Sarah Kanning

This week, I’m recommending a book to all those tired and bedraggled writers who are now more than two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). If you need balm for your weary souls, this is it: If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. This book was first published in 1938, but is absolutely relevant today. The current publisher is Graywolf; I have their 1987 edition, but there is a 2007 edition with an introduction by Andrei Cordescu (which I haven’t seen).

Ueland taught creative writing at a YWCA in Minneapolis for several years, and also rubbed elbows with a bohemian New York City crowd that also included Eugene O’Neill. Carl Sandburg was a friend and, not given to half measures, he told her that “This is the best book ever written about how to write.”

Her first lesson is this: “everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.” Oh, a dewy idealist! the snarkier among us might say — but Ueland came to this conclusion after teaching writing at a YWCA for three years. So idealist she definitely is, but more of a hard-boiled one, if that’s possible.

Her whole purpose, I think, is to get the reader into the best possible mental state to write: fearless, honest, and optimistic. Someone who is already half-wincing, waiting for the blow of criticism to land, is not going to do the kind of fiercely original writing that Ueland (along with most readers, I think) hopes for.

“Though everybody is talented and original,” Ueland cautions, “often it does not break through for a long time. People are too scared, too self-conscious, too proud, too shy…. Another trouble with writers in the first twenty years, is an anxiety to be effective, to impress people. They write pretentiously. It is so hard not to do this. That was my trouble” (63). That’s the bad news: it takes work, a lot of it, for a long time, to “break through.” On the plus side, if you follow Ueland’s advice, it will be an adventure, not drudgery; the preceding quote came from her chapter, “Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write.”

She has much to say, too, about the rest of life that intrudes on one’s creative endeavors, so for those who are continually battling guilt — thinking they aren’t living up to their various duties when they are writing, and thinking they are not living up to their art when they are being dutiful — this book is essential reading.

Find If You Want to Write at a nearby library or purchase it.