Elliott_BR_3

I found Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within inspiring, challenging, encouraging, and provocative. Published in 1986, this book advocates the "just keep writing and something will emerge" thesis we dismissed in class last week as an idea whose time had come and gone. "Keep your hand moving," she repeats, and shares intriguing techniques to help us do this. Write in spiral notebooks, in public places. Write "I remember?" and then write what comes up. Write for timed segments, at a set time every day, in marathons, even when you don't feel like it.

The difference between Goldberg's advice, I think, and the image I got from "just keep writing and something will emerge" is her conviction that the "something" she's looking for, that she thinks we should all be working with, is practice. Just as runners stretch before they run, she says, writers should practice, regularly, before they write the real stuff. She cheerfully admits to filling her spiral notebooks with complaints, repetitive wanderings, and garbage: practice stuff.

There's standard advice here, too (clearly, gracefully written.) Write with specific, original details. Tell stories, read other writers. Use fresh verbs. But her central message is, I think about courage. All that writing is central to Goldberg's Zen practice and becomes central to who she is in the world. "Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say," she tells us. Just as someone beginning meditation practice sits through barren stretches sure she's doing it all wrong, writers need to persevere, to practice. She assumes writing will change the writer's life, and challenges her readers to keep our hands moving until we change ours.