Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

finally settling the self on the self.

Jack Kerouac’s essentials for prose.

Accept loss forever Be submissive to everything, open, listening No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge Be in love with your life

Keep your hand moving.

Don’t cross out.

Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.

Lose control.

Don’t think. Don’t get logical.

Go for the j...

Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window.

Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories.

Take something you feel strongly about, whether it is positive or negative,

Choose a color—for instance, pink—and take a fifteen-minute walk. On your walk notice wherever there is pink. Come back to your notebook and write for fifteen minutes.

Write in different places—

Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop. Be as specific as possible.

Visualize a place that you really love, be there, see the details. Now write about it.

Write about “leaving.”

What is your first memory?

Who are the people you have loved?

Write about the streets of...

Describe a gran...

Write about: swimming the stars the most frightened you’ve ever been green places how you learned about sex your first sexual experience the closest you ever felt to God or nature reading and books that hav...

Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there.

What kind of animal are you? Do you think you are really a cow, chipmunk, fox, horse underneath?

There is a Zen saying: “Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.” Write when you write.

As soon as I hear the word about in someone’s writing, it is an automatic alarm.

A good warm-up or awakener is to write for ten minutes, beginning with “I am a friend to . . .” and only list inanimate objects.

Suzuki looked up and said, “I don’t want to die.”