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Becoming a Writer

By dorothea brande, category: reference | self-improvement & inspiration.

Mar 01, 1981 | ISBN 9780874771640 | 5 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780874771640 --> Buy

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About Becoming a Writer

A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande’s creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research “discovered” the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, and how to call forth the inner writer.

Also by Dorothea Brande

Wake Up and Live!

About Dorothea Brande

Born in Chicago, Dorothea Brande (1893–1948) was a widely respected journalist, fiction writer, and writing instructor. Brande is widely known for her enduring guide to the creative process, Becoming a Writer, originally published in 1934 and still popular today. In… More about Dorothea Brande

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Becoming a Writer: The Classic Bestseller

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Becoming a Writer: The Classic Bestseller Paperback – 1 Jan. 1981

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With close reference to the great writers of her day - Wolfe, Forster, Wharton and so on - Brande gives practical but inspirational advice about finding the right time of day to write and being very self disciplined about it - "You have decided to write at four o'clock, and at four o'clock you must write." She's strong on confidence building and there's a lot about cheating your unconscious which will constantly try to stop you writing by coming up with excuses. Then there are exercises to help you get into the right frame of mind and to build up writing stamina.

  • Print length 192 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Jeremy P Tarcher
  • Publication date 1 Jan. 1981
  • Dimensions 12.7 x 1.4 x 20.32 cm
  • ISBN-10 0874771641
  • ISBN-13 978-0874771640
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Jeremy P Tarcher; Reprint edition (1 Jan. 1981)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0874771641
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0874771640
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 1.4 x 20.32 cm
  • 62 in Authorship Reference
  • 100 in History of Books
  • 802 in Writing Reference (Books)

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Becoming a Writer Audiobook By Dorothea Brande cover art

Becoming a Writer

By: Dorothea Brande

  • Narrated by: Bonnie Agan
  • Length: 3 hrs and 13 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars 5.0 (4 ratings)

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Publisher's summary

Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer  remains evergreen decades after it was first written. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. She also insists that writing can be both taught and learned.

This is Dorothea Brande's legacy to all those who have ever wanted to express their ideas in written form. A sound, practical, inspirational, and charming approach to writing, it fulfills on finding "the writer's magic." This brand new audio edition is expressively narrated by Bonnie Agan.

Recorded by arrangement with TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: Education & Learning

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  • 5 out of 5 stars 5.0 out of 5.0

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  • Overall 5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance 5 out of 5 stars
  • Story 5 out of 5 stars

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Best Book on Writing

Excellent book. Very good reading of the book. A few glitches in the recording but only a word here and there. Written back in the 1930s, but still extremely relevant.

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A Helpful Guide and Strong Narration

It's hard for me to focus on how to's and guidebooks but I really enjoyed this one. Dorothea Brande is very easy to understand and I enjoyed the narration by Bonnie. Very engaging, easy listening.

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Becoming a writer

By dorothea brande.

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Becoming a writer by Dorothea Brande

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A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research "discovered" the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, how to call forth the inner writer.

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Book Review: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

dorothea brande becoming a writer

However, I done the research then that I did today before starting this review, I might never have read it. You see, I have always been what could be called a bleeding-hearted liberal, and apparently Dorothea Brande was married to Seaward Collins who admired Hitler and Mussolini and considered himself a fascist – at least during the 1930s. It seems that the politics of Brande herself were possibly slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. As well as Becoming a Writer , she wrote Wake Up and Live , a self-help book that sold well and that exhorted its readers to strive to better themselves and rise above others. I haven’t read Wake Up and Live , so can’t really comment on its contents, although according to Joanna Scutts, writing in The Nation, “there is nothing democratic about 1930s self-help.”  It doesn’t sound as if was the gentle compassionate kind of self-help I promote on this blog and in 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion ! 

