If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

by Brenda Ueland, Andrei Codrescu (Introduction)

Overview

But we must try to find our True Conscience, our True Self, the very Center, for this is the only first-rate choice-making center. Here lies all originality, talent, honor, truthfulness, courage and cheerfulness. Here lies the ability to choose the good and the grand, the true and the beautiful.

In her ninety-three remarkable years, Brenda Ueland published six million words. She said she had two rules she followed absolutely: to tell the truth, and not to do anything she didn't want to do. Her integrity shines throughout If You Want to Write, her bestselling classic on the process of writing that has already inspired thousands to find their own creative center. Carl Sandburg called this book "the best book ever written about how to write." Yet Ueland reminds us that "whenever I say ‘writing' in this book, I also mean anything that you love and want to do or make."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555974718
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/26/2007
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 8.05(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

BRENDA UELAND (1891–1985) spent many years living in New York, where she was part of the Greenwich Village bohemian crowd. She received an international swimming record for over-eighty-year-olds and was knighted by the King of Norway.

Andrei Codrescu, who lived in socialist Romania until the age of nineteen, is a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. A professor of literature at Louisiana State University, he lives in New Orleans.

Read an Excerpt

If You Want to Write

A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit

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By Brenda Ueland

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 1987 Estate of Brenda Ueland
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-260-8

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Chapter One

Yes, it has made me like working to see that writing is not a performance but a generosity.

I find that I wrote this to someone three years ago:

"Forgive me, but perhaps you should write again. I think there is something necessary and life-giving about 'creative work' (forgive the term). A state of excitement. And it is like a faucet: nothing comes unless you turn it on, and the more you turn it on, the more comes.

"It is our nasty twentieth century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul.

"Yes, we are all thoroughly materialistic about such things. 'What's the use?' we say, of doing anything unless you make money or get applause? for when a man is dead he is dead.' Socrates and the Greeks decided that a man's life should be devoted to 'the tendance of the Soul' (Soul included intelligence, imagination, spirit, understanding, personality) for the soul lived eternally, in all probability.

"I think it is all right to work for money, to work to have things enjoyed by people, even very limited ones; but the mistake is to feel that the work, the effort, the search is not the important and the exciting thing. One cannot strive to write a cheap, popular story without learning more about cheapness. But enough. I may very well be getting to raving."

And so now I have established reasons why you should work from now on until you die, with real love and imagination and intelligence, at your writing or whatever work it is that you care about. If you do that, out of the mountains that you write some mole hills will be published. Or you may make a fortune and win the Nobel Prize. But if nothing is ever published at all and you never make a cent, just the same it will be good that you have worked.

1938

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland Copyright © 1987 by Estate of Brenda Ueland. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

I was with [Ueland] right up to the end and wanted to shout, ‘Amen.'” —Andrei Codrescu, NPR

“I only have to read a few sentences and I am infected with the desire to follow her.” —The Women's Review of Books

From the Publisher