Writing Backwards

This book is aimed at authors who take their craft seriously and wish to perfect the methods by which they write their works and to focus the emotional power their writing can have on a reader.

In The Philosophy of Composition (1846) Edgar Allan Poe wrote about his thoughts on how to create literature that would trigger an emotional response in the reader, and the ways in which authors could achieve that result in their works. Nearly two hundred years later, Stewart Ferris has reinterpreted some of Poe’s ideas for the modern age, creating a new book that balances both old and new advice and sets Poe’s ideas in a contemporary context.

Ferris uses examples from his own works and from other current writers, and Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition is reproduced in its entirety, along with the text of his poem The Raven.