If You Want to Write

Just write! Just do it! That’s what they say. But who are they? I’d need more than ten fingers to count all the names. But for me, one name stands out among those many pundits.

And that’s Brenda Ueland.

“Who?” you ask. She doesn’t have a website. No Twitter handle. Certainly not an Instagram account.

No, she doesn’t, because she died thirty-six years ago, in 1985. She taught writing part-time in rural Minnesota, influencing many writers over the years. Apple-computer guru Guy Kawasaki is one of those writers. For him, Ueland’s book “was my guiding light when I first started writing.”

Even though it first appeared on booksellers’ shelves in 1938, Ueland’s masterpiece If You Want to Write is still in print. The poet Carl Sandburg dubbed it “the best book ever written about how to write.”

What was Ueland’s secret rule for writing?

Tell the truth, your truth.

Try to discover your true,

 honest, untheoretical self.

Ueland doesn’t exclaim, “Just write!” She goes deeper than that. She delves into the complexity of writing without all the bumper-sticker slogans. Her guru was English Romantic poet William Blake, who was anything but simple in his language.

Take the title of Chapter 1: “Everybody is Talented, Original, and Has Something Important to Say.”

That’s what I needed to hear as a beginning writer. In those days, I considered writing frivolous, at least my writing was, because my chances of being published seemed nil.

I didn’t live in New York.

I didn’t know anybody in publishing.

I didn’t type very well (and I still don’t!).

I didn’t have a lot of money for paper and ink and envelopes and return postage.

And I didn’t have any self-confidence when it came to my writing, thanks to a professor, he who shall remain nameless, he who laughed when I said I wanted to write historical novels, he who threw cold harsh words on my dreams. After that, I never told anyone else that I majored in history for that very reason.

So, when I discovered Ueland’s book, it seemed as if she’d tossed a life preserver my way.

Know that you have talent, are original

and have something to say.

Listen to her words:

But what happened to it [creative power and imagination]?

It is very tender and sensitive, and it is usually drummed out of people early in life by criticism … by teasing, jeering, rules, prissy teachers, critics, and all those unloving people who forget that the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life.

That striking passage gave me the courage to keep writing.

But I wouldn’t be honest if I said I hunkered down and just wrote after reading If You Want to Write. My butt didn’t hit the chair every day, as Anne Lamott says is necessary for writers.

Nor did I write freely, with abandon.

Write freely, recklessly, in first drafts.

In Chapter VII, titled “Be Careless, Reckless! Be A Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write,” Ueland urges writers to skip writing pretentiously. This happens with encouragement, with a license to say whatever comes to mind. She says:

To show you how people’s writing expands under encouragement, I will tell you of some of my pupils, what happened to these few, happened to all of them except, as I said, to those to whom writing is an easy, glib, superficial babbling. For these are apt to give it up soon, before they break through the shell of glibness to what is true underneath.

I was no lion or pirate, that’s for sure. For the longest time, in order to write at all, I needed a deadline set by someone or something besides myself. In other words, external deadlines kept me motivated. And that led to dozens of book reviews and articles in food encyclopedias over the years, all stellar experiences in keeping it short, sweet, simple.

Why other people’s deadlines?

I didn’t give myself permission to be a real writer, whatever that meant.

Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers.

Remember, I considered writing frivolous. Who was I, an ordinary person, to write?

Brenda Ueland pokes a hole in that idea in If You Want to Write.

But this is one of the results [of high-brow critics and prominent writers “deploring the attempts of ordinary people to write”]: that all people who try to write … become anxious, timid, contracted, become perfectionists, so terribly afraid that they may put something down that is not as good as Shakespeare.

She goes on, saying that writers, like all artists, must practice, must keep on doing the work even in the face of rejection and criticism, with “all your intelligence and love.”

Know that it is good to work.

At the end, in Chapter 18, she sums it all up with a twelve-point manifesto,  listing the essential points of her book.

Brenda Ueland threw me a life preserver, and I grabbed it, hanging on for dear life.

Tackle anything you want to … anything … .

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This post is the first of four posts about books that encouraged me to take myself seriously as a writer.

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