Review: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

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When I first started taking my writing seriously — though I don’t know how successful that was, because I still write stupid shit about zombie rockstars and butch girls in bars… Okay, when I started actually finishing stories instead of just starting them, I read a lot of books about writing. I listened to podcasts about writing. I was determind to learn how to write, and being a nerdy sort of girl I immediately started looking for someone to teach me. I browsed in bookshops for hours, sliding my fingers along the spines of the how-to-write books as if I’d somehow absorb the writerly knowledge inside them. I took copious notes on how to write a killer opening line, and how to construct a character arc, and how to plot and foreshadow and restructure and explain without explaining. Eventually I realised that it was all bullshit, and I sat down and wrote instead.

After I’d written for a while I was ready for the books again, and I remembered that one of them hadn’t been bullshit at all: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande.

Embarkation on the career [of writing] is easy enough: an inclination to reverie, a love of books, the early discovery that it is not too difficult to turn a phrase — to find any or all of these things in one’s first adolescent consciousness is to believe that one has found the inevitable, and not too formidable, vocation. But then comes the dawning comprehension of all that a writer’s life implies: not easy daydreaming, but hard work at turning the dream into reality without sacrificing all its glamour; not the passive following of someone else’s story, but the finding and finishing of a story of one’s own.

In Becoming a Writer, Brande talks a lot about rejection — and, PANKsters, I know you know about rejection. If you don’t, you’re not aiming high enough. Brande suggests that to deal with rejection (an inevitable part of the writing process), we must think of our writerly selves as two people: “a prosaic, everyday, practical person” who will network, participate in critique groups, send out your stories and open the rejections; the “sensitive, enthusiastic” artist person can then throw tantrums or indulge whims as much as necessary — but in private. She advises against envy and resentment towards writers you perceive to be better or more successful than yourself. In these days of social networking it’s easy to think that everyone else is wildly successful while you’re still slogging away at an opening line, but Brande reminds you that those emotions are not going to help you to write better stories.

One of my favourite parts of the book is Brande’s advice on dealing with non-writers: “the average person writes just too much and not quite enough to have any great opinon of an author’s life”. As writers we must observe people constantly but subtley, so that we can write about them without them knowing: “keep still about your intentions, or you will startle your quarry.” I am often accused of being curious — nosy to the point of rudeness, even — so to have Brande reassure me that this is a normal part of being a writer was wonderful. At least, it was something I could point to while saying to my girlfriend, “See? Opening the neighbour’s post is totally normal writer behaviour!”[1]

Brande also endorses my much-lamented Bejewelled addiction. Well, not directly, because this book was written in 1934, but she does recommend indulging in a “wordless occupation” to allow your subconscious mind to work. Activities mentioned include knitting, solitaire, scrubbing floors, or horseriding; Bejewelled fits perfectly with these activities, yet is vastly superior because it doesn’t involve animals or buckets of water and I can do it on the bus.

I don’t read technical how-to-write books because I am not ready for them, and I don’t read how-to-find-your-inner-writer books because they make me vomit into my mouth. But this book is neither of these things, and I love it because I recognise myself in it. This book is about you as a writer. You should read it.

[1] Okay, I don’t actually open my neighbour’s post. But I would if I thought I could get away with it.