Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

Learn to recall images and lines precisely as the writer said them. Don’t step away from their warmth and fire to talk “about” them. Stay close to them. That’s how you’ll learn to write. Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it.

There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.

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.

So 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.

First of all, don’t be literary.

Don’t “make” your mind do anything. Simply step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you.

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.

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.

your main obsessions have power; they are what you will come back to in your writing over and over again. And you’ll create new stories around them. So you might as well give in to them. They probably take over your life whether you want them to or not, so you ought to get them to work for you.

We are run by our compulsions. Maybe it’s just me. But it seems that obsessions have power. Harness that power.

You’re never free unless you are doing your art.

I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

Be awake to the details around you, but don’t be self-conscious.

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.

Seeing names makes us remember. A name is what we carry all our life, and we respond to its call in a classroom, to its pronunciation at a graduation, or to our name whispered in the night.

It is important to say the names of who we are, the names of the places we have lived, and to write the details of our lives.

Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency.

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.

Care about what is around you.

You accept what is and put down its truth.

“Literature will tell you what life is, but it won’t tell you how to get out of it.”

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.

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work.

The rule for writing practice of “keeping your hand moving,” not stopping, actually is a way to physically break through your mental resistances and cut through the concept that writing is just about ideas and thinking.

Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write.

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.” If you can capture the way things are, that’s all the poetry you’ll ever need.

listening in this way you become a clear mirror to reflect reality, your reality and the reality around you.

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.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive.

Don’t be self-absorbed, which eventually creates vague, muddy writing.

our dreams do reoccur. We might as well pay attention to them and act on them. It is a way to penetrate into our lives; otherwise we might drift with our dreams forever.

We think in sentences, and the way we think is the way we see. If we think in the structure subject/verb/ direct-object, then that is how we form our world. By cracking open that syntax, we release energy and are able to see the world afresh and from a new angle. We stop being so chauvinistic as Homo sapiens.

The more you are aware of the syntax you move, see, and write in, the better control you have and the more you can step out of it when you need to.

by breaking open syntax, you often get closer to the truth of what you need to say.

Try for good, strong first sentences. You might want to take the first half of your sentence from a newspaper article and finish the sentence with an ingredient listed in a cookbook. Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

When you write, stay in direct connection with the senses and what you are writing about.

First thoughts are the mind reflecting experiences—

Give things the dignity of their names.

“To see the World in a Grain of Sand, and a heaven in a Wild Flower . . . ”8

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.

So when we concentrate in our writing, it is good. But we should always concentrate, not by blocking out the world, but by allowing it all to exist. This is a very tricky balance.

We think of detail as small, not the realm of the cosmic mind or these big hills of New Mexico. That isn’t true. No matter how large a thing is, how fantastic, it is also ordinary. We think of details as daily and mundane. Even miracles are mundane happenings that an awakened mind can see in a fantastic way.

Details are not good or bad. They are details.

In order to write about it, we have to go to the heart of it and know it, so the ordinary and extraordinary flash before our eyes simultaneously.

Go so deep into something that you understand its interpenetration with all things. Then automatically the detail is imbued with the cosmic; they are interchangeable.

We are all interwoven and create each other’s universes.

This understanding is how we should come to writing. Then we can handle details not as individual, material objects alone but as reflections of everything.

It is good to talk. Do not be ashamed of it. Talk is the exercise ground for writing. It is a way we learn about communication—what makes people interested, what makes them bored.