Briony Hale

I was recently introduced to the book Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande, which was touted at the time as a superior alternative to the myriad blogs, YouTube videos, social media channels, and the like in which people with no experience give out writing advice.

Ever in search of the less popular craft books, I managed to snag a thrifted copy and perused it over the course of a number of evenings. Brande’s take on writing is unique in the fact that, being published in 1934, it doesn’t reference social media, television, or the internet in any way. (While it seems difficult do to so in the modern age, I would argue that the craft of writing itself can and should be done free from the distractions of modern technology as much as possible, even if publishing can be done exclusively online.)

Becoming A Writer is less about the craft of writing fiction than the psychology of committing oneself to writing regularly, and Brande rather astutely indicates that developing one’s beliefs about writing, and oneself, are preliminary to the work of developing one’s craft.

There are a few key takeaways from the volume overall, which can rather easily be distilled to this:

• There exists in oneself both a creative mind and a critical one, the writer and the editor, and the person who can command them both, keep them separate, and call upon each skill when appropriate will be successful where one’s peers will fail.
• One’s literary voice is compromised, however unintentionally, by reading the prose of others, and so every measure should be taken to ensure one is writing daily before being exposed to rhetorical influence.
• Writing is, fundamentally, about human experience. Having a wide variety of interesting experiences (material and emotional) will give one a wealth of foundation to choose from when writing.
• The originality of you will lead to the originality of your work. Brande outlines an exercise in which she asked every member of her writing class to construct a short story based on the barest, “tritest” outline (a one sentence summary). Brande states that in spite of the fact she, herself, could only construct two version of the same story from this outline, her students produced “twelve versions so different from each other that any editor could have read them all on the same day without realizing that the point of departure was the same in each” (pg, 127). She observes that each student “had seen the situation in some purely personal light, and that what seemed so inevitable to her was fresh and unforeseen to others” (pg. 127-128).
• Brande advocates for series of exercises, which include optimizing oneself ergonomically so that the physical act of writing does not become painful or burdensome for long periods of time, rising early and writing before all other distraction or exposure to the work of others, and developing the discipline of writing on schedule.

While I enjoy Brande’s style, a lot of this insight will feel familiar to people who spend a lot of time on internet communities oriented around writing. Where Brande really shines is in the last few chapters of the book. She deviates from discussion of writing exercises to focus on what she considers the third piece of a triad, in which genius joins the artist and the critic. Brande spends these last pages exploring the relationship between mind, body, and genius, drawing her conclusions from commonalities in the processes of writers who, on the surface, seem wildly different.

While I don’t think everyone has to go buy this one immediately, the fact that it’s fairly simple to thrift for cheap, and is a quick read, makes it something I would readily recommend to the curious, collectors of craft books, or someone very new to the craft who might better be served actually writing than scouring the internet for a good little tidbit of writing advice.

Speaking of which, a draft is calling me…

BH ❤