Notes on “If You Want to Write”, by Brenda Ueland
As I read this book I’ll be adding personal thoughts the book generates. I’ll also add direct quotes with page references. From time to time I’ll review my entries and highlight those that are most significant to me.
Chapter 1 – Everybody is Talented, Original and Has Something Important to Say
p. 21 The imagination works slowly and quietly.
p. ??? “Freed them from the clouds of automatic verbiage.”
When I spent the summer of 1963 in southern California after high school graduation, I was in a small apartment. Young neighbor girls had seen me. They came to the door one day, “come see our play”. I did, it was alive with their young imaginations. It was impossible not to be drawn into their excitement, their world, I loved it. One girl took me to meet her big sister, who was supposedly watching them. She was sunning herself in “an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikini”. A little added reward for being a good audience.
p. ? If you have no friend to encourage you, invent one. {I write emails to Jesse Wyeth. At some point I’ll post some to Letters Written and Answered}
p. ? Practice with all your intelligence and love.
p. ? Write to understand your own feelings better.
p. 33 A walk a little too long releases creative thoughts by placing you fully in the moment. The thoughts come slowly, little inward bombs bursting quietly. Once the creative thoughts come, write them, but do not grind them by endlessly rewriting, striving for perfection. Let them be, make room for more.
Chapter 6 – When you write, write in the moment, that is, write what you are feeling deep inside. Don’t write at or about something, write from within it. Others, when reading, will feel what you are feeling. p.42 “In other words, it is when you are really living in the present – working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.”
This writing in the moment, becoming lost, totally absorbed, comes most often for me when I’m writing to someone, someone I care deeply about.
Chapter 9 p. 60 – Example of my preceding bold text…
“The sound of the wind grew louder, and I raised myself on my elbow and looked out. Yes, it was blowing hard. A rooster, looking very silly his feathers all this-way-and-that, scurried across the yard toward the comfort of the coop.” [from an excerpt by Elsa Krouch]
This goes on, I’m transported into that moment, place and time. That’s what I want from my writing. That’s what I take from this book.
Ueland write of the excerpt:
” This writing, you see, is very beautiful. It is impossible to cut it. I try to take out a sentence here or there, but cannot bring myself to do it. They are all too good and necessary and contribute too much. And so it is with Art, literature, belles lettres, or whatever you want to call it.”
belles-lettres meaning: essays, particularly with literary and artistic criticism… French phrase meaning ‘beautiful’ or ‘fine’ writing.
Interesting here, to me, is the use of a single quote around a word or phrase. I use this quite often in my writing or comments on Facebook when I either cannot, or do not want to, use bold letters or italics to emphasize.
p. 73 – Think of telling a story, not of writing it.
Chapter XIV
Whatever you write will reveal your personality, and whatever you are will show through your writing.
Chapter XVI
Use your imagination.
Ueland’s last line…
And if it [this book] has given you the impulse to write one small story, I am pleased.
I want to just briefly add, something that Brenda Ueland did in her book revealed to me a great deal about Brenda Ueland the person. She truly cared about her readers and students. Throughout the book, she not only pulled from hundreds of examples of writers that were examples of what she was telling us, she also wrote in the style that pulled me into a belief that what she was telling me was, in fact, the truth.
