writing

I spend time telling my students to be themselves, to write what they know, to use their natural voices. Then I give them a handout with lead paragraphs from a cross-section of student writings. Invariably the "good" students--those who can write in complete sentences, who manage to find the spell-checker, and who know how to use punctuation--will pick the academic sounding leads. They all believe that they must use four syllable words to impress the teacher. They repeat the same abstractions over and over, stretching nothing of importance to three full pages. So when Natalie Goldman tells us "write clearly and with great honesty" and then calls it "writing down the bones," something in her essay rings very true.

Goldman's book is a series of commentaries on the tools, the mindset, the insecurities, practices, and disciplines of the writer. She pushes her audience to take chances, to not only let themselves fail but to learn from their failures. She tells us that: "When you learn to write this way--right out of your own mind--you have to be willing to write junk for five years." At the same time, however, she expects--and it is clear that she, herself, feels--a level of joy in the process. She tells us to seek our safety in the right pen, a good notebook, and to use the technology we find comfortable. She allows us to appreciate the ego within, to go ahead and celebrate the our internal "voices" even when they produce "terrible self-pitying junk for page after page." Out of sheer volume and continual practice Goldman expects the writer will be reborn in her students. From the tricks to get around the writer's block to the rewards for filling a page Goldman is a goldmine of simple advice and ideas that I find exceptionally suited for use in my own classes with my own budding student writers.

Natalie Goldberg apparently has two loves in life: Zen and Writing. She loves both equally. So she probably had a hard time deciding whether to write a book on Zen or a book on writing. She took the easy way out. She wrote a book that had both. And oh how it shows! Seems like almost every chapter she'll have a sentence that starts with "Katagiri Roshi said, . . .", as if I care what her Zen teacher had to say. I also remember her telling us to "use a writing utensil that is comfortable"--or something very similar. Now what person doesn't know that?! A waste of words, if you ask me. In my opinion, one should be VERY skeptical about a writer who has more "how-to-write" books than they do novels. If she really knew what she was talking about, don't you think she'd take her own advice and use it to start cranking out that bestseller that's been in her head for so long? If your kid wanted to play baseball, who would you rather have teach him: a person who WRITES about baseball and plays occasionally on weekends OR someone who PLAYS baseball nearly every day of the week? Same thing goes for writing. Now, if you want to read two good writing books, read ON WRITING by Stephen King and THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by STRUNK AND WHITE. As Stephen King will tell you, you're either born a competent writer, or you're not--and one who is not born a writer won't make it. But perhaps the BEST advice that anyone can give a writer is this quote from Epictetus: "IF YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER, WRITE!"

Natalie Goldberg's insights about writing as a spirtual practice are just as valid today as they were in 1986 when this book was first published. Her suggestions to writers work, both for beginning writers and for writers who depend on words in order to make a living. I recommend this book to the emerging writers I mentor as a must-have reference second only to a good dictionary.

As a professional writer who has written over 20 books and 500 magazine articles, I've given Writing Down the Bones away several times after mistakenly deciding that I'd outgrown it. Just as often I've had to go out and buy another copy to remind myself that there's more to the writing life than rejections, and royalties. Every time I reread it, I find something new. Last year I read Goldberg's memoir, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, which provides insights about how she came to her beliefs about writing and spirituality. I suggest reading both books.