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Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
In a sense this is what writing is like. You have all these ingredients, the details of your life, but just to list them is not enough. “I was born in Brooklyn. I have a mother and a father. I am female.” You must add the heat and energy of your heart.
Natalie Goldberg • Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom
Natalie Goldberg • Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Don’t tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation, and that feeling will awaken in them.
Natalie Goldberg • Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
This is also how you should be when you write: writing does writing. You disappear: you are simply recording the thoughts that are streaming through you.
Natalie Goldberg • Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Learn to write about the ordinary. Give homage to old coffee cups, sparrows, city buses, thin ham sandwiches. Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it. Promise yourself, before you leave the earth, to mention everything on your list at least once in a poem, short story, newspaper article.
Natalie Goldberg • 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
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Making a list is good. It makes you start noticing material for writing in your daily life, and your writing comes out of a relationship with your life and its texture. In this way, the composting process is beginning. Your body is starting to digest and turn over your material, so even when you are not actually at the desk physically writing, ther
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because they are fancy, you are compelled to write something good. Instead you should feel that you have permission to write the worst junk in the world and it would be okay. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing.
Natalie Goldberg • Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
It is important to remember we are not the poem.
Natalie Goldberg • Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Writing is not therapy, though it may have a therapeutic effect.