Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

  Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.

  Yad Vashem, a memorial for the Holocaust, is in Jerusalem. It has a whole library that catalogs the names of the six million martyrs. Not only did the library have their names, it also had where they lived, were born, anything that could be found out about them. These people existed and they mattered. Yad Vashem, as a matter of fact, actually means “memorial to the name.” It was not nameless masses that were slaughtered; they were human beings.

  Likewise, in Washington, D.C., there is the Vietnam Memorial. There are fifty thousand names listed—middle names, too—of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. Real human beings with names were killed and their breaths moved out of this world. There was the name of Donald Miller, my secondgrade friend who drew tanks, soldiers, and ships in the margins of all his math papers. Seeing names makes us remember. A name is what we carry all our life, and we respond to its call in a classroom, to its pronunciation at a graduation, or to our name whispered in the night.

  It is important to say the names of who we are, the names of the places we have lived, and to write the details of our lives. “I lived on Coal Street in Albuquerque next to a garage and carried paper bags of groceries down Lead Avenue. One person had planted beets early that spring, and I watched their red/green leaves grow.”

  We have lived; our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in Owatonna.

  Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer’s task to say, “It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home.” Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

  Baking a Cake

  WHEN YOU BAKE a cake, you have ingredients: sugar, flour, butter, baking soda, eggs, milk. You put them in a bowl and mix them up, but this does not make a cake. This makes goop. You have to put them in the oven and add heat or energy to transform it into cake, and the cake looks nothing like its original ingredients. It’s a lot like parents unable to claim their hippie kids as their own in the sixties. Milk and eggs look at their pound cake and say, “Not ours.” Not egg, not milk, but Ph.D. daughter of refugee parents—a foreigner in her own home.

  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. This is not just any father; this is your father. The character who smoked cigars and put too much ketchup on his steak. The one you loved and hated. You can’t just mix the ingredients in a bowl; they have no life. You must become one with the details in love or hate; they become an extension of your body. Nabokov says, “Caress the divine details.” He doesn’t say, “Jostle them in place or bang them around.” Caress them, touch them tenderly. Care about what is around you. Let your whole body touch the river you are writing about, so if you call it yellow or stupid or slow, all of you is feeling it. There should be no separate you when you are deeply engaged. Katagiri Roshi said: “When you do zazen [sitting meditation], you should be gone. So zazen does zazen. Not Steve or Barbara does zazen.” 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.

  The cake is baking in the oven. All that heat goes into the making of that cake. The heat is not distracted, thinking, “Oh, I wanted it to be a chocolate cake, not a pound cake.” You don’t think as you write, “Oh, I don’t like my life, I should have been born in Illinois.” You don’t think. You accept what is and put down its truth. Katagiri Roshi has said: “Literature will tell you what life is, but it won’t tell you how to get out of it.”

  Ovens can be very cantankerous sometimes, and you might have to learn ways to turn your heat on. Timing your writing adds pressure and helps to heat things up and blast through the internal censor. Also, keeping your hand moving and not stopping add to the heat, so a beautiful cake may rise out of the mixture of your daily details. If you find yourself checking the clock too much as you write, say to yourself you are going to keep writing until three (or four or five) pages, both sides, are filled or until the cake is baked, however long that takes. And you are never sure once the heat begins whether you will get a devil’s food or an angel food cake. There are no guarantees; don’t worry. They’re both good to eat.

  There are people who try to use heat only, without ingredients, to make a cake. The heat is cozy and feels good, but when you’re done, there’s not much there for anyone else to eat. That’s usually abstract writing: we get a sense there is great warmth there, but we have nothing to bite into. If you use details, you become better skilled at conveying your ecstasy or sorrow. So while you fly around in the heat of the oven, bring in the batter in the pan so we know exactly what your feelings taste like, so we may be a gourmet of them: “Oh, it’s a pound cake, a brownie, a light lemon soufflé.” That is what her feelings feel like. Not “It was great, it was great!” Yes, it was great, but how great? Give us the flavor. In other words, use details. They are the basic unit of writing.

  And in using them, you are not only baking cakes and buzzing around the oven. In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not just staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.

  Living Twice

  WRITERS LIVE TWICE. They go along with their regular life, are as fast as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there’s another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives everything a second time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

  In a rainstorm, everyone quickly runs down the street with umbrellas, raincoats, newspapers over their heads. Writers go back outside in the rain with a notebook in front of them and a pen in hand. They look at the puddles, watch them fill, watch the rain splash in them. You can say a writer practices being dumb. Only a dummy would stand out in the rain and watch a puddle. If you’re smart, you get in out of the rain so you won’t catch cold, and you have health insurance, in case you get sick. If you’re dumb, you are more interested in the puddle than in your security and insurance or in getting to work on time.

  You’re more interested, finally, in living life again in your writing than in making money. Now, let’s understand—writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for ti
me. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step—their time—and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it. They hold on to it and aren’t so eager to sell it. It’s like inheriting land from your family. It’s always been in your family: they have always owned it. Someone comes along and wants to buy it. Writers, if they are smart, won’t sell too much of it. They know once it’s sold, they might be able to buy a second car, but there will be no place they can go to sit still, no place to dream on.

  So it is good to be a little dumb when you want to write. You carry that slow person inside you who needs time; it keeps you from selling it all away. That person will need a place to go and will demand to stare into rain puddles in the rain, usually with no hat on, and to feel the drops on her scalp.

