In our day, collections of anecdotes—criticisms and observations, smart sayings and ludicrous tales, delivered by eminent men in conversation and recorded by their friends or discovered among their papers after their death, and put together with historical incidents concerning them—are published under the term ana.
Ana
The ancients were in the habit of indulging in this species of literature. From earliest periods Oriental nations have preserved the intimate talk of their wise men. From them the Greeks and Romans took up the practice. Plato and Xenophon recorded the colloquially expressed ideas of their master Socrates. It appears that Julius Cæsar compiled a book of apophthegms in which he related the bon mots of Cicero; and a freedman of that orator, taken with his master's liveliness and wit, composed three books of a work entitled "De Jocis Ciceronis."
Eighteenth century collections
But the term ana seems to have been applied to such collections only so far back as the fifteenth century. The information and anecdotes picked up by Poggio and his friend Barthelemi Montepolitiano during a literary trip in Germany "are to be called," says another friend in a letter, "Poggiana and Montepolitiana." Perhaps the most typical, and surely a very famous and interesting, production of this species of narrative in English is the "Walpoliana," a transcript of the literary conversation of Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford. Selden's "Table Talk" was considered by Dr. Johnson good ana, better than the French. But incomparably superior to all, a collection the most remarkable in the English language-and indeed, in any language (as a writer in the "Britannica" asserts)—is James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson." Though not conforming to the type of collection either in name or in form of presentation, this, according to Carlyle, "the greatest production of the eighteenth century," depends for its value mainly upon its ana. "Its interest," the same writer goes on to say, "arises, not from the details it furnishes of the events of Dr Johnson's career, still less from any attempt at a discriminating estimate of his work and character, but the graphic representation it gives of his habitual manner of life and speech. The animate greatness of Johnson appears, more than in all his writings, in his portrait delineated with the exactness of sharply-defined photograph, as he appeared, to the eyes of his admiring biographer, in his daily deshabille."
That is the secret of anecdote—it must get at the real man in however small a part.
While a book of ana is a collection of short, pointed, true colloquial relations of more or less detached interesting particulars concerning a person of consequence, a single anecdote is one of those interesting particulars entirely detached, short, pointed, true, and colloquial. A book of anecdotes is a group of stories, miscellaneous so far as subject matter is concerned. Spence's "Anecdotes" is a very famous eighteenth century literary set; and Percy's is an early nineteenth, with the stories selected—as the preface ostensibly gives notice—for their moral effect, and arranged according to the virtue illustrated or the subject treated—humanity, generosity, kindness; science, art, and so on.
How to write an anecdote
As we have seen, to be most interesting an anecdote must be singularly expressive of the peculiarities of the person represented; or if the event recorded is not in the form of a character episode, but rather in the form of an unusual happening, it must be consonant with the accepted popular notion of the man's personality. To write an original anecdote you will need to pick out of your past experience or the experience of some one of your acquaintances a story of a more or less important personage in your neighborhood, a happening that has never hitherto been written down. If the person concerned is not very well known or if the trait of character revealed would not be immediately recognized by his friends, you might prefix a slight statement that will help point your narrative. Remember, however, that an anecdote must be very brief; also that it must have a single and complete climax; and that you must under no circumstance be induced to add another word after the climax is reached.