But in R. V Cassill’s first entry into the textbook genre, Writing Fiction (1962)—his name would become familiar to later generations of students as the editor of the 1978 Norton Anthology of Short Fiction—this prominent Iowa (later Brown University) creative writing teacher prescribed the autopoetic compositional process thusly: “The writer of an original story begins to shape his material by accepting an emotional commitment to it—very much as if he himself were the first character to appear in the story to be.” This “scaffolding” is then “totally replaced by structural elements of the story
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