Writerpreneur: Forgotten Bestseller Secrets Course

In 1938, Oklahoma's first Rhodes scholar started a very unique and successful university course for writers. His name was Walter S. Campbell.

For the next 20 years, his course produced professional writers who started selling their stories before they finished their training. The vast bulk of them became publishing professionals from there on out. In this short period, their thousands of students turned out literally millions in royalties, untold numbers of magazine articles and stories, hundreds of books, and some were even made into movies.

Some of their most notable graduates include Louis L’Amour, Mary Higgins Clark, Fred Grove, Tony Hillerman, Bill Gulick, William R. Scott, Ed Montgomery, Neal Barrett, and Bill Burchardt. Among the best-known movies are “The Hallelujah Trail,” “Onionhead,” “Hondo,” and “Bend of the River.” Even the hit musical/movie “Oklahoma!” had its roots in a story from one of Campbell’s course graduates.

No other course, past or present, achieved comparable success. Worldwide, this course stood alone.

What made the most effective writing course in known history that successful - and whatever happened to the most effective writing course in known history?

The first clue we have is that 5 of the 6 textbooks they used over their heyday are no longer in print.

What distinguished those books?

1. Campbell and Harris re-introduced concepts that were known throughout literary history as common practices used to create popular stories.
2. They recognized that those practices were common to all types of writing, not just fiction novels.
3. Stories, articles, and all writing types were considered best written to be experienced as a single contiguous flow of creative continuity.

The premise Campbell found and taught was that all the books we have in our libraries, as well as the new ones released every year, are themselves based on ancient models and patterns. Ones which were themselves based on human nature and our limited capacity to truly understand Nature.

And so, they pushed practices which were ingrained (wired) into readers throughout the culture – and continue to be trained into us and our children today. No plot is original these days. That idea’s been recognized as true for ages. Campbell and Harris took this as a guiding hint. They then adjusted their training into making each writer into a self-taught professional. Their students were taught to study those same successful patterns that perennial-selling classics used – the ones found in the pages of those books, articles, and stories.

Campbell understood that if there were a magic secret to successful writing, the fastest results come from students doing these actions:

• to write continually, regularly,
• to study carefully the specific market where he wanted to write in order to gauge what that market would buy,
• to study the works of the continuing top-selling masters in each market area, learning their techniques but not copying their writing style – and beyond all,
• writing only about subjects which interested him greatly and involved him emotionally.

Through study of classic and modern writers, Campbell isolated several approaches to writing which I’ve found haven’t been emphasized or even mentioned in any modern text on author craft.

In the full book, I borrow from the texts of Campbell, Harris, and Swain as the course instructors. I also bring other long-career authors in with guest essays.

This work aims not to summarize their 1200-pages of work, but to present key forgotten elements.

I wrote this to explore what I learned from Campbell and his two instructor’s textbooks which have been lost to time. My research has always been followed with a bread-crumb trail of write-ups. And were all of Campbell's and Harris’ works returned to press, I’d be happy to retire this one and it’s short-course.

Meanwhile, you have this review and field guide to their works. So you can improve your own author craft by standing on the shoulders of forgotten giants to see further.

Best of luck to you and yours.