Book Review: If You Want to Write

Kristen King

If You Want to Write
by Brenda Ueland
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997
179 pages, $11.95

reviewed by Karen Fisher-Alaniz

www.inkthinkerblog.com — Brenda Ueland’s book, If You Want to Write, is not just for aspiring writers. It is aimed at anyone who has within them a yearning to create. Ueland taught writing at colleges and universities. She wrote more than 5 million words in her lifetime. But the accomplishment she was most proud of, was teaching ordinary people to write, at her local YMCA. The book is sprinkled with examples of her students’ accomplishments and their struggles to achieve them.

And Ueland has no qualms about stating what is true, that she is a great writer and a magnificent teacher. She quotes William Blake, “He who knows not his own genius has none.”

Chapter titles include “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”; “Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write”; and “Why you are not to be discouraged, annihilated, by rejection slips.” But my personal favorite is the chapter “Why women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.”

Why is that my favorite? This book was originally published in 1938 by a woman who dared to wear pants and get her hair cut short at a barber shop. I am inspired by the fact that she was telling women, still under social pressures to keep their ankles covered, to forget their housework and pluck away at a typewriter instead. Her lessons, her wisdom are both timeless and timely. She was indeed a renaissance woman.

If You Want to Write is subtitled, A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit. Many pages contain long footnotes, more like after-thoughts. I often found those even more compelling than the text itself. Ueland leads by word and by example, giving us confidence to follow her, when she says to, “…work from now until you die, with real love and imagination and intelligence, at your writing… If you do that, out of the mountains that you write some mole hills will be published.”

And so…dirty dishes sit in my sink and mounds of laundry on the floor as I pluck away! Oh what joy to neglect my housework.

****
Karen Fisher-Alaniz recently finished transcribing more than 400 pages of letters her father wrote during World War II. She is currently writing a book based on the secret life he led as a code breaker during the war. Contact her at karenlalaniz@hotmail.com.

Although this article was published by Kristen King, the original author retains all copyright and should be contacted for reprint requests.