If You Want to Write. Illustrated

Brenda Ueland

• Publisher: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780880004428
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

Brenda Ueland was a well-known lawyer, feminist activist, writer, and journalist.If You Want to Write is her most famous work. It is a classic study of the essence of literary creativity and its techniques.When formulating a philosophy on creativity, Brenda wrote: "Why should we all use our creative power....? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money."

CHAPTER I

Everybody Is Talented, Original and Has Something Important to Say

I HAVE BEEN WRITING A LONG TIME AND HAVE LEARNED some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years. In this class were all kinds of people: prosperous and poor, stenographers, housewives, salesmen, cultivated people and little servant girls who had never been to high school, timid people and bold ones, slow and quick ones.

This is what I learned: everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

And it may comfort you to know that the only people you might suspect of not having talent are those who write very easily and glibly, and without inhibition or pain, skipping gaily through a novel in a week or so. These are the only ones who did not seem to improve much, to go forward. You cannot get much out of them. They give up working presently and drop out. But these, too, were talented underneath. I am sure of that. It is just that they did not break through the shell of easy glibness to what is true and alive underneath—just as most people must break through a shell of timidity and strain.

Everybody Is Talented

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. Try not expressing anything for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter or draw a picture or sing, or make a dress or a garden. Religious men used to go into the wilderness and impose silence on themselves, but it was so that they would talk to God and nobody else. But they expressed something: that is to say they had thoughts welling up in them and the thoughts went out to someone, whether silently or aloud.

Writing or painting is putting these thoughts on paper. Music is singing them. That is all there is to it.

Everybody Is Original

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be. Jennings at Johns Hopkins, who knows more about heredity and the genes and chromosomes than any man in the world, says that no individual is exactly like any other individual, that no two identical persons have ever existed. Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original.

So remember these two things: you are talented, and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing, and I will tell why later.

This creative power and imagination is in everyone, and so is the need to express it, i.e., to share it with others. But what happens to it?

It is very tender and sensitive, and it is usually drummed out of people early in life by criticism (so-called “helpful criticism” is often the worst kind), by teasing, jeering, rules, prissy teachers, critics, and all those unloving people who forget that the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life. Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.

You know how all children have this creative power. You have all seen things like this: the little girls in our family used to give play after play. They wrote the plays themselves (they were very good plays too, interesting, exciting, and funny). They acted in them. They made the costumes themselves, beautiful, effective, and historically accurate, contriving them in the most ingenious way out of attic junk and their mothers’ best dresses. They constructed the stage and theater by carrying chairs, moving the piano, carpentering. They printed the tickets and sold them. They made their own advertising. They drummed up the audience, throwing out a dragnet for all the hired girls, dogs, babies, mothers, neighbors within a radius of a mile or so. For what reward? A few pins and pennies.

Yet these small ten-year-olds were working with feverish energy and endurance. (A production took about two days.) If they had worked that hard for school it probably would have killed them. They were working for nothing but fun, for that glorious inner excitement. It was the creative power working in them. It was hard, hard work, but there was no pleasure or excitement like it, and it was something never forgotten.

But this joyful, imaginative, impassioned energy dies out of us very young. Why? Because we do not see that it is great and important. Because we let dry obligation take its place. Because we don’t respect it in ourselves and keep it alive by using it. And because we don’t keep it alive in others by listening to them.

For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.

How does the creative impulse die in us? The English teacher who wrote fiercely on the margin of your theme in blue pencil: “Trite, rewrite,” helped to kill it. Critics kill it, your family. Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands. Older brothers sneer at younger brothers and kill it. There is that American pastime known as “kidding”—with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything. But I will tell more about that later.

You have noticed how teachers, critics, parents, and other know-it-alls, when they see you have written something, become at once long-nosed and finicking and go through it gingerly sniffing out the flaws. AHA! a misspelled word! as though Shakespeare could spell! As though spelling, grammar and what you learn in a book about rhetoric has anything to do with freedom and the imagination!

