Becoming a Writer Quotes

“Writing's not always a pleasure to me, but if I'm not writing every other pleasure loses its savour.”
― John Braine, Becoming a Writer

“All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“Old habits are strong and jealous. They will not be displaced easily if they get any warning that such plans are afoot; they will fight for their existence with subtlety and persuasiveness.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“There is one sense in which everyone is unique. No one else was born of your parents, at just that time of just that country’s history; no one underwent just your experiences, reached just your conclusions, or faces the world with the exact set of ideas that you must have. If you can come to such friendly terms with yourself that you are able and willing to say precisely what you think of any given situation or character, if you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on Earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“Every book, every editor, every teacher will tell you that the great key to success in authorship is originality”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming A Writer

“My own experience has been that there is no field where one who is in earnest about learning to do good work can make such enormous strides in so short a time.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“It is well to understand as early as possible in one’s writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“If you are unwilling to write from the honest, though perhaps far from the final, point of view that represents your present state, you may come to your deathbed with your contribution to the world still unmade, and just as far from final conviction about the universe as you were at the age of twenty.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“The philosophies, the ideas, the dramatic notions of other writers of fiction should not be directly adopted. If you find them congenial, go back to the sources from which those authors originally drew their ideas, if you are able to find them. There study the primary sources and take any items over into your own work only when they have your deep acquiescence— never because the author in whose work you find them is temporarily successful, or because another can use them effectively. They are yours to use only when you have made them your own by full acquaintance and acceptance.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“Se trata de reglas de oro útiles: que uno siempre debería pensar como un escritor, ser una de esas personas a las que nada se escapa; que uno debería intentar, a ser posible, trabajar todos los días, o confiar en que, en esos días en que uno no está bien, el proceso de composición siga teniendo lugar en el inconsciente; que es bueno intentar escribir incluso cuando no parece que haya nada sobre lo que escribir; que la revisión y la autocrítica son habilidades cruciales; que nada está terminado hasta que no ha pasado por el cuidadoso tamiz de tu propio juicio objetivo, porque un escritor debe ser un excelente lector de sí mismo. El libro de Brande ofrece diversas prácticas cuya intención es señalar el camino hacia estas cosas; pero el énfasis fundamental está en la originalidad característica que cada escritor debe buscar. Su idea principal es sencilla pero básica: la escritura de una historia, poema, u obra de teatro no es simplemente la aplicación de una técnica probada y contrastada a un conjunto de materiales dados. Como ella dice: «Si una situación ha atrapado tu atención […] es que tiene significado para ti, y si puedes descubrir cuál es ese significado, ya tienes la base de una historia». Un escritor «descubre» una historia; la historia, haciendo uso del instinto y la visión del escritor, se descubre entonces a sí misma. La peculiaridad de visión que ella identifica, tal vez de modo algo anticuado, como «genio» es un elemento real y necesario de la creación seria. Es el espíritu de uno mientras escribe, nuestro propio hálito en nuestra escritura, la «magia del escritor» que es el objetivo de todos los consejos que ha dado.”
― Dorothea Brande, Para ser escritor

“La esencia de la escritura seria es que no se trata de luchar por repetir lo que han hecho otros, sino de luchar por no hacerlo. Es cierto que los escritores más interesantes tienen un sentido profundo de cuáles son las reglas y las convenciones clave de la escritura. Pero no están intentando copiar un género, una tradición, un conjunto de hábitos, sino que intentan ampliarlos, por medio de la fortaleza de su visión, del poderío de su lenguaje, y de sus innovaciones formales. En otras palabras, lo que hace buena o genial la literatura no es simplemente la capacidad para seguir hábitos y costumbres; es la presencia de una visión fuerte y original que utiliza la escritura como medio de exploración. El hecho crucial es que la escritura comienza mucho antes de que empecemos a escribir esta novela o ese relato: empieza con la sensibilidad, el autocontrol y la originalidad de un escritor concreto. Y el libro que marca la gran excepción a la regla general de que los libros con reglas generales tienen una utilidad meramente limitada”
― Dorothea Brande, Para ser escritor

“Brande parte de oposiciones como imaginación/voluntad, vocación/profesión, magia/oficio, inconsciente/consciente, infantil/adulto, cerebro derecho/cerebro izquierdo, intuición/instrucción, Id/Ego —etc.—, y busca que las fronteras se desdibujen para que la escritura fluya”
― Dorothea Brande, Para ser escritor

“«la magia existe y se puede enseñar» y la magia, en gran medida, nace de la rentabilización de los materiales del inconsciente.”
― Dorothea Brande, Para ser escritor

“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. Write anything that comes into your head:”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“The importance of novels and short stories in our society is great. Fiction supplies the only philosophy that many readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.
The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction. On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among reader to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“For the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind. It is not by weighing, balancing, trimming, expanding with conscious intention, that an excellent piece of art is born. It takes its shape and has its origin outside the region of the conscious intellect. There is much that the conscious can do, but it cannot provide you with genius, or with the talent that is genius’ second cousin.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“A QUESTIONNAIRE Here are a few questions for a self-examination which may suggest others to you. It is by no means an exhaustive questionnaire, but by following down the other inquiries which occur to you as you consider these, you can come by a very fair idea of your working philosophy: Do you believe in a God? Under what aspect? (Hardy’s “President of the Immortals,” Wells’ “emerging God”?) Do you believe in free will or are you a determinist? (Although an artist-determinist is such a walking paradox that imagination staggers at the notion.) Do you like men? Women? Children? Do you consider romantic love a delusion and a snare? Do you think the comment “It will all be the same in a hundred years” is profound, shallow, true or false? What is the greatest happiness you can imagine? The greatest disaster? And so on. If you find that you are balking at definite answers to the great questions, then you are not yet ready to write fiction which involves major issues. You must find subjects in which you are capable of making up your mind, to serve as the groundwork of your writing. The best books emerge from the strongest convictions—and for confirmation see any bookshelf.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“You can write about anything which has been vivid enough to cause you to comment upon it.” If a situation has caught your attention to that extent, it has meaning for you, and if you can find what that meaning is, you have the basis for a story.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“You are persuading your reader, while you hold his attention, to see the world with your eyes, to agree with you that this is a stirring occasion, that the situation is essentially tragic, or that another is deeply humorous. All fiction is persuasive in this sense. The author's conviction underlies all imaginative representation of whatever grade.
Since this is so, it behooves you to know what you do believe of most of the major problems of life, and of those minor problems which you are going to use in your writing.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“In my experience, the pupil who sets down the night's dream, or recasts the day before into ideal form, who takes the morning hour to write a complete anecdote or a passage of sharp dialogue, is likely to be the short story writer in embryo. Certain types of character sketching, when it is brief and concerned with rather general (or even obvious) traits, point the same way. A subtler analysis of characters, a consideration of motives, acute self-examination (as distinct from romanticizing one's actions), the contrasting of different characters faced by the same dilemma, most often indicate the novelist. A kind of musing introspection or of speculation only sketched in is found in the essay writer's notebook, although with a grain of drama added, and with the particularizing of an abstract speculation by assigning the various elements of the problem to characters who act out the idea, there is promise of the more meditative type of novelist.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer