Becoming a Writer

by Dorothea Brande

The Four Difficulties

First there is the difficulty of writing at all.

Second, and far more often than the layman would believe, there is the writer who has had an early success but is unable to repeat it.

The third difficulty is a sort of combination of the first two: there are writers who can, at wearisomely long intervals, write with great effectiveness.

Often it is the result of such ideals of perfection as can hardly bear the light of day.

The fourth difficulty actually has a technical aspect: it is the inability to carry a story, vividly but imperfectly apprehended to a successful conclusion.

Those are the four difficulties oftenest met at the outset of an author’s writing life.

First of all, then, becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating a writer’s temperament.

There is an earlier and healthier idea of the artist than that, the idea of the genius as a man more versatile, more sympathetic, more studious than his fellows, more catholic in his tastes, less at the mercy of the ideas of the crowd.

the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the “innocence of eye” that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeonholing them without wonder or surprise;

But there is another element to his character, fully as important to his success. It is adult, discriminating, temperate, and just. It is the side of the artisan, the workman, and the critic rather than the artist. It must work continually with and through the emotional and childlike side, or we have no work of art.

The writer’s first task is to get these two elements of his nature into balance, to combine their aspects into one integrated character.

But there is no scandal and no danger in recognizing that you have more than one side to your character.

He worries to think of his immaturity, and wonders how he ever dared to think he had a word worth saying. He gets as stage-struck at the thought of his unseen readers as any sapling actor.

Every writer goes through this period of despair.

Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer—the craftsman and the critic in him—are actually hostile to the good of the unconscious, the artist’s side; and the converse of this proposition is likewise true.

Like any other art, creative writing is a function of the whole man. The unconscious must flow freely and richly, bringing at demand all the treasures of memory, all the emotions, incidents, scenes, intimations of character and relationship which it has stored away in its depths; the conscious mind must control, combine and discriminate between these materials without hampering the unconscious flow.

the story arises in the unconscious. It then appears, sometimes only vaguely prefigured, at other times astonishingly definite, in the consciousness. There it is scrutinized, pruned, altered, strengthened, made more spectacular or less melodramatic; and is returned into the unconscious for the final synthesis of its elements.

There will be a prosaic, everyday, practical person to bear the brunt of the day’s encounters.

remembering that its first function is to provide suitable conditions for the artist-self. The other half of your dual nature may then be as sensitive, enthusiastic, and partisan as you like; only it will not drag those traits into the workaday world.

One excellent psychological reason for an author to keep his profession to himself is that if you confess so much you are likely to go further and talk of the things you mean to write.

Send your practical self out into the world to receive suggestions, criticisms, or rejections;

your writing self is an instinctive, emotional creature, and if you are not careful you will find yourself living the life that will give you the least annoyance and the greatest ease instead of a life that will continually feed and stimulate your talent.

If you leave it to the more sensitive side of your nature to set the conditions of work and living for you, you may find yourself at the end of your days with very little to show for the gift you were born with.

you will have to learn to be your own best friend and severest critic—mature, indulgent, stern, and yielding by turns.

Only observation will show you the effect of any group or person on you as a writer. Seeing a dull soul whom you doggedly adore, or a brilliant friend who irritates you, may have to be treated as a very special form of indulgence, to be yielding to only rarely.

Watch for a while, and see which authors are your meat and which are your poison.

But at the time of writing, nothing is more confusing than to have the alert, critical, over scrupulous rational faculty at the forefront of your mind.

There is no arrogance like that of the intellect, and one of the dangers, as we have said, of studying the technique of story writing too solemnly is that the reason is confirmed in its delusion of being the more important member of the writing team.

All those naïve and satisfying dreams of which we are the unashamed heroes or heroines are the very stuff of fiction, almost the material prima of fiction.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write.

After a day or two you will find that there is a certain number of words that you can write easily and without strain. When you have found that limit, begin to push it ahead by a few sentences, then by a paragraph or two. A little later try to double it before you stop the morning’s work.

you have decided to work at four o’clock, and at four o’clock write you must! No excuses can be given.

Write sense or nonsense, limericks or blank verse; write what you think of your employer or your secretary or your teacher; write a story synopsis or a fragment of dialogue, or the description of someone you have recently noticed. However halting or perfunctory the writing is, write. If you must, you can write, “I am finding this exercise remarkably difficult,” and say what you think are the reasons for the difficulty.

For you are going to do this from day to day, but each time you are to choose a different hour.

The important thing is that at the moment, on the dot of the moment, you are to be writing, and that you teach yourself that no excuse of any nature can be offered when the moment comes.

If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy as early as late.

These two strange and arbitrary performances—early morning writing, and writing by prearrangement—should be kept up till you write fluently at will.

When you have succeeded in establishing these two habits—early morning writing and writing by agreement with yourself—you have come a long way on the writer’s path.

Now it is time to consider yourself and your problems objectively again; and if you have followed the exercises well you should have plenty of material for an illuminating first survey.

The best way to escape the temptation to imitate is to discover as early as possible one’s own tastes and excellences.

What, on the whole, do you write, when you set down the first things that occur to you?

Put aside every preconception about your work.

The repetitions, the recurrent ideas, the frequent prose forms in these pages will give you your clues. They will show you where your native gift lies, whether or not you eventually decide to specialize in it.

The Critic at Work on Himself

A Critical Dialogue

Be Specific in Suggestions

In the long run, it is your taste and your judgment that must carry you over the pitfalls, and the sooner you educate yourself into being all things to your writing-character the better your prospects are.

Correction after Criticism

The Conditions of Excellence