All of the books about the the writing process that I’ve reviewed so far (Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones , Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way ) have a deep sense of compassion in them. It’s true Brande does have empathy with the beginning writer who struggles with self-doubt in his ability ( Becoming a Writer was published in 1934, when sexism may not even have been a word, so the beginning writer she refers to is always “he.”) It’s also true she has a brusque way of writing that borders on bossiness at times. You must get up early each morning write for at least fifteen minutes each day. You must schedule a time to write each day and stick to it. So if your chosen time is 4 o’ clock you must stick to this each day. If you can’t do this, Brande says, then you might as well give up trying to be a writer and go stack shelves in Walmart instead. (Well that’s not quite what she said, but it’s the modern day equivalent.) So, yes, I can see that Scutts has a point.

Nevertheless, Becoming a Writer   does contain a lot of useful advice – which explains why it remains so popular. Indeed Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” are very similar to Brande’s suggestion to write for fifteen minutes every day immediately upon waking. Both also advise (well Cameron advises, Brande demands) that you shouldn’t read over what you wrote for several weeks. And of course, Brande said it first.

She also says, “the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind.” I have a feeling someone else said something similar to that in a post on this blog just two days ago. In fact, several someones said it, since everyone who commented also agreed. This is why Brande insists writers should get up early to write: that early morning writing comes from the unconscious mind. She also says that writers need to cultivate the “dual character of the genius” and says first of these is: “the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness of a child, the ‘innocence of eye.'” The second is: “adult discriminatory temperament, and just…the the critic rather than the artist.”

This second side, of course, is what needs to be in charge if we are to follow Brande’s rules and write at the same time each day. It is also the side that needs to be in charge when we rewrite and edit.

Brande writes a lot about the genius. He’s the man who “habitually acts as his less gifted brothers rarely do.” Of course, if we all learned to habitually act like geniuses, then genius would become commonplace. And maybe it is, because Brande also says that the genius often doubts himself and so runs into difficulties. She identifies four difficulties us geniuses face on our path to greatdom.

These four difficulties are…

  • Writing at all.
  • The one book writer.
  • The occasional writer.
  • The uneven writer.

The first one means exactly what it says – that you can’t get started at all. The second means that a writer has “early success but is unable to repeat it.” The occasional writer produces very good work – very slowly. Brande gives the example of a female student of hers who had till then produced one very good short story a year. (I wonder if this student was also a mother?) Finally, the uneven writer might start a story well, but not be able to finish it, or some aspects of their stories don’t work.

Although Brande  was, in general, scathing about standard creative writing classes that taught structure, plot, characterisation etc, she does say that these classes can be of some help to the uneven writer. But she says the real difficulty “has set in long before the story form is in question.” The issue is lack of confidence.  I tend to agree with her, and think that it is important to learn techniques and to work on confidence in our writing.

The truth is that whether Brande was a fascist or not, her book does have a lot to offer the beginning writer, and is even worth reading if you have been writing for a while but feel a little stuck or stale. Just don’t take the bossy side of her too seriously and remember that even she has two sides. The best advice to remember as you read is in a section on recreation where she says: “you are to be your own best friend – not simply your stern and disciplinary elder.”

4 Comments on “Book Review: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande”

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I’m surprised she came off as a fascist to you! I got the opposite impression from various off-the-cuff opinions that she revealed, like how students shouldn’t be forced to work through college and her general attitude toward things like hypnotism, the unconscious, etc.

I thought the message of Wake Up and Live was very egalitarian: Everyone – introvert, extrovert, rich or poor – is wasting their potential, and everyone can reclaim it with a little help and practice.

She does have a strict, school-marmish tone that I attributed to the formalness of the times, but I actually found both books to be very encouraging – like a mom who’s extra good at cheering you up precisely because she doesn’t tend to get all emotional about everything else.

I had her totally pegged as a liberal (maybe because I’m conservative and subconsciously look for slights against my worldview in everything I read). Not that it mattered. Interesting how two people can come to such different conclusions from the same material.

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Yes, it is interesting that people can come to different conclusions, though I didn’t come to that conclusion that Brande was fascist by reading “Becoming A Writer.” Like you, I enjoyed it and found it useful at the time. It was only when I did some research on her before writing this review that I read about her links to fascism.

