Brenda Ueland

Writer

1891-10-24 – 1985-03-05

Brenda Ueland was an American writer, editor, and teacher best known for her book If You Want to Write, which encouraged personal voice and creativity.

Books by Brenda Ueland

If You Want to Write
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Me
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Strength to your sword arm
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Quotes by Brenda Ueland

By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
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When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks. And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.
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But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. Be not anxious for the morrow, and which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.
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In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.
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Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery....I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.
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Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
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Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
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Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. I will not Reason and Compare, said Blake; my business is to Create. Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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Remember William Blake who said: Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
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...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
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Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
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The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one.
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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
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(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and imaginative death.And what we so often call reason and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. It won't pay. People will think it is silly. No one else does it. It is immoral.But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.For this Reason as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things. And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against mere enthusiasm, Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!
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(about William Blake)As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy....He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven.
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...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
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...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
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Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
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