Dorothea Brande’s Writing Brain
Dorothea Brande’s book Becoming a Writer is an inspirational masterpiece. It is remarkable that this book was first published in 1934 and don’t let the fact it talks about typewriters and stationery stores put you off. It is as relevant for writers today as it has ever been.
It has had a profound effect on my writing practice and many of the principles it outlines are key to the Your Writing Brain approach.
It asks us to confront our doubts and fears and get our minds in a place to be productive. Her approach is not about teaching someone to write but a guide to becoming a writer. In some ways it is an instruction manual on how to develop a skill-the mindset and habits of a writer.
Dorothea Brande was way ahead of her time. Decades before science talked about the left and right sides of the brain, she understood the role of the conscious and unconscious mind.
For her the conscious mind is shy elusive and unwieldly but it is possible to tap into it at will and even direct it. The conscious mind is meddlesome, opinionated but can be made subservient to the inborn talent through training.
The two sides to the writer are workman and critic. Both have their place in the writing process but if we let the critic take control before the work has been done, we will kill many of our most important ideas.
She disagreed with the idea that genius can’t be taught and felt that through daily writing, regular exercise and lots of reading we can all improve.
Our approach at Your Writing Brain is to empower the writer to write. As Brande recognised, the difficulties of the average writer is the difficulty to write at all. If we do not confront and deal with this issue -no amount of technical instruction on writing can help.
She suggested setting aside a specific time for writing-especially first thing in the morning. This approach has been further developed more recently by Julia Cameron and has become known as morning pages.
Brande talks about training yourself in the “twilight zone” simply to write. You can move on from this to training yourself to write on schedule starting with very small periods of time. We should not get up from our desks until the task is completed.
According to Brande if we cannot do this, after completing the exercises she has outlined, our resistance to writing is greater than our desire to write and perhaps writing is not for us.
Her approach also encourages us to engage our imagination and “turn ourselves gently in a relaxed state of mind the direction you want to go”. She suggests we learn to hold our mind as still as our body. These sentiments echo the approach of mindfulness which can help all of us to write with less effort.
She also asks us to take a good look at our writing practices. With a clearer idea of ourselves, our abilities and our weaknesses we can discover the conditions under which we write at our best. When we need to take a break from our writing, we will learn what activities can sustain us when we get back to our desks.
A fresh approach to life was important to Brande. She encourages us all to learn to see again, to approach things in new ways and recapture the” innocence of eye”.
She tells us there is a place for talking about writing but warns that in talking about it too much we may consider it done. I am sure we can all identify a time when after reading a personal development book and feeling we had already done something to deal with the issue we face, we felt less motivated to put the ideas into practice!
Reading this book and doing the exercises could change the way you approach your writing and help achieve your writing goals. It is a book you can read and engage with. The style is calm and reassuring. It is as if she is in the room with you. There is no attempt to sell this approach to you. She asks you to judge it by its results.
As Brande points out advice from successful writers to the novice can be varied and confusing at times. It is as if there is some conspiracy to delude and mislead them as to the process involved. A key feature of Brande’s approach is the recognition that we are all different and once we understand how our writing brain works, we can make it work with and not against us.