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Yep. I’m on Chapter 14 and just today decided to google her. I’m a little shocked. Where did you find your info? I found mine on Wikipedia and IMDb. I was reading the article about self-help books, including hers in the 1930’s and ’40’s on The Nation until I was kicked off for having read (they said) my quota.

Found myself wondering if her husbands’ fascist sympathies had anything to do with being so well known in publishing and believing a monarchical fascist leader would give him more power.

I guess there’s more to learn about her in the context of history and how Americans could be influenced toward European fascism. Liking Hitler!? Ug. This is sort of reminding me of a current political candidate.

Carolyn, most of what I found out was from that article on the Nation, and on Wikipedia. There’s not a lot about her. I try to keep an open mind, but the Facist sympathies of her husband seem beyond dispute, but her involvement with it is less clear. It’s a pity you didn’t manage to finish reading Scutt’s article in the Nation, because it is very interesting.

Scutt’s says Brande’s book “Wake up and Live” (which I haven’t read) encourages you to think you are superior to others if you are successful. I suspect that in the end Brande was a mix of beliefs, possibly influenced by her husband.

And yes, it is somewhat concerning that similar politics still appear, not just in the USA, but all over. In the UK (where I am) we don’t have anyone quite so blatantly racist at the level Trump has reached, but there’s a few come close.

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Becoming a Writer

    The first step toward being a writer is to hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.   ~ Dorothea Brande

Fledgling writers sometimes need an attitude adjustment. And sometimes more experienced writers do, too.

Otherwise, why would bestselling author Hilary Mantel confess that she reads Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer at least once a year?*

There is a sort of writer’s magic [also called Artistic Coma]. There is a procedure which many an author has come upon by happy accident or has worked out for herself which can, in part, be taught.

I first learned of Becoming a Writer years ago when I dashed into an airport bookstore in who-knows-where and spotted a paperback with a simple cover. It resembled something a five-year-old kid deep in salmon-hued fingerpaint would do. Languishing among a number of more spritely tomes, Becoming a Writer nonetheless stood out among the usual beach reads and bodice rippers. I grabbed it, paid, and ran to the loading gate.

Settled into my miniscule seat in coach, I sank into Brande’s no-nonsense, straightforward take on the writing process.

dorothea brande becoming a writer

She wrote in the 1930s, basing her work on experience gained as a writing teacher in the 1920s. Her approach to writing owed much to the times she lived in, intellectual life permeated by the New Thought Movement and the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Self-help books proliferated, writers reflecting people’s need for self-reliance after the horrors of World War I, the flu epidemic of 1918, and the Great Crash of 1929. Some contemporaries of Brande include Dale Carnegie, Ayn Rand (Russian-born Alisa Rosenbaum), and Brenda Ueland .

Becoming a Writer predates Ueland’s If You Want to Write by two years, appearing in 1934. And Brande, like Ueland, doesn’t focus on commas, semi-colons, or any of the tricks of the trade usually discussed in books about writing.

Why is her book still important?

The key to writing, Brande suggests, lies in “cultivating a writer’s temperament.” In every writer, two beings co-exist. One approaches the world with an “innocence of eye,” filled with childlike wonder at the world’s marvels, tuned into their subconscious. The other embodies the practical, the critical, and the artisan, living in the harsh world of reality. To be a writer—or to engage in any creative endeavor—both of these beings must be in balance. Brande’s take foretells the left/right-brain dichotomy.

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 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.

Brande subscribes to a Jungian view of the human psyche and applies it to the writer’s mind. Nowadays, experts call this “mindset.” In other words, until a writer faces these issues of balance, they will not benefit much from technical training focusing on the how-to rules of writing.

According to Brande, four issues specific to writers need attention:

The Difficulty of Writing at All The “One-Book” Author The Occasional Writer The Uneven Writer

And that’s why her book stayed on my shelves when, in a fit of pandemic cabin fever last year, I hauled most of my precious books to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale.

