OnlineBookClub.org

Hello all,

I'm wondering how did writers 100+ years ago approach the writing of a novel?
I am wondering how writers like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Mark Twain wrote their novels. Did they just put a pen to paper and start writing or did they make an outline. There is so much information today about how to write, I would like to know how writers many years ago approached the craft of writing a novel when there was no information out on how to write a novel. And how long did it take writers back then to write novels?

Thank in advance.

I'm not sure how long it would take writers to write novels back in the day, but I do know that a good novel would probably take just as long to develope as it does now (though, publishing, printing, and getting the word out about the novel probably takes a lot less time now a days)

As for how they came up with ideas for what to write, I do know that Mark Twain used a lot of social satire as his books were designed to tell about the problems of society. Pretty much find a controversial story or topic and write about it while changing the names of those involved (ok, I don't know about the last part) haha

If you really want to know the exact inspiration as to why authors wrote about what, google it or type it in on the internet. You'll most likely get exactly what you want

I like the idea of reading a very old book and knowing that the author had to scribble ideas, probably by candle light. Some of the most fascinating story tellers had labour away. Can you imagine the frustration with typos. Truly, the art of writing.

Extended narratives have been around for quite a while; certainly more than a hundred years back. If I look on my bkkoshelf, just next to me, I can see Dante's The Divine Comedy, Farid ud-din Attar's The Conference of Birds, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji... When I ran a class in Writing Theory I referred to Aristotle's Poetics and several works by Plato - that's going back 2000 + years.