But it is a not a truth generally acknowledged, for Steven Pyne opens his book with the claim that ‘ours is a good age for nonfiction’. He points to the decline of interest in contemporary fiction and cites the editor of The Atlantic magazine on the ability of historians to provide strong plots and memorable characters in the service of ‘important and morally charged subject matter’. The contents list of the New York Review of Books attests to the popularity of good history.

Curthoys and McGrath seek to rescue history from its bad reputation, to help practitioners produce work that people will want to read. Pyne is more concerned with the components of historical prose, and his aim is to guide practitioners in the arts and crafts of history as literature. Both books are concerned with the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, and both are in agreement on the distinction between making it up and getting it right. The two Australian historians are more receptive to literary theory, more comfortable in their response to postmodernism. The American is impatient with unnamed deconstructionists who invade history to demonstrate literature’s critical primacy. In response to their unpacking of texts, Pyne affirms the importance of ‘packing that prose in the first place’.

The Curthoys and McGrath manual is more extensive. They pose the question ‘who is your history for?’ and identify a range of genres, from student essays and postgraduate theses to journal articles, monographs, textbooks, references and trade books, commissioned histories, family histories, television, film and radio scripts, popular articles, briefs for museum exhibitions, websites and podcasts. Their subsequent coverage is more restricted, for they draw their examples and their testimony from academic practitioners. The first part of the book is concerned with research and is pitched primarily at the postgraduate. The authors give excellent advice on planning the project, finding research materials, working in archives, the interpretation of primary sources, and the technologies of recording information on paper, laptop and digital camera.

The notable absence is advice on how to organise it. Apart from a brief introduction to the software programs EndNotes and Zotero, and the useful suggestion to keep a journal, the problems of information retrieval go unexamined. Yet in my own experience of supervising and conducting research, it is the most fundamental of all tasks. Most novitiates quickly discover the problem of an undifferentiated mass of notes. Those who have done it before find that customary devices – cards, files, folders, digital and hard copy – collapse under unforeseen exigencies. The method of organisation is inherently task-dependent, reorganisation a time-consuming but inescapable consequence of a false start.

Curthoys and McGrath thus begin earlier than Pyne, with the preconditions of writing history, and they also provide advice on what follows it: the launch, the promotion, the gritting of teeth as you read a hostile review. But midway through their book, they reach the point where Pyne begins, with the act of literary creation. ‘In that space where research and writing overlap,’ they announce, ‘a marvellous creative process starts to kick in’. Or perhaps not so marvellous. They concede that procrastination is common and offer some helpful tips on how to get on with it.

Their advice on how to write is systematic and sensible. The importance of openings and endings, the strategies of emplotment, the shape of a chapter, the avoidance of intrusive sign-posting, the use of anecdotes, authorial tone and register, the use of quotations and footnotes, the need to hear your prose, and the inescapable task of verification – these and other aspects are treated clearly and illustrated well.

Curthoys and McGrath place particular emphasis on a point of view. One of the reasons why history is boring, they claim, is that historians adopt the stance of the absent but omniscient narrator who ‘understands everything that happened, and tells the story in such a way that only one interpretation is possible’. Their preference is to bring the historian into the history and to experiment with multiple points of view. Yet they are insistent on the obligations to the evidence: ‘If you want to stay with history, you won’t have the same kind of freedom as the historical novelist.’

They write in an easy, informal style – more like that of a seminar than a lecture – and warn the reader that this is not the way to write history. ‘Don’t follow us,’ they add, ‘in using informal truncations like “don’t” and “won’t”.’ The same might be said of their instruction to avoid clichés, which is found in a chapter entitled ‘Tough Love’, which refers to a willingness ‘to do the hard yards’. Even more disconcerting is the advice that ‘most grammar is about constructing clear and meaningful sentences’. The encouragement to revise ruthlessly (‘be a stern, harsh critic’) should have eliminated ‘impact on’, ‘conflict situation’, ‘a sense of ’, ‘all about’ and those deadly neologisms ‘focus’ and ‘address’.

Stephen Pyne is not immune to these infelicities. Anyone who has read his Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991) will appreciate his skill as a writer, so it is disconcerting to encounter here a mix of elevated prose and homely colloquialism. It is all too easy, he remarks, for writers to go ‘puttering about the historical countryside’ when they need to ‘get on the trail’. He relates his mistake, when writing the biography of an American geologist, of placing all his ‘bets on the dicey role of prevailing theory’ (this seems to be an unconscious homonym): ‘my strategy was dumb.’

Pyne’s point of departure is the false choice imposed by the literary approach to non-fiction, which allows only ‘a popular hack job’ and ‘a kludgey academic book’. As with Curthoys and McGrath, he argues that form should follow function, and he gives particular attention to the principles of design. In violation of their injunction to ‘favour shorter sentences wherever possible’, he allows much greater freedom. Much of his practical advice on writing, cadence, diction, the active and passive voice, quotation and citation accords with Curthoys and McGrath. He is just as vigilant on the obligations of the historian to what can be known and the primacy of substance over style: hence his dictum that ‘evidence trumps aesthetics’. It is the strategies for realising the history that exercise him. His treatment of these aspects is more systematic, his case studies longer and more challenging. Pyne’s book could be read with profit by any historian.

I have already recommended Pyne to colleagues, and I shall be advising my postgraduates to make extensive use of Curthoys and McGrath. I have a feeling that my advice will be taken by those who don’t need it, those who are already conscious of language and style. The others will continue to put words on paper as if they were loading data onto dumb barrows, to use Pyne’s metaphor. You can read their drafts and correct the mistakes of syntax, lexicon and punctation, but that doesn’t reduce their deafness to tone.

There are others excited by writing, though I am far from sure that they should be encouraged to enrol in university writing programs or be lured by publishers into the circuit of the literary festival. All too often, the able young historians who respond to the blandishments of Calliope forsake Clio. They sacrifice the substance of their thesis to literary effect, and produce a book that is neither good history nor widely read. Far better for them to take their advice from the historians who have produced these manuals.