Thumb Your Nose

I'm looking at two photographs of Brenda Ueland,  author of If You Want to Write, one taken in 1938 and the other in 1983, when she was ninety-one, and the latter photograph is scary-awful.  Note to self:  no photographs after eighty.  I picked up the book last evening and remembered what a charming, supportive spirit she is.  Chapter seven is titled, "Be careless, reckless!  Be a lion, be a pirate when you write" and chapter ten, "Why Women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing."

I see you can get a used copy for $4.50 at Powell's Books in Portland, the best new and used bookstore on the planet.

Here's what Brenda Ueland says on page nine:

"And so now you will begin to work at your writing.  Remember these things.  Work with all your intelligence and love.  Work freely and rollickingly as though they 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."

Novels in Hiding

Novels in Hiding

In one of the first English novels, Pamela, by Samuel   Richardson, the heroine is chased from room to room by the lord of the manor, Sir Something or Other.  She locks herself in a closet to write letters to her dear parents about her narrow escapes.  The subtitle of the book is Virtue Rewarded.

 It’s been forty years since I’ve read the book. I remember that it is an “epistolary novel” and that I thought that a closet was a closet, a place where clothes are hung, shoes on a floor that  always needs dusting, maybe a shelf above the clothes pole where sweatshirts are  stored or a stack of jeans.  I didn’t think of  a closet  as merely a small private room, and  in Pamela’s case, one with a desk and a lock on the door.

When the term “coming out of the closet” was first used, my  impression was that the person had been hiding in a metaphorical clothes closet, like a frightened child.

 I notice now that “closet” has moved to a general reference to any kind of secret life:  a closet drinker, or racist, or, ironically, a closet homophobe.  The term implies something about yourself that you have been afraid to acknowledge.

This past week I have encountered three closet novelists; that is, three people who  have written novels, shown them to no one--or very few-- left them on a shelf or in a box for years; in one woman’s case, for twenty-five years.

I am in awe of them.  I applaud them.  They have written  books! Probably there are more closeted novelists out there, but I think there are even more  souls like me, who have kept their desire to write closeted year after year, in the dark, behind the winter coats.