“This creative power and imagination is in everyone and so
is the need to express it, i.e., to share it with others. But what happens to
it?
“It is very tender and sensitive, and it is usually drummed
out of people early in life by criticism (so-called “helpful criticism” is
often the worst kind), by teasing, jeering, rules, prissy teachers, critics,
and all those unloving people who forget that the letter killeth but the spirit
giveth life. Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is
discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two...
“You know how all children have this creative power…But this
joyful, imaginative, impassioned energy dies out of us very young. Why? Because
we do not see that it is great and important. Because we let dry obligation
take its place. Because we don’t respect it in ourselves and keep it alive by
using it. And because we don’t keep it alive in others by listening to them...
“You have noticed how teachers, critics, parents and other
know-it-alls, when they see you have written something, become at once
long-nosed and finicking and go through it gingerly sniffing out the flaws.
AHA! A misspelled word! as though
Shakespeare could spell! As though spelling, grammar and what you learn in a
book about rhetoric has anything to do with freedom and the imagination!”
“Remember these things. Work with all your intelligence and
love. Work freely and rollickingly as though [you] were talking to a friend who
loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all
know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.”
excerpts from If You Want To Write by Brenda Ueland
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