One of the most important lessons I gleaned from Brande’s book stemmed from the practice of daily writing, before the sun came up, in the darkness, alone, my desk lit only by the gleam of my computer’s monitor.

To reiterate, what you are actually doing is training yourself, in the twilight zone between sleep and the full waking state, simply to write.

Those who have worked their way through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way will recognize this practice, which Cameron calls “morning pages.” I’ll confess I often slacked off, choosing instead to read rather than write.

dorothea brande becoming a writer

Brande insists these two things—“morning writing” and “writing by agreement”—will propel yearning writers forward, toward becoming the writers they dream of being.

But sometimes Brande’s words sting:

If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write…

  She goes on to say something else that screams Truth:

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…not writing a few pages which will be judged for style or correctness alone, but the prospect of turning out paragraph after paragraph and page after page which will be read for style, content, and effectiveness.

A key takeaway from Becoming a Writer , then, lies in the need to establish discipline and priorities. This will be different for every writer.

The unconscious is shy, elusive, and unwieldy, but it is possible to learn to tap it at will, and even to direct it. The conscious mind is meddlesome, opinionated, and arrogant, but it can be made subservient to the inborn talent through training. By isolating as far as possible the functions of these two sides of the mind, even by considering them not merely as aspects of the same mind but as separate personalities, we can arrive at a kind of working metaphor, impossible to confuse with reality, but infinitely helpful in self-education.

I still find Brande’s book an excellent way to pick myself up off the floor when I’m feeling blue about writing. When I’m at loose ends, discouraged by rejection. When I wonder why I don’t just play bridge all afternoon instead of writing. At moments like that, I take a busman’s holiday, seeking wordless activities. Brande suggests knitting, fishing, playing solitaire, or just lying in the grass staring at clouds. These forays into solitude provide fertile soil for ideas to flourish and flower.

Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.

But not all is roses.

Brande’s prose comes across as old-fashioned in spots. She uses exclusively male pronouns and includes longer sentences than is the norm today. And I feel a bit squeamish in knowing that this brilliant woman married Seward Collins, the wealthy editor of The American Review , a Fascist-leaning publication that ran between 1933 and 1937.

Separating a writer from her personal life, and from her era, is sometimes a must.

In addition to the wisdom found on every page of Becoming a Writer , I love Brande’s delicious bibliography of now-vintage books on writing, many published in the early years of the twentieth century. She ends with a chapter of “Prosaic Pointers,” meant to ease the time spent at the desk. Coffee plays an important role!

Despite all of Brande’s encouraging words and techniques, I couldn’t always quell my inner critic. Hilary Mantel named her inner critic “Nigel.” I called mine Alfie. Alfie still acts up more than I like, injecting his long, pointed nose into my business when he shouldn’t.

And, thanks to Alfie, no matter what I did—writing morning pages, taking time to be alone, daydreaming, setting deadlines for myself—I still lacked something: the courage of my convictions.

________________________

This post is the second of four about books that encouraged me to take myself seriously as a writer.

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Cynthia D. Bertelsen

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Thanks, Cindy.

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  4. TOP 25 QUOTES BY DOROTHEA BRANDE

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  6. Becoming a Writer (English Edition) eBook : Dorothea Brande: Amazon.com.mx: Tienda Kindle

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COMMENTS

  1. Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

    Refreshingly slim, beautifully written and deliciously elegant, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer remains evergreen decades after it was first written. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. It's just a question of finding the "writer's magic"--a degree of which is in us all.

  2. Becoming a Writer: Dorothea Brande, John Gardner: 8601200420760: Amazon

    Born in Chicago, Dorothea Brande (1893-1948) was a widely respected journalist, fiction writer, and writing instructor. Brande is widely known for her enduring guide to the creative process, Becoming a Writer, originally published in 1934 and still popular today.

  3. Becoming A Writer : Dorothea Brande : Free Download, Borrow, and

    Become A Writer by Dorothea Brande 1934. Instructions on creative writing. Addeddate 2020-06-10 17:16:35 Identifier becoming-a-writer Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3b080j6t Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR) Page_number_confidence 100.00 Ppi 300 Scanner Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.6.4 Add Review Become A Writer by Dorothea Brande 1934.

