"I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another"
About this Quote
Ueland takes a scalpel to the romantic myth of the writer as windswept genius and replaces it with a glue-stick ethic: attention, play, repetition. The Byron image is doing more than mocking melodrama. It’s a cultural shorthand for a certain kind of creative narcissism, the performance of feeling as proof of importance. By rejecting “Lord Byron on a mountain top,” she’s rejecting writing as theater - the pose, the suffering, the grand weather systems of the ego.
Her alternative is disarmingly small: a child in kindergarten, stringing beads. The simile re-routes “feeling” away from tempest and toward absorption. Feeling, in Ueland’s frame, isn’t a thunderclap; it’s the quiet pleasure of making, the bodily sense of time disappearing because the work is concrete and doable. “One bead on after another” reads like craft advice disguised as psychology: break the task down, keep the hand moving, let meaning accrue through sequence rather than epiphany.
The subtext is permission. She’s telling anxious writers that the emotional state to aim for isn’t inspiration but steadiness - happiness without spectacle, concentration without self-judgment. Coming from a 20th-century writer who taught creativity and championed ordinary voices, it also nudges against gatekeeping: writing isn’t reserved for those who can summon heroic torment. It’s available to anyone willing to sit down, stay present, and make the next small choice.
Her alternative is disarmingly small: a child in kindergarten, stringing beads. The simile re-routes “feeling” away from tempest and toward absorption. Feeling, in Ueland’s frame, isn’t a thunderclap; it’s the quiet pleasure of making, the bodily sense of time disappearing because the work is concrete and doable. “One bead on after another” reads like craft advice disguised as psychology: break the task down, keep the hand moving, let meaning accrue through sequence rather than epiphany.
The subtext is permission. She’s telling anxious writers that the emotional state to aim for isn’t inspiration but steadiness - happiness without spectacle, concentration without self-judgment. Coming from a 20th-century writer who taught creativity and championed ordinary voices, it also nudges against gatekeeping: writing isn’t reserved for those who can summon heroic torment. It’s available to anyone willing to sit down, stay present, and make the next small choice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit — Brenda Ueland (originally 1938; modern Graywolf Press edition). Contains the passage comparing writing to “a child stringing beads in kindergarten.” |
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