Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

Think of writing as a lifetime relationship.

Writing lets us drop our edge and merge with everything.

Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

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

“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. How many of us with our big salaries are actually secure anyway?

If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace.”

There is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago, we will do it again. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before. Each time is a new journey with no maps.

It is important to adhere to them because the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel. It’s

First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.

The world is not permanent, is everchanging and full of human suffering. So if you express something egoless, it is also full of energy because it is expressing the truth of the way things are.

That is the discipline: to continue to sit.

Inspiration means “breathing in.” Breathing in God.

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.

We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

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, and write about it as though you love it. Go as far as you can, writing as though you love it, then flip over and write about the same thing as though you hate it. Then write about it perfectly neutral.

Write in different places—

Give me your morning.

Visualize a place that you really love, be there,

Write about “leaving.”

What is your first memory?

Write about the streets of your city.

Describe a grandparent.

Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there. A friend calls it “writing off the page.”

Writers, when they write, need to approach things for the first time each time.

Own anything you want in your writing and then let it go.

In the process of writing them, you will learn how.

We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it. I

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader’s job to find it.

Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it.

We write in the moment.

They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and the emotions at that time of writing.

That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us.

Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.

There was nothing dangerous for him in them anymore. The air was no longer electric.

The real life is in writing, not in reading the same ones over and over again for years.

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.

In a sense, this is how we should write. Not asking “Why?,” not delicately picking among candies (or spark plugs), but voraciously, letting our minds eat up everything and spewing it out on paper with great energy.

Have you ever been able to just stay with one thought for very long? Another one arises.

That is because he had an idea of what he wanted to say before he came to paper. Of course, you can sit down and have something you want to say. But then you must let its expression be born in you and on the paper.

Let go of everything when you write, and try at a simple beginning with simple words to express what you have inside. It won’t begin smoothly. 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.