Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.

It is true that the inside world creates the outside world, but the outside world and our tools also affect the way we form our thoughts.

You learn to not be tossed away no matter how great the thought or emotion. That is the discipline: to continue to sit. The same is true in writing. You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them.

Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this “composting.” Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

Meditadyon kendinle barisma

Katagiri Roshi said: “Your little will can’t do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean just you making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you—the birds, trees, sky, moon, and ten directions.”

Understanding this process cultivates patience and produces less anxiety. We aren’t running everything, not even the writing we do. At the same time, we must keep practicing.

We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us. This understanding also helps us to accept someone else’s success and not to be too greedy. It is simply that person’s time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.

Meditasyon kendinle barisma not 1'in devami

We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us. This understanding also helps us to accept someone else’s success and not to be too greedy. It is simply that person’s time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.

Meditasyon not 2'nin devami

When you begin to write this way—right out of your own mind—you might have to be willing to write junk for five years, because we have accumulated it over many more than that and have been gladly avoiding it in ourselves.

Meditasyon kendinle barisma sebep not 3'un devami

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.

Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration, and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs.

Making a list is good. It makes you start noticing material for writing in your daily life, and your writing comes out of a relationship with your life and its texture. In this way, the composting process is beginning. Your body is starting to digest and turn over your material, so even when you are not actually at the desk physically writing, there are parts of you raking, fertilizing, taking in the sun’s heat, and making ready for the deep green plants of writing to grow.

DISCIPLINE has always been a cruel word. I always think of it as beating my lazy part into submission, and that never works.

Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us.

The ability to put something down—to tell how you feel about an old husband, an old shoe, or the memory of a cheese sandwich on a gray morning in Miami—that moment you can finally align how you feel inside with the words you write; at that moment you are free because you are not fighting those things inside. You have accepted them, become one with them.

If you think big enough to let people eat cars, you will be able to see that ants are elephants and men are women. You will be able to see the transparency of all forms so that all separations disappear.

Metaphor is saying the ant is an elephant. Now,

metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.

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.

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 must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not just staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.

And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.

Jack Kerouac in his list of prose essentials said, “Be submissive to everything. Open. Listening.” He also said, “No time for poetry, but exactly what is.”

best art almost becomes sentimental but doesn’t.

We shouldn’t forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do. And if you throw a line in about it, it reminds the reader, too, that though we must concentrate on the task before us, we mustn’t forget the whole breathing world. Tossing in the color of the sky at the right moment lets the piece breathe a little more.

We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close. Details are not good or bad. They are details.

The struggle we go through as human beings, so we can again and again have compassion for ourselves and treat each other kindly.

Zen teachers talk about our rooms as an indication of our state of mind. Some people are afraid of space and so fill every nook and cranny. It is analogous to our mind’s fear of emptiness, so the mind constantly stirs up thoughts and dramas.

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. Finally, there is no perfection.

“Well, I’ll try my best. I figure I have to give it a shot, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’ll just accept it.” Roshi responded, “That’s the wrong attitude. If they knock you down, you get up. If they knock you down again, get up. No matter how many times they knock you down, get up again. That is how you should go.”

have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing. Avoid getting caught by that small gnawing mouse of doubt. See beyond it to the vastness of life and the belief in time and practice.

But when I do listen, it offers me a chance to touch my life which always softens me and allows me to feel connected with myself again.

Dogen, a thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist master, said, “Every day is a good day.” That is the ultimate attitude we should have toward our writing, even if we have good and bad days.

When I was separated from my husband, Katagiri Roshi said to me, “You should live alone. You should learn about that. It is the terminal abode.” “Roshi, will I get used to loneliness?” “No, you don’t get used to it. I take a cold shower every morning and every morning it shocks me, but I continue to stand up in the shower. Loneliness always has a bite, but learn to stand up in it and not be tossed away.”

Art is communication. Taste the bitterness of isolation, and from that place feel a kinship and compassion for all people who have been alone. Then in your writing lead yourself out of it by thinking of someone and wanting to express your life to him. Reach out in your writing to another lonely soul. “This is how I felt when I drove across Nebraska, late August, early evening alone in my blue car.”

In the ability to connect with one people lies the chance to feel compassion for all people.

“We are good and therefore we are capable of shining forth through our resistance to write well and claim it as our own.”

Sometimes we expose ourselves before we understand what we have done.

Plus freezing up makes for terrible writing.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

Land is the earth. Earth is your life, moment by moment.

It’s important for people to spend some time digging into their past in their writing practice because there should be no place that you’re avoiding. If you avoid it in yourself, you’re going to avoid it whatever you write about, and that pollutes the writing. You need to be able to stand up with your life. Accept your mind and your life.

think we see certain kinds of things more clearly when we’re not as broken.