By Brenda Ueland
"Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say" (p. 3). If you want to write, you can! This is the message Brenda Ueland delivers in If You Want to Write.
While this book is a "how to," it is more "you have to" and "Yes, you can too!" Ueland helped me with technique, but maybe more importantly with motivation. She writes:
I hope to prove to you the importance of your working at writing, at some creative thing you care about. Because only if I can make you feel that, will you do it and persist in it. And not only for the next few weeks! I want you to do it for years to come, all your life! (p. 14)
I doubt she intended it, but Brenda Ueland made me rethink my writing hour as time with the Lord; not just the moments I spend in the Word and in prayer. Why? Because I am doing what I am doing with the gifts he has given me in the world in which he placed me.
She also wants you to know that you need not be learned or "gifted," but you do need to write. And when you do, good things can happen. Take Sarah McShane for example, a woman who had "no courses in Browning and Tennyson, no talk at home about Dickens and Louisa M. Alcott" (p. 72) but who could write better than Mrs. Roosevelt. She concludes: "I want you to know that. This is so that you will not be discouraged, annihilated by rejection slips, and too much awed and inhibited by successful writers, but will work along in your own way, as Sarah McShane does" (p. 81).
Ueland is not against mechanics, but she would argue that something comes before mechanics, it is presence. Early on, Ueland comments about the writing of sonnets:
One of the intrinsic rewards for writing the sonnet was that then the nobleman knew and understood his own feeling better, and he new more about what love was, what part of his feelings were bogus (literary) and what real, and what a beautiful thing the Italian or the English language was" (p. 18).
As I read it, If You Want To Write is Brenda Ueland's effort toward that same sense of knowing.
Key lessons for writers: Pardon the "Ps," they just came . . .
1. Practice: "But here is an important thing: you must practice not perfunctorily, but with all your intelligence and love, as Kreisler does. A great musician once told me that one should never play a single note without hearing it, feeling that it is true, thinking it is beautiful" (p. 9)
2. Persistence: Van Gogh only earned $109 from his paintings during his lifetime. His painting of doctor Paul Gachet went for $75 million in 1991, and Christies in New York sold four more of Van Gouh's works in November of 2021 for $161 million. Ueland comments: "He had a terribly hard life--loneliness, poverty and starvation that led to insanity. And yet it was one of the greatest lives that was ever lived--the happiest, the most burningly incandescent" (p. 23). My conclusion drawing on her observation: Writers must never let their energies be dictated by their feelings of bearing minimal fruit.
3. Presence: In Chapter 6, "the dormant poet," Ueland highlights "living in the present" by contrasting Mexicans and southwestern Indians with northerners: "But we northerners have become too much driven by the idea that in twenty years we will live, not now: because by that time our savings and the accrued interest will make it possible. To live now would be idleness. And because of our fear we have come think of all idleness as hoggish, not as creative and radiant" (p. 56). Even as I write this review in the early hours of the morning, I do so out a desire "not to be idle." I appreciate her admonition. I hear her saying that to "not do" can be a very important "to do" in the creative process.
4. Process: One must have a process for capturing ideas, which often begin as interesting meandering thoughts. "Not knowing that they are thoughts at all, or "'thinking,' you have no respect for them and do not put them down on paper--which you are to do from now on! That is, you are always to act and express what goes through you" (p. 59). So carry a journal or have a means electronically to capture thoughts.
5. Productive idleness: "But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi . . . they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time." See quote below by Plotinus on contemplation. She adds:
I learned from [my class] that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little change to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness" (p. 49).
She add this: "Our idea that we must always be energetic and active is all wrong. . . . This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination; it is letting in ideas. Willing is doing something you know already, something you have been told by somebody else; there is no new imaginative understanding in it. And presently your soul gets frightfully sterile and dry because you are so quick, snappy and efficient about doing one thing after another that you have not time for your own ideas to come in and develop and gently shine" (p. 29). . . . "But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi . . . . dare to be idle, i.e. not be pressed and duty-driven all the time (p. 30).
