The Guinea Pig Report: Becoming A Writer, Overview
In keeping with my official status as Wannabe Writer, I’ve got about five feet of shelf space completely occupied by How To Write books. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are fairly OK. Some of them are excellent, and they get reread about once or twice a year. Two books in that last category are Dorothea Brande’s Becoming A Writer and Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block.
Given that my copy of the Nelson appears to have disappeared, and the replacement I ordered hasn’t arrived yet, we’ll be talking about Becoming A Writer first.
In 1934, Dorothea Brande proposed to do something that creative writing teachers to this day insist on the impossibility of doing: teach genius. Teach the student the “writer’s magic.” And, not content with simply doing that which is popularly held impossible, Brande went as far as to proclaim the doing of it necessary before any writing workshop, class, or style book could do the student a lick of good. Such instruction would be perfectly useless until that which Brande uniquely suggested teachable was taught.
And, by the Gods, it’s true. What good is Strunk & White’s little book, what good is Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, On Writing Well, the Chicago Manual of Style, the dictionary, the thesaurus, what good all the rest of those wonderfully instructive volumes if you’re not writing?
Cynics might summarize Brande’s approach as “butt in chair glorified,” but I think she was onto something more. And, with all due respect to proponents of the “butt in chair” method, it too must come after some preliminaries are first settled. As Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. says in her ambitious Writing In Flow,
“Telling someone to ‘just do it’ is akin to telling someone who’s depressed that all she has to do is ‘think happy thoughts’ and happiness and joy will follow.”As for myself, I try to return to those preliminaries whenever I reach another bump on my road to a writing career. Whenever planting my butt in the chair becomes difficult and I’m tempted to give myself a tongue-lashing on the subject of self-discipline, I open this book to page one and begin working my way through it once more.
Which is what I’m doing now–and I invite you to join me.
The posts that follow will neither replicate nor take the place of Brande’s writing. They’ll just be notes on my progress through the exercises the author suggests, and my thoughts on why those exercises work. If you’d like to follow along at home, I strongly encourage you to get your hands on a copy. The Amazon link above works well; you can also use Booksense to find the book at an independent bookstore near you or simply visit your neighborhood library.
In any case, I hope you find these notes useful. Or at least entertaining.
Here we go….