“Garbageman’s Daughter, your voice as a writer is strong and brave but as a person you are a wimp. This is what creates your craziness. The chasm between the great love you feel for the world when you sit and write about it and the disregard you give it in your life," writes Natalie Goldberg in her writing manual Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. She later adds: “You often use writing as a way to receive notice, attention, love."
Okay, so perhaps, Goldberg doesn’t address me by name. But, it sure seems like she is talking to me. Goldberg understands the writing life, and the anxieties that accompany it. In her classic 1986 guidebook, she offers advice for writers of all experience levels from novice to widely-published authors and for practitioners of all genres from poetry to novels (with a huge bias towards verse).
Although writing instructors frequently use Goldberg’s work as a textbook, it reads more like a collection of Zen meditations than a primer. The longtime Zen disciple recommends a free form, non-rule oriented approach to writing. She follows her own advice by a creating a loosely structured book (containing 64 chapters of varying lengths plus an introduction and epilogue). The manual frequently reads like a writer’s notebook or a random collection of essays. Readers can easily jump around to chapters with clever names like “Fighting Tofu,” “Don’t Marry the Fly,” “One Plus One Equals a Mercedes Benz” and “Blue Lipstick and a Cigarette Hanging Out Your Mouth.”
Goldberg’s message is pretty simple: embrace who you are and write anywhere. Her approach is nicely summarized here with my bizarre hybridization of Writing Down the Bones and Green Eggs and Ham:
You may like to write
in a tree!
If not in a tree,
try a car!
Write in a box.
Write with a fox.
Write in a house.
Write with a mouse.
Write here or there.
Write anywhere.
Yes, her message is that simple: Write anywhere and doing anything you need to do to get the words out. Write solo, write with a partner, write in restaurants, join a writing group, have a writing circle around a camp fire, set-up a poetry booth and write for strangers upon request, or use props like an unlit cigarette hanging from your mouth or blue lipstick.
At times her techniques are contrived and ridiculous, but her enthusiasm and sincerity inspires people to write. Goldberg’s gentle approach emphasizes the idea that writers need multiple options for tackling their writing, and there is no one specific methodology for writing, which is strikingly different from strict, theoretical approaches that emphasis structure and rules.
Sure, she gives her readers a Zen beat down with her excessive optimism and nauseating oneness with the world, when she writes advice such as: “Best come to writing with everything in you. And when you’re done writing, best to walk out in the street with everything you are, including your common sense or Buddha nature—something good at the center, to tell you the names of the streets, so you won’t get lost.”
Nice sentiment, but my GPS will tell me the street names. Second, I do not have a Buddha nature. I am motivated more by a goddess of resentful bitchiness and a muse of bitter self-indulgence. However, I still think Goldberg would be pleased that something motivates to me write even if it is more self-absorption than eastern philosophies. She would greet me with positive sentiments such as: “Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.”
The part about being kind isn’t likely to happen and I don’t buy that writing while being surrounded by beautiful scenery will make my writing better or more authentic. No amount of picturesque beaches and gorgeous sunsets could improve my crappy poetry. Crappy poetry is crappy poetry is crappy poetry.
But, I do take some of her other advice such as using a samurai, which means to take out a metaphorical knife and cut the clutter from the page. To make her argument, she uses a quote from William Carlos Williams to Allen Ginsberg: “If only one line in the poem has energy, then cut the rest out and leave the one line.” This technique has completely changed my approach to writing. This method empowers me to actually complete works even if they are just a few sentences opposed to having a long queue of unfinished partial pieces. (Note to husband, I do not measure my love for you by the number of words it takes for me to tell our story. Sorry, you do not like my short pieces of late, but three sentences of passionate cleverness supersede a full page of lukewarm sentimental dribble any day).
Although not all Goldberg’s advice makes sense, she gets people writing for trade and for fun. Yes, her approach is excruciatingly sweet like a perverse combination of a hallmark card, a doting grandmother and a pre-school teacher. But her style is a welcomed change from the harsh world of letters where there is no shortage of people to tell you that your writing sucks. There are the apathetic professors who will scribble red all over your paper and give you a C+ with limited explanation and the magazine editors who will send a form letter with the dreaded: “Thank you for submitting, but at this time, your submission does not meet the requirements for inclusion in our publication. Good luck with your future endeavors.” And of course, all the blog readers who generously leave comments, such as: “Why do you even bother?” or “So, were you trying to be funny?”
In an environment with so much cruelty and criticism, aren’t there times when we all just need some milk, chocolate chip cookies, a hug and a gentle dose of Zen philosophy?
