The Write Stuff

I just finished reading a classic, if rather quirky, book. If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit, was originally published in 1938 and reissued in 1983, two years before the author died at the age of 93. According to the inside notes, the author, Brenda Ueland, was born at the turn of the century in Minneapolis to a lawyer father and suffragist mother. She spent some time in New York hanging out with the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village before returning to the Midwest to write, edit, and teach. There are two great pictures of her on the inside cover. The photo from 1938 (age 47) shows her from the side in an austere suit jacket and plain white blouse, looking quite serious and yet dreamy as she gazes at some distant point. In the photo taken for the second edition (age 91) she's wearing a boldly stripped jacket with her bow tie askew and her hair rather wild as she looks directly into the camera with a quizzical half-smile on her face. It looks like a lot of living went on between those two pictures. The book is an odd mix of spiritual, feminist, and practical insights about the personal value of expressing one’s divine creativity through writing. Her main point is that, “everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” She believed that everybody has something original to say if he/she speaks the truth from his/her true inner self. She encouraged her students to get out of their own way and write what they knew and felt without laboring over the words. She was a big advocate of “living in the present moment”, long walks and making time for solitude, all of which she felt opened one up to creativity. She urged women to avoid being consumed by attention to housework and catering to everyone else’s needs. Sounds very modern! I wonder what Brenda Ueland would think of blogging if she were alive today?