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A review by annauncharted
Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
4.0
What’s a word greater than grateful that I could use to describe how fortunate I feel to have been recommended this book?
I took my sweet long time (25 days) working through this short book (175 pages). I found myself reading and re-reading so many sentences and paragraphs throughout—trying to tattoo the deeper, distilled meanings onto my hippocampus.
This book on writing is unlike so many others in that it’s not focused on craft and techniques (i.e. character development / plot / pov / sentence structure / etc.). If that’s what you’re looking for—this ain’t it my good friend (maybe checkout The Art of Fiction by John Gardner or On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-fiction by William Zinsser).
This book by Dorthea Brande (1893-1948) is a book about befriending your own brain and developing the ability to recognize and bridge the different rolls the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind play in writing.
“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. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two.”
Out of all the books on writing I’ve read thus far—I so wish this had been the first I found. This book builds self-confidence in anyone who’s been hungry their whole life for words and wants to finally taste their own and *hopefully share something exquisite with the world one day.
*Fun fact: This book was originally published in 1934 and went out of print for years and years. Thank goodness the wisdom within these pages lives on thanks to a recognition that this still deserves a spot on our collective conscious bookshelf.
I took my sweet long time (25 days) working through this short book (175 pages). I found myself reading and re-reading so many sentences and paragraphs throughout—trying to tattoo the deeper, distilled meanings onto my hippocampus.
This book on writing is unlike so many others in that it’s not focused on craft and techniques (i.e. character development / plot / pov / sentence structure / etc.). If that’s what you’re looking for—this ain’t it my good friend (maybe checkout The Art of Fiction by John Gardner or On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-fiction by William Zinsser).
This book by Dorthea Brande (1893-1948) is a book about befriending your own brain and developing the ability to recognize and bridge the different rolls the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind play in writing.
“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. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two.”
Out of all the books on writing I’ve read thus far—I so wish this had been the first I found. This book builds self-confidence in anyone who’s been hungry their whole life for words and wants to finally taste their own and *hopefully share something exquisite with the world one day.
*Fun fact: This book was originally published in 1934 and went out of print for years and years. Thank goodness the wisdom within these pages lives on thanks to a recognition that this still deserves a spot on our collective conscious bookshelf.