A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism …” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.”

So often I come upon articles written by critics of the very highest brow, and by other prominent writers, deploring the attempts of ordinary people to write. The critics rap us savagely on the head with their thimbles, for our nerve. No one but a virtuoso should be allowed to do it. The prominent writers sell funny articles about all the utterly crazy, fatuous, amateurish people who think they can write.

Well, that is all right. But this is one of the results: all people who try to write (and all people long to, which is natural and right) become anxious, timid, contracted, become perfectionists, so terribly afraid that they may put something down that is not as good as Shakespeare.

And so no wonder you don’t write and put it off month after month, decade after decade. For when you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, free and not anxious. The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:

“Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.”

And if you have no such friend—and you want to write—well, then you must imagine one.

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.

 

 

I hate it not so much on my own account, for I have learned at last not to let it balk me. But I hate it because of the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.

A gifted young woman writes a poem. It is rejected. She does not write another perhaps for two years, perhaps all her life. Think of the patience and love that a tap-dancer or vaudeville acrobat puts into his work. Think of how many times Kreisler has practiced trills. If you will write as many words as Kreisler has practiced trills I prophesy that you will win the Nobel Prize in ten years.

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 beautiful.

And so now you will begin to work at your writing. Remember these things. Work with all your intelligence and love. Work freely and rollickingly as though they were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

And so that you will work long hours and not neglect it, I will now prove that it is important for yourself that you do so.

CHAPTER II

Imagination Is the Divine Body in Every Man

Imagination Is the Divine Body in Every Man

William Blake

I HAVE PROVED THAT YOU ARE ALL ORIGINAL AND talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse.

But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear that expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching items off lists and thinking you are being efficient; by anxiety about making a living, by fear of not excelling.

Now this creative power I think is the Holy Ghost. My theology may not be very accurate, but that is how I think of it. I know that William Blake called this creative power the Imagination, and he said it was God. He, if anyone, ought to know, for he was one of the greatest poets and artists that ever lived.

Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all of their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.

How could we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it. But if we are women we think it is more important to wipe noses and carry doilies than to write or to play the piano. And men spend their lives adding and subtracting and dictating letters when they secretly long to write sonnets and play the violin and burst into tears at the sunset.

They do not know, as Blake did, that this is a fearful sin against themselves. They would be much greater now, more full of light and power, if they had really written the sonnets and played the fiddle and wept over the sunset, as they wanted to.

I have to stop here and tell you a little about Blake. This is to show you the blessings of using your creative power. To show you what it is (which may take me a whole book) and what it feels like.

Blake used to say, when his energies were diverted from his drawing or writing, “that he was being devoured by jackals and hyenas.” And his love of Art (i.e., expressing in painting or writing the ideas that came to his Imagination) was so great that he would see nothing but Art in anything he loved. And so, as he loved the Apostles and Jesus, he used to say that “they were all artists.”

God he often called the “Poetic Genius,” and he said “He who loves feels love descend into him and if he has wisdom, may perceive it is from the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord.”

Now this free abundant use of his creative power made him one of the happiest men who ever lived. He wrote copious endless poetry (without the slightest hope or concern that it would ever be published). For a time he thought that if he wrote less he would do more engraving and painting. He stopped it for a month or more. But he found on comparison that he did more painting when he let out this inspired visionary writing. All of which proves, I think, that the more you use this joyful creative power—like the little girls producing the plays—the more you have.

As for Blake’s happiness—a man who knew him said: “If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.”

And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. (I think ambition injures it and makes it a nervous strain and hard work.) He burned most of his own work. Because he said: “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.”

As an old man, his wish for a little girl was “that God might make His world as beautiful to her as it had been to him.”

He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven.

“The death of a saint!” said a poor charwoman who had come in to help Mrs. Blake.

Yet this was the man who said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and “imaginative dearth.”

