Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.) Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.) Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the m

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.

Besides opening and receiving what was said, this kind of deep, nonevaluative listening awakens stories and images inside you.

There comes a time to shape and direct the force we have learned. I asked them, “What are your deep dreams? Write for five minutes.” Many of us don’t know, don’t recognize, avoid our deep dreams. When we write for five, ten minutes we are forced to put down wishes that float around in our mind and that we might not pay attention to. It is an opport

That’s the great value of art—making the ordinary extraordinary. We awaken ourselves to the life we are living.

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.

A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.

you can have topics you want to write about—“I want to write about my brother who died in San Francisco”—but come to it not with your mind and ideas, but with your whole body—your heart and gut and arms. Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you

When we know the name of something, it brings us closer to the ground. It takes the blur out of our mind; it connects us to the earth.

who can bear to look at the junk of our own minds that comes out in writing practice?