6. Prescriptions to improve: (1) On storytelling, think of telling a story, not of writing it." "When you tell a story then you have the instinctive sense of timing in it, of going into detail where it is important, of moving fast over the surface of the story where that is necessary" (p. 103). (2) Description: "The more you wish to describe a Universal the more minutely and truthfully you must describe a particular" (p. 104). (3) Read your writing aloud to yourself. "As soon as your vice drags, cross that part out" (p. 138). (4) The more you feel it, the better you will write it (p. 114). (5) Read great Russian writers: Tolstoi, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky.
Quips and Quotes:
1. William Black on enthusiasm: "Mere Enthusiasm is the All in All!" William Blake (p.. 14)
2. Ueland on creative work: A state of excitement. And it is like a faucet: nothing comes unless you turn it on, and the more you turn it on, the more it comes" (p. 26)
3. Plotinus on contemplation: "So there are men too feeble for contemplation." "Being unable to raise themselves to contemplation from the weaknesses of their Soul, unable to behold spiritual reality and fill themselves with it, but desiring to see it, they are driven to action that they may see that which they could not see with the spiritual eye" (p. 32).
4. Ueland: "It is only in walks that are a little too long, that one has any new ideas" (p 44).
5. Blake on detail: The golden rule of art, as well as life is this: That the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. Great inventors in all ages knew this." "Singular and Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime"; and he said of beautiful form: "Minuteness is their whole Beauty" (pp104-5).
6. Blake on description: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius" (p. 108). "The truth, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But within the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc., everything is smoothed out to seem plausible, -- villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that one one believes a word of it" (p. 108).
7. On "Great men: "I have read all of Chekhov now. He is so great, and his letters and his life and what people remember of his is greater. Yet it is consoling that if he did not know all about cruelty, gluttony, cowardice, coldness in himself, he could not have written about them. Great men feel and know everything that mean men feel, even more clearly, but they seem to have made some kind of ascension, and these evil feelings, though they still understand them sympathetically, no longer exert any power over them" (p. 111).
8. Because it wasn't meant: Ueland decries writing like an advertising writer. "Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant. It was all written, not because the writer felt something and then said it (if you feel a thing the more simply you say it the better, the more effective), but because he tried to impress and inveigle people, convince them something is very fine about which he himself does not really care a button" (pp. 115-16).
9. Tolstoy on Critics: Critics are people especially incapable of knowing what art is because "they are erudite, that is perverted, and at the same time very self-confident individuals." This set of maladies makes them "opaque and atrophied so that they cannot feel any more with the immediacy of a child or of plain people or of poets" (p. 118-19).
10. The personality behind the writer is what she calls the Third Dimension. It will be that which shines through the writer's work.
11. On Fiction: For in fiction, Chekhov said, you can pose a questions (about poverty, morality, or whatever it is) but you must not answer it. As soon as you answer it the readers know you are lying, i.e., forcing your characters to prove something" (p. 124)
My recommendation:
Read Brenda Ueland to learn how to be a better writer. She is a good one. Better perhaps, is that while she doesn't know you, she believes in you. She really does. And she will give you examples of good writing and clues on how to improve your craft. As a theologian, Ueland falls short, but this word, is a verse worth memorizing: Keep a Slovenly, Headlong, Impulsive, Honest Diary. As she notes, not a "had lunch" diary, but one that records the thoughts, sights, and feelings of the day. My entry for this day, "Read Brenda Ueland today. Was silenced, prodded, challenged, and encouraged. I picked up my pen and began to write."
Some of the writers/books she cites:
1. T.E. Lawrence, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom."
2. Dostoevsky, Poor People
3. Writers who were prisoners: Sir Walter Raleight, Bunyan and Dostoevsky
4. Great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky
5. Browning, Tennyson, Dickens, Louisa M. Alcott
