The Best Writing Craft Book You’ve Never Heard Of
It’s quite a slim book. My edition is blue and white, with blurred, indistinct shapes behind its bold, all-caps title: IF YOU WANT TO WRITE. Let’s get down to brass tacks, it seems to be saying. I’m not going to lure you in with metaphors about birds. I’m here to tell you some hard truths.
If You Want to Write was originally published in 1938. It was written by a woman by the name of Brenda Ueland, born in 1891 and raised in Minneapolis. Now, I’m guessing that you’ve probably never heard of Brenda Ueland, and so allow me to more fully introduce her to you by quoting from the “About the Author” on the inside cover: “[S]he earned her living as a writer, editor, and teacher of writing. Brenda’s later years were full and active: she received an international swimming record for over-80-year-olds and was knighted by the King of Norway.”
Ahem. And now that you have a bit of an idea of the personality that we are dealing with here, we can dive into the book itself.
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If You Want to Write is rather a different kind of writing craft book. It offers practical writing advice, but not exactly the kind you are probably used to receiving. Brenda Ueland doesn’t instruct you on how to use verbs in your sentences, or on how to build characters. She doesn’t tell you not to use adverbs, or talk about story structure. Instead, she outlines a way of living life that will naturally lead to the joyful creation of the written word (or of “anything that you love and want to do or to make”), in a “living, true, touching, remarkable way.”
Her touchstones are simple, but they land unerringly in the heart.
First of all, her years of teaching led her to the conclusion that “everyone is talented, original, and has something important to say.” The self-trust that was inherent to us from birth, Ueland says, and is so essential to the creative process, has been squeezed out of us by critics, teachers, family. We have to relearn that we are brilliant, and this book sets out to tell us how.
Her chapters are wonderful, and boast titles that range from “Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion, Be a Pirate, When You Write,” to “Art is Infection,” to “Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect It for Their Writing.” There are liberal quotations from and references to her favourites sprinkled throughout the book—Tolstoy, Blake, and Van Gogh all make multiple appearances.
The book has an oddly spiritual element to it, partly because of the many Blake quotes and anecdotes. But again, it is not a typical book on spirituality. Reminding us at times of the era in which this was written, there are allusions to Christianity, but religion is treated unconventionally, and there is a sense that Ueland’s understanding of the divine is mainly that it is one way of describing the creative force.
She is also delightfully liberal with her footnotes. Sometimes the footnote content on a page is twice the main text. Here is a fantastic example of something that Brenda Ueland decided to put in a footnote:
“Sometimes say softly to yourself: ‘Now...now. What is happening to me now? This is now. What is coming into me now? This moment?’ Then suddenly you begin to see the world as you had not seen it before, to hear people’s voices and not only what they are saying but what they are trying to say and you sense the whole truth about them. And you sense existence, not piecemeal—not this object and that—but as a translucent whole.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but a book that puts that in a footnote has my attention.
If You Want to Write also goes in depth into what its author considers the vital components of creating. Idleness is one of them. Feeling free is another. Writing with what she calls “microscopic truthfulness” is a third, and perhaps the most uncommon piece of writing advice is what Ueland terms the “Third Dimension.” This means, to get straight to the point, that you need to be a good person, because you cannot escape the fact that your personality will show through your writing. “If the Third Dimension, the writer’s personality, has something fine in it, there you will see it through the words, as through glass,” she says In one of my favourite chapters, entitled “Why You Are Not to Be Discouraged, Annihilated, by Rejection Slips,” there is nary a mention of submitting your work, nor of rejection slips, until the very last paragraph. Instead, the entire chapter is devoted to comparing excerpts from published writers to an excerpt written by “Sarah McShane,” a pseudonym for one of Ueland’s students. The comparisons invariably end with “Sarah McShane’s writing is better,” or “Not as good as Sarah McShane’s,” or “No. Sarah McShane writes better.” It’s quite funny, but you can also see her point. Sarah McShane does write better. And that, my friends, is why you shouldn’t feel cast down by rejection slips.
By now, hopefully, you have the picture that this is an unusual and invigorating book. If You Want to Write embodies the qualities that Brenda Ueland advocates. It is truthful, it is authentic, and her personality and experiences certainly shine through the words on the paper. If we want to write, it tells us, we must work every day, work slowly, pay attention, work with pleasure, be authentic, write about what is in our hearts.
And if we’re not sure what that is? Well there is an answer for that too:
“The only way to find your true self is by recklessness and freedom...And do not try to be consistent, for what is true to you today may not be true at all tomorrow, because you see a better truth.”
