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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
This is by far one of the best and most useful and inspiring books I have ever read. If you are a writer or artist of any kind being a cook or quilter or if you teach anything at all this book is a staple for your life. Everyone and anyone could benefit from reading this!
This was full of wonderful insight, and, even though I wasn't expecting it, turned out to be quite the feminist manifesto, too!
A quick inspirational read...if you're a writer.
A book that I always read when I want to refresh my desire to write and be inspired. I always enjoy her breezy, iconoclastic style and her stress on writing freely and impulsively (in the first draft). It's kind of amazing to think this book is rapidly closing in on a hundred years old.
I have read this book every couple of years since I was a teenager. I gave it to my Dad to read and he loved it, and said it was so hard to get through because every line was true and made you sit there in awe wondering about your life. I think it's true you have to forget the blahness of similarly titled books and know this book is as much about how to live as how to write. This author wrote it in 1932 or so, and lived to be an octegenarian swimmer. She constantly quotes Keats, Blake, Dostoevsky, Chekov, etc. as if they are flowing in her veins or perhaps under her feet. Anyone I've met who read it said, oh yes, they too read it every few years. So get one!
"Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money." - Ueland
I read If You Want to Write very slowly, over six years, going to it when I needed a bit of encouragement or was feeling low or uninspired with the writing process. Ueland always served as a pick-me-up, a teacher and cheerleader for the ages. While some anecdotes are a bit dated (and a few not very PC), the overall impact is one of support and motivation. She gives everyone permission to create, and makes the reader feel they have something of value to share and contribute.
I read If You Want to Write very slowly, over six years, going to it when I needed a bit of encouragement or was feeling low or uninspired with the writing process. Ueland always served as a pick-me-up, a teacher and cheerleader for the ages. While some anecdotes are a bit dated (and a few not very PC), the overall impact is one of support and motivation. She gives everyone permission to create, and makes the reader feel they have something of value to share and contribute.
I listened to the abridged version of the book. I didn't really learn anything new from this book, at least the audio version, but I really liked the encouragement. I'll probably listen to it often.
I started each chapter really wanting to like the lesson but the simple expression at the start was always the best line and it went downhill and became more fake/puffed up with fillers. It seemed mostly like short list of useful lessons given to an evangelical preacher paid by the word.
I discovered this book at our hosts airbnb in Maine. The author is from MN and moved to NYC. It is a great book that I want to add to my library someday. A good one about writing and art to refer and find inspiration.
"If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh, you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something -- the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it."
"If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh, you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something -- the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it."