Christian Writers' Reading Challenge Day 17

Welcome to Day 17 of the Christian Writers' Reading Challenge! I'm so glad you're coming back for more--or, if it's your first time, taking a dive into some great books on writing. This week we're working on If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland.

Days 17-25

Quick Guide

Required Material: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland

Reading Guide: You have nine days to read 18 chapters and a preface. It shouldn't take you that long. The chapters are brief and the writing flows. As always, annotate! Interacting with the text is the best way to absorb it and remember it. Also, the footnotes in this book are a blessing. Read them all.

Notes: When you get to Chapter 13, pay attention. Last week you wrote that art is resonance. Track down that bit of paper and add, "Art is infection." Copy the quote: "The artist has a feeling and he expresses it and at once this feeling infects other people and they have it too." This is important and we'll use it again later.

Ueland looks at the relationship between Christianity and art in a different way than Tolkien, L'Engle, or Peterson--if you enjoy William Blake's poetry, you'll love this book. You're going to get a thousand angles of craft, art, and Christianity in this challenge. Bask in the diversity of thought in Christendom, because it's the differences that highlight the commonalities, and the perspectives that allow us to view the whole.

Deep Dive

About the Author: Brenda Ueland's father was a judge, and her mother was a suffrage activist--the latter of which shines through in the occasionally-feminist slant of the book. Ueland hasn't been alive for quite some time now: She was born in 1891, and If You Want to Write was published in 1938, during the Great Depression--hence the emphasis on the common man and anyone's ability to write. In the front of the book is a short biography if you want more information on the author.

Hard Words: Ueland's dedication to the concept that anyone can write bleeds into her vocabulary. She writes in a bright, fast-paced style well-suited to the optimism of her work, with a vocabulary that her intended audience--anyone--can understand. However, she frequently quotes artists such as Van Gogh, Blake, and the great Russian novelists, and their style is slightly more elevated. The words themselves aren't difficult to comprehend, but the meaning behind them is subtler.

Notes for Christians: The elephant in the room: This doesn't look like a Christian book upon first read. Unlike our others books so far, there is almost no explicit reference here to religion (specifically, Christian faith) as a driving force for creativity. However, Ueland teaches valuable lessons for Christian artists about ecstasy, inspiration, and seeing the divine and beautiful in everything. Her style is more akin to the Romantic poets she quotes than to any modern Christian writer. And that's a good thing. Christian writers can get caught up in the solemnity of their call and the heavy duty of writing with discipline, selectivity, and discernment. But we should never forget that whatever we do, we must do with all our heart. God calls us to be joyful workers, and If You Want to Write is an excellent guide to that effect.

Read the chapter titles before you do anything else. They are an effective summary of the book and good advice in themselves.

Spelling has absolutely nothing to do with good writing. Seriously. It does not matter if you can spell. Look at Shakespeare and Chaucer--it's almost impossible to read them in the original English. Celebrated children's author Roald Dahl couldn't spell worth a farthing. That's what proofreading is for. Spelling and the creative process are archenemies. You cannot serve both masters at once, as I continually remind certain members of my writing group.

Grammar, on the other hand, can have quite an effect on the readability of the piece--this is why we argue about the usefulness of the passive voice. If you know your grammar, you can create all sorts of cool effects in your writing, by obeying the rules or strategically choosing to break them.

Disclaimer: This book is about first drafts. It's not that you never need to edit; it's that you should separate the creative process from the editing.

When Ueland explains how everyone is talented, she defines self-expression as "thoughts welling up ... and the thoughts [going] out to someone." This stresses the importance of an audience. There is little point in prayer if no god hears us. There is little point in writing if no one reads it.

According to Ueland, "the stereotyped Christian notion" of loving one's neighbors is to "coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick." Her notion of love differs quite a bit, and is honestly a better one. In 1 Corinthians 13, we learn that love is patient and kind. Not envious, not boastful, not proud. Not dishonorable or self-seeking. Slow to anger. Holding no grudges. It always protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres. It never fails. But most importantly to writers, love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the Truth. Compare modern society's notion of love, and the notions you've read in books, with the Bible's comprehensive definition. As Christians, God's Word is our one True standard.

Here is where Ueland is a Christian: She believes in the beauty and worth of all Creation. Like a child, she has not lost her sense of wonder. All writers must live this way.

William Blake was an amazing Christian poet. He was also a Romantic, which means he focused on the importance of Nature, Memory, childhood innocence, the Individual*, and the Common Man in his work. These values are still important to us as writers and as Christians today. If you want a sample of his work, read "The Lamb" and "The Tyger," in that order. Almost everyone read "The Tyger" in their childhood, but that's only half the story. Blake wrote a collection of poems, Songs of Innocence and Experience, in which each happy, innocent poem had its darker, fiercer counterpart. *As opposed to Institutions, including the church. Many such institutions in the Romantic period were corrupt, hence the emphasis on going to Nature to find God.