  4. Becoming a Writer

    Learn more Read sample Audible sample Follow the authors Dorothea Thompson… Follow Dorothea Brande Follow Becoming a Writer Kindle Edition by Dorothea Brande (Author), Digital Fire (Editor) Format: Kindle Edition 4.4 694 ratings

  5. Becoming a Writer

    Kindle. $0.99 Read with our Free App. Hardcover. $9.99 1 Used from $27.22 8 New from $9.18. Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative writing classroom of the 1920s. It remains evergreen decades after it was first written. She believed that anyone can write as writing can be both taught and learned.

  6. Dorothea Brande

    Biography She was born in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago, the Lewis Institute in Chicago (later merged with Armour Institute of Technology to become Illinois Institute of Technology ), and the University of Michigan.

  7. Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande: 9780874771640

    About Becoming a Writer. A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research "discovered" the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their ...

  8. Becoming a Writer

    Dorothea Brande Penguin, Mar 1, 1981 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 192 pages A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer...

  9. Becoming a Writer: The Classic Bestseller : Dorothea Brande: Amazon.co

    Born in Chicago, Dorothea Brande (1893-1948) was a widely respected journalist, fiction writer, and writing instructor. Brande is widely known for her enduring guide to the creative process, Becoming a Writer, originally published in 1934 and still popular today.In 1936, Brande published a masterwork of practical psychology, Wake Up and Live! The book entered more than 34 printings and sold ...

  10. Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

    Story By: Robert McKee Publisher's summary Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer remains evergreen decades after it was first written. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. She also insists that writing can be both taught and learned.

  11. Becoming a Writer Summary

    As author and teacher John Gardner points out in the foreword to Dorothea Brande's classic book Becoming a Writer, it is not just technique that writing students need. Beginning writers (as...

  12. Becoming a writer by Dorothea Brande

    by Dorothea Brande. A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research "discovered" the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching ...

  13. Book Review: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

    It's true Brande does have empathy with the beginning writer who struggles with self-doubt in his ability ( Becoming a Writer was published in 1934, when sexism may not even have been a word, so the beginning writer she refers to is always "he.") It's also true she has a brusque way of writing that borders on bossiness at times.

  14. Becoming a writer : Brande, Dorothea, 1893-1948

    Brande, Dorothea, 1893-1948 Publication date 1981 Topics Authorship, Fiction -- Technique, Språkvetenskap -- stilistik, Litteraturvetenskap -- estetik, Fiction Publisher Los Angeles : Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Putnam Collection printdisabled; marygrovecollege; internetarchivebooks; americana; inlibrary Contributor Internet Archive Language English

  15. Paperback

    Becoming a Writer Paperback - May 24, 2019 by Dorothea Brande (Author) 4.4 680 ratings See all formats and editions

  16. Becoming a Writer

    Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research "discovered" the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, and how to call forth the inner writer. Print length

  17. Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

    Becoming a Writer: The Classic Bestseller (Paperback) Dorothea Brande (author) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★. 1 Review Sign in to write a review. £12.99. Paperback 192 Pages. Published: 01/03/1981.

  18. Amazon.com: Becoming a Writer (Audible Audio Edition): Dorothea Brande

    Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer remains evergreen decades after it was first written. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write.

  19. Becoming a Writer

    3 Nov 2021 Becoming a Writer by Cynthia D. Bertelsen | posted in: Writer's Craft, Writer's Life / Writer's Notebook | 1 The first step toward being a writer is to hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm. ~ Dorothea Brande Fledgling writers sometimes need an attitude adjustment. And sometimes more experienced writers do, too.

  20. Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Becoming a Writer

    Brande believes that becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating "a writer's temperament." That is "the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness of a child, the innocence of the eye." ... Dorothea Brande writes in clear, concise terms what is needed to become a writer, and like the others ...