Becoming a Writer

"Even in 1934, Dorothea Brande knew that most writers didn't need another book on "technique" -- and this, before so many more would be published. No, she realized, as John Gardner notes in his foreword, "the root problems of the writer are personality problems," and thus her wise book is designed to simply help you get over yourself and start writing, with techniques ranging from a simple declaration to write every day at a fixed time -- no matter what -- to exercises that come close to inventing the TM and self-actualization movements that would follow a few decades later.

Analyzing how you write, revise, and critique your own work will help you grow as a writer and improve your work.

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.

She has her novice writers note the effects of everything in their environment on their writing. She shows them how to harness the unconscious, how to fall into the "artistic coma," then how to re-emerge and be their own critics.

Becoming a Writer 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 the expectation in her introduction: "This book, I believe, will be unique.... I think there is such a magic and that it is teachable. This book is all about the writer's magic.""

-Amazon

This is not a book to teach writing but a guide to how to become a writer and flourish in your field. Dorothea Brande's advice is timeless, relevant even nearly a century later, inspiring writers through past, present, and future.