On My Night Table…

If You Want To Write,  A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit, by Brenda Ueland, Greywolf Press, 2007, originally published in 1938.

Actually, this book is always on my night table!  It is my favorite book on writing and creativity.  You can turn to almost any page and find something wonderful, truthful, and refreshing.  Dear old Brenda always lifts my spirits.

Here is a little bit of what I read last night in Chapter 7.  She is talking about the students in her class:

"...they would break through... as from a cocoon, and write suddenly in a living, true, touching, remarkable way.  It would happen suddenly, overnight.  They would break through from composition- writing, theme-writing, to some freedom and honesty...
What made them do this?  I think I know.  I think I helped them to do it.  And I did not do it by criticism, i.e., by pointing out all the mediocrities in their efforts (and so making them contract and try nervously to avoid all sorts of faults).  I helped them by trying to make them feel freer and bolder.  Let her go!  Be careless, reckless!  Be a lion, be a pirate!  Write any old way.
Francesca [a friend] helped me to understand this.  When giving violin lessons she never tells a child that he is playing a bad note.  Why do that?  He knows it himself.  All are trying to get nearer and nearer to true pitch, to perfection, anyway.  Why fix the attention on the avoidance of mistakes?  It just tightens them up, contracts them, and makes them dislike lessons.  Moreover, when they are thinking so vividly about the bad notes that they are warned to avoid, they play them again and again... To play a note truly, as the simplest person knows, your mind must be on the true note, your Imagination hearing it as you want to play it."

Isn't she marvellous?

Be a lion!