Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

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

“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.” And don’t worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.

If every time you sat down, you expected something great, writing would always be a great disappointment.

“We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.”

We aren’t running everything, not even the writing we do. At the same time, we must keep practicing. It is not an excuse to not write and sit on the couch eating bonbons.

You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.

The trick is to keep your heart open.

Don’t identify too strongly with your work. Stay fluid behind those black-and-white words. They are not you. They were a great moment going through you. A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.

Writing is everything, unconditional. There is no separation between writing, life, and the mind.

Allow yourself to be awkward. You are stripping yourself. You are exposing your life, not how your ego would like to see you represented, but how you are as a human being. And it is because of this that I think writing is religious. It splits you open and softens your heart toward the homely world.

Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you will find your intelligence, your words, your voice.

Writing is a whole lifetime and a lot of practice.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

You don’t write about politics by thinking you should. That will become doggerel. Start caring about politics, reading about it, talking about it, and don’t worry about what it will do to your writing. When it becomes an obsession, you will naturally write about it.

Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.

This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in Owatonna.

You can say a writer practices being dumb.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page.

Be patient and don’t worry about it. Just sing and write in tune.

Writers get confused. We think writing gives us an excuse for being alive. We forget that being alive is unconditional and that life and writing are two separate entities. Often we use writing as a way to receive notice, attention, love. “See what I wrote. I must be a good person.” We are good people before we ever write a word.

Build up a tolerance for positive, honest support.

Learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings. A writer is all at once everything—an architect, French cook, farmer—and at the same time, a writer is none of these things.

No matter how large a thing is, how fantastic, it is also ordinary.

We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night that gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.

So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don’t be jealous, especially secretly. That’s the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it’s just more clarity in the world for all of us.

A writer is a visitor from the Midwest to New York City for the first time, only she never leaves the Midwest; she sees her own town with the eyes of a tourist in New York City. And she begins to see her life this way too.

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.

Writing is deeper than therapy. You write through your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go of.