Brenda Ueland on Imagination and Creativity

     The following are some of my favorite lines from Brenda Ueland’s beautiful and inspiring classic, “If You Want to Write”.

Taken from chapter IV:

“The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly”

“Our idea that we must always be energetic and active is all wrong . . .  your soul gets frightfully sterile and dry because you are so quick, snappy and efficient about doing one thing after another that you have not time for your own ideas to come in and develop and gently shine . . .

So . . . dare to be idle, i.e., not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time . . . for great and creative men know what is best for every man is his own freedom so that his imagination . . . can grow in its own way.

The imagination needs moodling, - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering  . . . If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all.  Wait for them.  Put down the little ideas however insignificant they are.  But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.

 . . . [T]he dreamy idleness that children have, an idleness when you walk alone for a long, long time . . . or dig in a garden or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the piano . . . or paint ALONE . . . where you sit with pencil and paper or before a typewriter quietly putting down what you happen to be thinking, that is creative idleness . . . at such times you are being slowly filled and re-charged with warm imagination, with wonderful, living thoughts.

It must come from your true self and not your theoretical self, from what you really think, love and believe, not from your hope to make an impression.

Good ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come but the better they are. 

What you write today is the result of some span of idling yesterday, some fairly long period of protection from talking and busyness.

Remember this:  you may not be conscious, when you sit down, of having evolved something important to say.  You will sit down as mentally blank . . . just the same, when you begin to write presently something will come out, something true and interesting.”