Dorothea Brande’s book Becoming A Writer came out in 1934, and it’s undoubtedly the most successful writing book of that decade. It’s still in print. I read it a couple of years ago and, to be honest, I agree with her on a lot of stuff. She was hugely influential and I think a lot of her attitudes and assumptions have, by proxy, flowed through to me. ...
Dorothea Brande was the first person to advocate this idea of morning pages. That you must rise half an hour or an hour earlier than you customarily do, and write with no especial agenda, and through this you’ll circumvent your inner critic and begin to produce great reams of creative work. This is an idea that has become ingrained in creative writing culture. ...
Now my main problem with this technique is that I’ve never, ever been able to do it. ... I felt really guilty and useless for not doing it. ...
Turns out during the 30s Dorothea Brande married Seward Collins, editor of The American Review, the biggest Far Right magazine in the country. He was proudly anti-Semitic, he praised Hitler and Mussolini, and she wrote for the magazine too and wrote some deeply anti-Semitic stuff herself. So fuck her. If you find it difficult to get up every morning to do an hour of freewriting in your journal, remember it’s a regime invented by an actual nazi.
--Tim Clare, “The 100 Day Writing Challenge,” Day 17
This was so liberating. When I was a teen, I found Becoming a Writer, and I distinctly remember reading where Brande wrote, as a “solemn warning”: “If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy as early as late.” (italics hers)
Of course I failed. I did not give up writing--I knew there was no other outlet for my energy, so I decided that I must be lazy, that I’d have to get better someday. I was not old enough to realize that I could disagree with such a famous instructor or that she could, in fact, be wrong. I just carried those words around with me, all these years, to hector me and taunt me and tell me I am not truly cut out for the business. It took an actual graduate degree in writing to move the needle on that idea. I did and do need help with discipline, but this has nothing to do with one single woman’s pronouncement in the 1930s.
In short, if you are going to be haunted by the specter of inadequacy all your life, make sure it’s not actually the fash first.
