If you want to Write

Chapter 1: Everybody Is Talented, Original and Has Something Important to Say

• Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
• Everybody is original, if he tells the truth if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be.
• The only way to loving a person is by listening to them and seeing and believing in the poet in them.

Chapter 2: imagination is the divided body in every man

• Creative power should be kept alive in all people for all the lives. Because it is life itself. It is the spirit. In fact, it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.
• How could we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it. The more you use this joyful creative power the more you have.
• We have come to think that Duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first, – at least for some part of every day of your life.
• It is a wonderful blessing if you will use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else.
• The author assured us with all the earnestness, that no writing is of waste of time, – no creative work where the feelings, imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Chapter 3: Why a Renaissance Noblemen Wrote Sonnets

• At the time of the Renaissance, all gentlemen wrote Sonnets. The nobleman wrote a sonnet to tell the lady that he loved her.
• One of the intrinsic rewards for writing the sonnet was that then the nobleman knew and understood his own feeling better, and he knew more about what love was, what part of his feelings were bogus (literary) and what real, and what a beautiful thing the Italian or the English language was.
• Remember though that any motive that makes you feel like writing is fine, Use it. If you want to dazzle the public, try it. Good luck to you.
• Writing is not a performance but a generosity.

Chapter 4: The imagination works Slowly & Quietly

• Our idea that we must always be energetic and acting is all wrong.
• If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. 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 solitude.
• Good thoughts come slowly and therefore it is nothing for you to worry about or to be afraid of, and it is even a bad plan to hurry then artificially.

Chapter 5: Sooner strangle an infant in its Cradle than Nurse Unacted Desires

• Unacted desires breed pestilence.
• Think and then let it out, act. Always.
• Think quietly for a time. Express it quietly later.
• If you want to write try this: Go into your room alone. Resign yourself tranquillity to doing something slow and worthless for at Kraft an hour. Take a pencil or sit before your computer and look out of the window. Perhaps write down and name what colours you see in the sky with quiet dreamy attention. Don’t bother to make sentences unless you want to. Or dreamily and carelessly write what goes through your head such as “ I don’t seem to feel at all like working today. what is this muggy feeling?” (You may find yourself giving a brilliant, beautiful, luminous description of dullness and apathy). Or idly scrawl:
• “ I seem to wish I could write a story that would sell for $800 about a Duchess but I never knew a Duchess and can’t seem to see one in my mind’s eye and what should I name her anyway?” Thoughts will begin to come out of this. You will find you have something to say. And tomorrow data will be more.
• We are always doing something, – talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The man is kept naggingly busy on some easy, and important, external thing all day.
• That is why most people are so afraid of being alone. For after a few minutes of unpleasant mental vacancy, the creative thoughts begin to come.
• If you say a line over and over again, after a long time the nerves and muscles in your brain and jaws will know how to do it automatically. But all that automatic grinding takes a Long, Long time.

Chapter 6: Know that There is Often Hidden in us a Dormant Poet, Always Young and Alive

• Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
• Feel happy, truthful and free when you are writing. With complete self-trust. Get out truthfully what is in you and it will be interesting, it will be good. Salable? don’t know. But that is not the thing to think of-for a long time anyway.
• Always be truthful to yourself, never care if you are believed or not.
• Keep re-charging yourself as children do, with new thinking called “Inspiration.”

Chapter 7: Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write

• Though everybody is talented and original, often it does not break through for a long time. People are too scared, too self-conscious, too proud, too shy.
• We have been incorrectly taught that writing is something special and not just talking on paper.
• Another trouble with writers is an anxiety to be effective, to impress people. They write pretentiously.
• Many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. So let’s do a favour to yourself – see how bad a story you can write. See dull you can be. Go Ahead.
• “I will give you 10$ if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!” And of course no one can.

Chapter 8: why you are not to be Discouraged, Annihilated Rejection Slips

• Millions of human beings, with education and without it, think and feel things that are worth saying and they can write them just beautifully, like great men and women and true poets.
• The author wants you to know that you will not be discouraged, annihilated by successful writers, but will work along in your own way.

Chapter 9: People confuses the Human and the Divine Ego.

• Write from yourself.
• If you write something and they all tell you it is bad, – editors, critics, everybody, – think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discourage for a minute, but keep on writing.)
• What is they all tell you it is bad and you still think in your soul that what you wrote was good, – if you find that you still believe what you wrote and feel it and it is true to you, then you must stand by it.
• Thousands and thousands of people, all people, have the same light in them, have their own creative power in them, is they only come to see it, respect it and let it out.

Chapter 10: Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect It for Their Writing

• The lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and mental things (that do not require all their gifts and abilities) for others and never anything for themselves.
• If you shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in black verse!’ You would be surprised how they would respect you.

