consider informal aesthetic education and writing self-help literature since Peter Elbow’s 1973 Writing without Teachers, the first self-help book to be embraced by academia, carried far-reaching pedagogical benefits.