One of my favorite anecdotes in this book is when Ueland describes her friend's reaction to a slight illness: "Oh, that is no way to treat a cold! ... No, I slumped a little yesterday and so I caught it. But I worked all night and it is much, much better now." Say what you will about this method, you'll write some interesting things when you're in an addled state--say, right before bed or while ill. A slightly altered mental state does wonders for the imagination, and certainly gets the Inner Critic out of the way. Maybe the Inner Critic is more sensible than us and went to bed, maybe we're just uncomfortable enough that we've stopped caring. Either way, try writing when you're not quite as fresh as you'd like.

Pay attention to the Van Gogh quotes in chapter three. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

Carry a notebook EVERYWHERE. If you are not already doing this, you must. You might think you'll remember until you get home. You won't, guaranteed, and who wants to take the chance anyway? "Put down the little ideas however insignificant they are," Ueland says. This is a true writer's habit.

The Blake quote in the title of chapter five is a controversial point for Christians. Because of course, some desires should go unacted. Desires for violence and lies, desires for addictive substances, desires for anything contrary to God's wishes, are of course bad. So what does Ueland mean, then, by making this quote a chapter title? She explains: We can't let our good desires, our creative impulses, go unused too long. In simple terms, she says write, don't just sit around thinking about it! Something all writers need to hear.

Chapter five in a nutshell: Don't overthink.

Practice "microscopic truthfulness." Keep a journal and be honest about everything. The only person who will ever read it is you. You can burn it before you die if necessary. And if you're really writing with microscopic truthfulness, that will prob'ly be necessary.

Write a thousand words in an hour and a half, I dare you. I'm sure you've done it before. We've all done it before, we just weren't counting, because we were writing--which is how it should be.

Ueland talks about the difference between her students' writing and that of professional magazine writers. She explains why her students are better. One of the hardest things for writers to learn is that, though emulating great writers can improve our talent, we have to be careful how we emulate. I'm not talking about plagiarism or developing your own voice--I'm talking about what makes good writing. It's not all the dinky "writing" things like how the sentences are built and how big your vocabulary is. There will be time for that later. But in the first place, you should always be concerned with what you experienced, how it made you feel, why it made you feel that way, and how to express that without making it sound like writing. The great writers are not great because they all write sentences alike and use special sets of words, but because they writer from their souls and tell the truth, which is a tiny refraction of the Truth (like L'Engle's streams and lake), and this is what Christians should aim for. Focus on truth in your first draft. We can think about technique in the second.

In other words, don't try to sound literary. The men who wrote great literature weren't trying to sound literary. They were a telling a story in a way only they knew how. You know a different way.

Ueland talks of overworked wives (and this statement of hers applies equally to overworked husbands or anyone else who has stretched themselves too thin, be you thirteen or thirty): "You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all." Writing, teaching, and giving love require mental and emotional energy, which in turn require you to take time to replenish yourself--time to read and pray and let the LORD restore your soul. Humans are not non-stop machines. Play is an incredibly important part of psychological development. Rest is vital to healing. Thinking is essential to writing. Silence is necessary for sound. Allow yourself time, not just for your job, your housework, and your writing, but also for peace and self-care.

Memorize this: "The more you wish to describe a Universal the more minutely and truthfully you must describe a Particular." Example: My dad once described to me two teenagers in a bar. "They were lacking supervision and maybe purpose in their lives," he said. "How did you know that?" my brother and I asked. Dad clarifies: "One of them was blacking out the back of his hand with a Sharpie." That is the difference between Universal and Particular--the difference between "knowing" and seeing, between abstract and concrete. Write about Sharpies, not supervision.

Chapter thirteen is the heart of a principle we'll visit again. Read carefully. Believe it or not, the sober CS Lewis has an explanation for the sprightly Brenda Ueland's phenomenon of infection.

Children are always asking questions. Yet the questions they ask are always questions of "Why?", usually in response to something you just said, something that makes no sense to the child. When that happens, answer carefully. My young cousin used to be obsessed with "Why?", and my mother had the perfect solution: "Why do you think?" Not asked in annoyance or exhaustion or sarcasm (which small children do not understand--which speaks well of them), but lovingly and with genuine curiosity. Remember L'Engle: she preferred scientists to theologians because scientists asked question and theologians gave "unchangeable" answers. This is not how the creative process works. Children are born understanding so much by faith. They trust their parents to do right, by themselves and by God (even if they do not know "God" as such--children have an inherent sense of what is good, even if they often act contrary. Think of how often small children see hypocrisy and say "That's not fair!"). All of this to say, Jesus tells us to come to Him like little children, and it is much easier to maintain one's childhood faith and wonder than to reconstruct it in adulthood.