And what we so often call “reason” and think is so fine is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our memory and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. “It won’t pay.” “People will think it is silly.” “No one else does it.” “It is immoral.”

But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

For this “Reason,” as Blake calls it (which is really just caution), continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. “For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things.” And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic Know-it-all, warned people against “mere enthusiasm,” Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent, and fierce red-haired man): “Mere Enthusiasm is the All in All!”

I tell you all this because I hope to prove to you the importance of your working at writing,[1] at some creative thing that 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!

We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first—at least for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you will use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, lighthearted, and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.

I know a very great woman who makes her living by teaching violin lessons in the daytime. (Her name is Francesca and I may have to speak of her later.) Then from midnight until five o’clock in the morning, she is happy because she can work on her book. This is her daily routine. The book is her life work. She has been working at it for thirty years. In it she hopes to explain to people how they can learn to play the violin beautifully in two years instead of ten, and she wants them to know this because playing great music will do so much for them (all).

One day she came to me and had a very bad cold. “Oh, lie down quick!” I exclaimed, “and I will get you some hot lemonade and put a shawl over yourself.”

She opened her eyes wide at me, and said almost with horror in her voice:

“Oh, that is no way to treat a cold! … No, I slumped a little yesterday and so I caught it. But I worked all night and it is much, much better now.”

Now, you see, I have established a reason for your working at writing, not in a trifling, weak way, but with affection and endurance. In other words, I want to make you feel that there is a great intrinsic reward to writing. Unless you feel that, you will soon give it up. You won’t last very long at it. A few rejection slips will flatten you out. A few years of not making a cent out of it will make you give it up and feel bitterly that it was a waste of time.

I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that. Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

CHAPTER III

Why a Renaissance Nobleman Wrote Sonnets

NOW PERHAPS THE THOUGHTS, “THERE IS NO MONEY IN it,” and “It may never be published,” you find dry up all the springs of energy in you, so that you can’t drag yourself to a piece of paper.

I have experienced this often. I have cleared it up for myself in this way:

At the time of the Renaissance, all gentlemen wrote sonnets. They did not think of getting them in the Woman’s Home Companion. Well, why write a sonnet at all then?

Now one reason is (and this is very fine and commendable) the hope of getting it in the Woman’s Home Companion. But there are many other reasons more important. And incidentally unless you have these other reasons, the sonnet won’t have much vitality, and the Woman’s Home Companion will send you a rejection slip.

A Renaissance nobleman wrote a love sonnet for a number of reasons. A slight and very incidental reason may have been that he wanted to show people he could do it. But the main reason was to tell a certain lady that he loved her: (although they also wrote beautiful sonnets then about all sorts of things: sonnets that were prayers, that were indignant business letters, that were political arguments).

But say the nobleman wrote a sonnet to tell the lady that he loved her. His chest was full of an uncomfortable pent-up feeling that he had to express. He did it as eloquently, beautifully, and passionately as he could, on paper.

And although his sonnet was never published in any magazine, and he never got a cent for it, he was not unrewarded any more than a person who sings a beautiful Bach chorale is unrewarded and needs to be paid for it—any more than the little ten-year-old girls who produced the plays had to have fifty cents an hour and the regular union rates.

One of the intrinsic rewards for writing the sonnet was that then the nobleman knew and understood his own feeling better, and he knew 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.

If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.

When van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled notepaper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I had thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about design and balance and getting interesting planes into your painting, and avoided, with the most stringent severity, showing the faintest academical tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love[2] and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

The difference between van Gogh and you and me is, that while we may look at the sky and think it is beautiful, we don’t go so far as to show someone else how it looks. One reason may be that we do not care enough about the sky or for other people. But most often I think it is because we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.

And van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap notepaper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. He made it as much like what he loved as he could. You and I might have made the drawing and scratched it off roughly. Well, that would have been a good thing to do too. But van Gogh made the drawing with seriousness and truth.

