Going Back to Primary Sources
I’ve spent a large chunk of my life teaching principles from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: the differences between flat and round characters; “the king died, and then the queen died” is a story, but “the king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot. I never had to read the book, because those lessons are part of the fabric of writing now. They were referenced by mentors, reinforced with examples, used to mark out the lines between good writing and bad. I had what I needed, so why go looking for the original? I had a copy if I needed it – often more than one – but there was other stuff to read that advanced his original points. Forster wrote his speeches in 1927, and the ideas had been hashed out (I didn’t even have Forster’s name right, half the time, referring to him as EM Forrester for much of the last decade). Academia doesn’t