Personality versus ideas--the two are separate and yet related. If you've ever taken a personality test (not a Which-Hogwarts-House-Are-You test, but a real one like the Big Five or MBTI), you know that there are many ways of categorizing personality. Let's just define it for now as temperament (though that doesn't do it justice). Your temperament and your ideas have very little to do with each other. For example, psychologists have noticed that people with extremely high intelligence and imagination--creative temperaments--tend to have more liberal ideas, and vice versa for those with conservative ideas. It's possible, though, to test high in the Openness trait of the Big Five (the trait which governs intelligence and creativity) and still maintain more traditional Judeo-Christian ideas. I am well-acquainted with many stunning instances of this--traditional Baptists who are some of the most creative and intelligent people I've ever met, for example, my father. So which is more important, personality or ideas? Neither. They both make you who you are, though admittedly personality is less changeable than ideas. But one's identity is ultimately found not in personality OR ideas, but in Christ and our calling.

Ueland presents cliches as lies. Think of them this way and you'll use far fewer cliches.

In chapter fifteen, Ueland tells us about her niece Carlotta's school assignment. The story is an excellent example of first draft creativity followed by second-draft revision. (And it's good advice on assignments.)

Another definition of Art: "You tell somebody something not to show off but because you want to share it with them." This definition can apply to a personal story or a hot meal. This is a much better definition of art than you'll find just about anywhere else, because it takes into account all the small everyday things that become art because of our love for the act and for the person who receives it. Gardening, quilting, baking, and taking notes can be Art.

I'll leave you with this final quote: "Know that is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege."

Study Questions: What is "talent," according to Ueland?

Is the only purpose of writing self-expression? If not, what are the other purposes?

Repeatedly in the challenge we have seen the theme that children are more creative than adults. This suggests creativity comes naturally, and the suppression of this creativity is learned. Who or what teaches children not to be creative? Why does this entity do so? Will the end result be good or evil? What should be done about it? (If you want another EXCELLENT-with-a-capital-everything Christian book, read The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis, which may give insight into the problem of reduced creativity as we grow older.)

In what ways do writers expect too much for their writing? How do we overestimate the inherent value of our efforts?

Ueland says Art is "expressing in painting or writing the ideas that [come to one's] Imagination." How do you define Art?

What is the connection between the "Imagination" and the human soul or the Holy Spirit? What is Imagination?

"One of the intrinsic rewards for writing the sonnet was that then the nobleman knew and understood his own feeling better, and he knew more about what love was," says Ueland. What unexpected deeper benefits do you gain from writing?

Read the passage on honoring thy father and mother (in chapter four). What should true obedience look like for a creative person? Is there something inherently wrong with the "willing" that Ueland described earlier?

What is "living in the present"? Do you do it enough? Can it be done too much? How can you do it more?

How can we balance self-discipline (necessary for action) and a carefree spirit (necessary for creative acts) in our everyday lives? In other words, how can we work joyfully when we don't feel like it?

What is happening to you now? Write a paragraph.

What is the dullest, worst story you can write? Don't be shy. Try it.

What is the difference between the human ego and the Divine ego? (Note: "ego" is Latin for "I," the first-person pronoun.)

What are you willing to sacrifice for your writing-time? What must you sacrifice, if you wish to continue properly? Where is the disparity between the two, and what can be done about it?

How do you hide your true self in your writing? There's prob'ly a psychological term for it, but the jargon doesn't matter right now. Do you hide a sad soul behind Pollyanna-ish work? Do you cover your "tender-hearted, sensitive" self with loud, brash writing? Why? What are you afraid of? Getting hurt again? Sounding mopey? Banish those petty fears. The only thing you should be afraid of is hiding forever and losing yourself entirely. YOU are more important than your fears. God is more powerful than anything in your past, and He sees everything you're trying to hide, and he loves you anyway. Never forget it. You were created the way you are, and you have experienced every terrible thing, for a reason.

How is the "Third Dimension," as Ueland puts it, involved in true art (not the pretentious vainglorious stuff)?

Do you know someone who consistently overexplains simple things? (Are you that person? Then stop it, out of Christian compassion for your listeners.) Why might someone consistently overexplain simple matters? Go beyond the cynical "they must think we're all idiots." Perhaps they are easily confused and require the level of detailed explanation that they give to others, and they believe they are being helpful and following the Golden Rule. Be creative in your answers--then find a better solution to all the possible reasons to overexplain.

Is there a difference between the Conscience and the Holy Ghost? What is it? How do you know?

One more question, which has been asked before and may be asked again and will always have a new and better answer: What is Christian art? What is the job of the Christian artist?

Come back next week, when we'll read "On Stories," an essay by the great CS Lewis.