This is what van Gogh wrote about people like all of us, whose creative impulse is confused (and not simple as his was) and mixed up with all sorts of things such as the wish to make an impression (not just to tell the truth) and to do what critics say artists should do, and so on.

He said:

“When I see young painters compose and draw from memory,[3] and then haphazardly smear on whatever they like also from memory—then keep it at a distance and put on a very mysterious, gloomy face to find out what in Heaven’s name it may look like, and at last and finally make something from it, always from memory—it sometimes disgusts me, and makes me think it all very tedious and dull.

“They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer—some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky—are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one’s life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.”

To show that the creative impulse of van Gogh, a great genius, was simply loving what he saw and then wanting to share it with others, not for the purpose of showing off, but out of generosity, I will tell you a few things he said. I want to show you that what he had in him is just what you all have in yourselves and should let out. For I must remind you again and again that that is the whole purpose of this book.

Van Gogh said:

“My only anxiety is what I can do … could I not be of use and good for something? … And in a picture I wish to say something that would console as music does.”

He said:

“We take beautiful walks together. It is very beautiful here, if one only has an open and simple eye without any beams in it. But if one has that it is beautiful everywhere.”

He said:

“Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her.”

And this:

“When we drove back from Zundert that evening across the heath, Father and I got out and walked awhile; the sun was setting red behind the pine trees, and the evening sky was reflected in the pools; the heath and the yellow and white and gray sand were so full of harmony and sentiment—see, there are moments in life when everything within us too is full of peace and sentiment, and our whole life seems to be a path through the heath, but it is not so always.”

And this:

“What has changed is that my life was then less difficult, but as to the inward state that has not changed. If there has been any change at all, it is that I think and believe and love more seriously now what I already thought and believed and loved then.”

This:

“Oh, while I was ill there was a fall of damp and melting snow, I got up at night to look at the country. Never, never had nature seemed to me so touching and so full of feeling.”

And this:

“In a few years I must finish a certain work. I need not hurry myself; there is no good in that—but I must work on in full calmness and serenity, as regularly and concentratedly as possible, as briefly and concisely as possible.

“The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude[4] want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures—not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express sincere human feeling.”

You can see how van Gogh’s simple impulse is in all of us. But in us it is clouded over and confused with notions such as: will the work be good or bad? or would it be Art? or would it be modernistic enough and not academical? and would it sell? would it be economically sound to put the time in trying to do it?

Well, van Gogh was one of the great painters. During his life he made only 109 dollars in all on his paintings. They are now worth about two million dollars. 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. And see, a few words he has written in his letters, these many years after his death, have changed my whole life!

And one of the most important of these intrinsic rewards is the stretched understanding, the illumination. By painting the sky, van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it. In the same way (as I would tell my class), you will never know what your husband looks like unless you try to draw him, and you will never understand him unless you try to write his story.

I tell you these things because of my own difficulties. One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: will it make money? But you find that if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don’t make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated, and without life in it. Or you do make money, and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writings give you the pip.

Another great stumbling block and inhibition to me was the idea that writing (since I wanted to make a fortune and dazzle the public)[5] was something in which you showed off, were a virtuoso, set yourself up to be something remarkable.

But at last I understood from William Blake and van Gogh and other great men, and from myself—from the truth that is in me (and which I have at last learned to declare and stand up for, as I am trying to persuade you to stand up for your inner truth)—at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it. If they did not—fine. They did not need to listen. That was all right too. And I would never fall into those two extremes (bot...

Table of contents

• Brenda Ueland
• IF YOU WANT TO WRITE
• PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
• CHAPTER I
• Everybody Is Talented, Original and Has Something Important to Say
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• CHAPTER V
• CHAPTER VI
• CHAPTER VII
• CHAPTER VIII
• CHAPTER IX
• CHAPTER X
• CHAPTER XI
• CHAPTER XII
• CHAPTER XIII
• CHAPTER XIV
• CHAPTER XV
• CHAPTER XVI
• CHAPTER XVII
• CHAPTER XVIII
• Footnotes