Chapter 11: Microscopic Truthfulness

• Writing with ‘Microscopic Truthfulness’ is another way to find your True Self.
• While writing don’t think of the words, think of the story. It does no good to make words try to be better, snappier; one must have a clear idea of the people and what happened to them.
• Think of telling a story and writing it.
• In writing one must be bold, free and truthful.
• Don’t try to make it sound smooth and mellifluous, but write with exquisite and completely detached exactness and truthfulness. Look at the person and just say what you see, even if it sounds like a catalogue.
• Gradually by writing you will learn more and more to be free, to say all you think; and at the same time, you will learn never to lie to yourself, never to pretend and attitudinize.
• But only by writing and by Long, patient, serious work you will find your true self.
• And why fine it? Because it is, I think, your immortal soul and the life of the spirit, and if we can only free it and respect it and not run it down, and let it move and work, it is the way to be happier and greater.
• The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining. That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes- in writing or in life – and do not fret about them but pass on and write more. Active evil is so much better than passive good, which is just docile, feebleness, timidity.
• And do not try to be consistent, for what is true to you today may not be true at all tomorrow, because you see a better truth.

Chapter 12: Art is Infection

• You must feel when you write, free. You must disconnect all shackles, weights, obligations, all duties. You can write as badly as you want to. You can write anything you want to, – a six–act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What’s the use? You can never be smarter than you are.
• You try to be and everybody sees through it like glass, and on top of that know that you are lying and putting on airs.
• Write always what you think.
• The artist has a feeling and he expresses it and at once this feeling infects other people and they have it too. And the infection must be immediate or it isn’t art.
• There is no sense in writing something which you don’t feel.

Chapter 13: The Third Dimension

• If you are writing stories, you must never be an advocate of your characters.
• Characters must come fully to life in your imagination.
• The personality behind the writing is very important. This is what we call The Third Dimension.

Chapter 14: Keep a Slovenly, Headlong, Impulsive, Honest Diary

• Now, this is an inevitable truth: whatever you write will reveal your personality, and whatever you are will show in your writing.
• Never, never lie to yourself. Don’t lie to others, but least of all to yourself.
• One of the very worst, self-murdering lies that people tell to themselves is that they are not good and have no gift and nothing important to say.
• Don’t be afraid of writing bad, mawkish stories for that will show you many things about yourself, and your eye and taste and what you really feel and care about will become clearer to you. If you write a bad story, the way to make it better is to write three more. Then look at the first one. You will have grown in understanding, in honesty. You will know what to do to it. And to yourself.
• That is why I think it is good to keep a diary. I don’t mean a “had lunch” diary. But do this: write every day, or as often as you possibly can, as fast and carelessly as you possibly can, without reading it again, anything you happened to have thought, seen or felt the day before.
• it is good to read your writing aloud to yourself. As soon as your voice drags, cross that part out.
• Writing is talking, thinking, on paper. And the more impulsive and immediate the writing the closer it is to the thinking, which it should be.

Chapter 15: You Do Not Know What Is in You-an In­ exhaustible Fountain of Ideas

• ANOTHER REASON FOR writing a diary is to dis­cover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.
• If you are going to write you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently and with self­ trust. If you once become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million· dollars in the bank and don’t know it, it doesn’t do you any good.

Chapter 16: On Using the Imagination

• People believe that it is hard to use imagination. People when they write, try too hard, try to force it
• Imagination comes, works, when you are not trying.
• Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

Chapter 17: The Tigers of Wrath Are Wiser Than the Horses of Instruction

• Write what comes to you now. More will come later.
• You should tell the story first. Everybody can tell a story. If you have ever told a story to a child so that he would listen, you can tell a story.
• When people condemn what we do, they are symbolically destroying us.
• the energy of the creative impulse comes from love and all its manifestations-admiration, compassion, glowing respect, gratitude, praise, compas­sion, tenderness, adoration, enthusiasm.
• Don’t keep marshalling thoughts like: “I must prove it.”

You don’t have to prove it by citing scientific exam­ples, by comparing and all. Say it. If it is true to you, it is true. Another truth may take its place later. What comes truly from me is true, whether anybody believes it or not. It is my truth.

• Therefore when you write, speak with complete self­ trust and do not timidly qualify and feel the ice of well authenticated literary usage and critical soundness­ so afraid when you have finished writing that they will riddle you full of holes. Let them. Later if you find what you wrote isn’t true, accept the new truth. Consistency is the horror of the world.

Chapter 18: He Whose Face Gives No Light Shall Never Become a Star

• If everybody writes and respects and loves writing, then we would have a nation of intelli­gent, eager, impassioned readers; and generous and grateful ones, not mere critical, logy, sedentary pas­sengers, observers of writing, whose attitude is: “All right: entertain me now.”