Mommy Brain

Take Joy is not a technical guide to being a writer. And Yolen is not an author who believes that writing has to be “opening a vein.” She loves what she does, and wants other writers to take joy in their craft.

This book is full of witty wisdom and insight into the craft of writing. This is not simply a “how-to” book. There are some practical suggestions on topics like plot and setting, but there is also a lot of “why-to.” Why do we write? Is it simply for financial consideration? Or does the act itself give us pleasure and joy?

If we are writing simply to be published, odds are that the majority of us will be disappointed.

“Know this about being published: It is out of our hands. Even if you do everything you can think of to effect that outcome, you cannot make an editor take your work. You can go to conferences. You can take creative writing classes (though I have always wanted to see if it were possible to teach a course in noncreative writing). You can read books about writing, such as this one. You can set a work schedule on your computer and make a special place and space for your writing like my Aerie. You can travel to Yaddo and make friends there with performance artists. You can subscribe to Publishers Weekly and The Writer and Poets & Writers or find them in the library. You can get a B.A. or an M.F.A. or a Ph.D. in medieval lit. You can work as a day laborer, having heard that it will ready you for writing the great American novel. Or you can work as a librarian, because someone tells you that is the way to learn to write children’s books. You can walk around Lower Slobovia for a year, sail across the Atlantic in a water closet, become Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal amanuensis, have intercourse with bug-eyed aliens, manage to marry a mass murderer, or murder a mass marrier. Or get thrown off the jury at the next Michael Jackson retrial. Or – God help us – sleep with an editor. It does not – alas – guarantee a thing, though all of those are proably more effective than merely having talent or writing well.”

So Yolen encourages us to write for the sheer joy of the creative process. To enjoy our craft – even if it is only for ourselves. This is a wonderful book, and if you love to write or want to write or love to read about writing or get inside author’s heads – you should read it.

4 out of 5 stars

Here are some of Yolen’s nuggets:

“Fiction is like wrestling with angels – you do not expect to win, but you do expect to come away from the experience changed.”

“I truly believe that a great story must leave the reader with hope. Though I have to admit, I love a good cry.

Charlotte’s Web certainly doesn’t end with joy. But it does end with hope.

If absolutely everyone died at the end of Moby Dick, who would be around to narrate? Or care?”

“A Ringing in the Head

This is how a book or story has to start. Something rings in my head, like Great Tom. A knell.

Or sounds in my brain like a horn. A call to battle.

Sometimes two characters argue in my mind.

Sometimes it is a character tapping me on my shoulder.

Sometimes it is a vision, a picture in my head.

Only when I hear that ringing, that battle horn, that clear argument, or feel that tapping, or see the vision do I know there is a story I have to tell.

Then I must invoke the magic word. Oh, yes – there is one. All truly successful writers know it.

I shall whisper it in your ear: BIC.

It stands for Butt in Chair.

Really. Hard work is the only real magic there is – if the book in your head is to get onto the page.”

“What is a Poem?

What is a poem?
Hard work.
A single great line.
What we see and hear the moment before sleep takes us.
The pause between heartbeats.
The first touch of the drumstick on the tight stretch of drum
and the slight burring after.
A word discovered after an afternoon of trying.
An emotion caught in the hand, in the mouth,
Two words that bump up against one another
and create something new.
Hard work.
What is a poem?
Hard work.
Literature’s soul.
A touch of lemon swab on a parched mouth.
A son who smells of sweat instead of cigarettes.
A new word, like frass, which is what the caterpillar
leaves behind.
A story compressed to a paragraph,
a paragraph squeezed to a phrase,
a phrase pared to its essence.
Hard work.
What is a poem?
Hard work.
Emotion surprised.
Throwing a colored shadow.
A word that doubles back on itself, not once but twice.
The exact crunch of carrots.
Precise joys.
A prayer that sounds like a curse until it is said again.
Cows punctuating a field of snow.
Hard work.
What is a poem?
Hard work.
The space between a hummingbird’s wingbeats.
A child’s meddlefurs.
A whistle too high for a dog to hear.
One bloody word after another after another.
The graceful ellipse of memory.
The graceful collapse of memory.
The graceful lapse of memory.
The graceful lips of memory.
Hard work.
What is a poem?
Hard work.
Hard work.
Hard work.
Hard work.”

“I is for Igloo, an uncomfortable place for most of us to live. To live within the pages of most books would be just as uncomfortable. The hairbreadth escapes, the wounds (both physical and emotional), the outbursts and inbursts alone would paralyze most of us. Imagine tracking Jean Valjean through the Paris sewers or following Inspector Rebus into the dark streets of Edinburgh after a murderer. Imagine sailing on a raft down the muddy Mississippi with an escaped slave as a companion. Or standing back-to-back with Lt. Sharpe and the Forlorn Hope while fighting off Napoleon’s finest. Imagine racing around the world in eighty days in a balloon, or facing down an enraged witch with only a pail of water. In real life most of us would suffer fatal heart attacks or come out of the adventures with the shingles or at least needing a long course with a psychiatrist. Plus wanting a long, hot bath and plenty of good soap. Books are, of course, a place of borrowed courage. But to live there? Not on your life.”