  Writers Have Good Figures

  WHAT PEOPLE DON’T realize is that writing is physical. It doesn’t have to do with thought alone. It has to do with sight, smell, taste, feeling, with everything being alive and activated. The rule for writing practice of “keeping your hand moving,” not stopping, actually is a way to physically break through your mental resistances and cut through the concept that writing is just about ideas and thinking. You are physically engaged with the pen, and your hand, connected to your arm, is pouring out the record of your senses. There is no separation between the mind and body; therefore, you can break through the mind barriers to writing through the physical act of writing, just as you can believe with your mind that your hand won’t stop at the wood, so you can break a board in karate.

  After one writing class a student, in amazement, said, “Oh, I get it! Writing is a visual art!” Yes, and it’s a kinesthetic, visceral art too. I’ve told fourth-graders that my writing hand could knock out Muhammad Ali. They believed me because they know it is true. Sixth-graders are older and more skeptical. I’ve had to prove it to them by putting my fist through their long gray lockers.

  When I look around at people writing, I can tell just by their physical posture if they have broken through or not. If they did, their teeth are rattling around in their mouth, no longer tight in their gums; their hearts might be pounding hard or aching. They are breathing deeply. Their handwriting is looser, more generous, and their bodies are relaxed enough to run for miles. This is why I say all writers, no matter how fat, thin, or flabby, have good figures. They are always working out. Remember this. They are in tune, toned up, in rhythm with the hills, the highway, and can go for long stretches and many miles of paper. They move with grace in and out of many worlds.

  And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration. If you read a great poem aloud—for example, “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley—and read it the way he set it up and punctuated it, what you are doing is breathing his inspired breath at the moment he wrote that poem. That breath was so powerful it still can be awakened in us over 150 years later. Taking it on is very exhilarating. This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

  Listening

  AT SIX YEARS OLD I was sitting at my cousin’s piano in Brooklyn making believe I was playing a song and singing along with it: “In the gloaming, oh my darling . . .” My cousin, who was nine years older, sat down beside me on the piano stool and screamed to my mother, “Aunt Sylvia, Natalie is tone-deaf. She can’t sing!” From then on, I never sang and I rarely listened to music. When I heard the scores from Broadway shows on radio, I just learned the words and never tried to imitate the melody. As I grew older my friends and I played a game, Name That Tune. I would hum something and they would break into peals of laughter, not possibly believing I was actually humming “Younger Than Springtime” from South Pacific. This was a way I received attention, though my young heart secretly longed to be Gypsy Rose Lee. After all, I knew all the words to all the songs. But basically, the world of music was not available to me. I was tone-deaf: I had a physical defect, like a missing foot or finger.

  Several years ago I took a singing lesson from a Sufi singing master, and he told me there is no such thing as tone-deafness. “Singing is 90 percent listening. You have to learn to listen.” If you listen totally, your body fills with the music, so when you open your mouth the music automatically comes out of you. A few weeks after that, I sang in tune with a friend for the first time in my life and thought for sure I had become enlightened. My individual voice disappeared and our two voices became one.

  Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don’t only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

  Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are. Jack Kerouac in his list of prose essentials said, “Be submissive to everything. Open. Listening.” He also said, “No time for poetry, but exactly what is.” If you can capture the way things are, that’s all the poetry you’ll ever need.

  Rabbi Zalman Schachter once told a group of people at the Lama Foundation that when he was in rabbinical school the students were not allowed to take notes. They had to just listen, and when the lecture was done they were expected to know it. The idea was that we can remember everything. We choose and have trained our minds to repress things.

  After something is read in class, I often have the students do a “recall”: “As close as you can to the exact words of what was said or written, repeat anything that was strong for you. Don’t step away and say, ‘I liked when she talked about the farmland.’ Give us exact details: ‘Standing in the field, I was lonelier than a crow.’” Besides opening and receiving what was said, this kind of deep, nonevaluative listening awakens stories and images inside you. By listening in this way you become a clear mirror to reflect reality, your reality and the reality around you.

  Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page.

  If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. Maybe it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to learn something, go to the source. Basho, the great seventeenth-century Haiku master, said, “If you want to know about a tree, go to the tree.” If you want to know poetry, read it, listen to it. Let those patterns and forms be imprinted in you. Don’t step away from poetry to analyze a poem with your logical mind. Enter poetry with your whole body. Dogen, a great Zen master, said, “If you walk in the mist, you get wet.” So just listen, read, and write. Little by little, you will come closer to what you need to say and express it through your voice.

  Be patient and don’t worry about it. Just sing and write in tune.

  Don’t Marry the Fly

  WATCH WHEN YOU listen to a piece of writing. There might be spaces where your mind wanders. We sometimes respond with comments such as “I don’t know, it got too deep for me” or “There was just too much description, I couldn’t follow it.” Often the problem is not in the reader but in the writing.

  These are places where the writer went back on himself, became diverted in his own mind’s enjoyment, forgetting where the story was originally heading.

  A writer might be writing about a restaurant scene but become obs
essed with the fly on the napkin and begin to describe, in minute detail, the fly’s back, the fly’s dreams, its early childhood, its technique for flying through screen windows. The reader or listener becomes lost because right before that the waiter had come to the table in the writing and the listener is waiting for him to serve the food. Also, the writer may not be clear on his true direction or not directly present with his material. This creates a blur in the writing. It is some area that is fuzzy and so loses the reader’s attention because it makes a little gap, letting the reader’s mind wander away from the work.

  A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence.

  Stay on the side of precision; know your goal and stay present with it. If your mind and writing wander from it, bring them gently back. When we write, many avenues open up inside us. Don’t get too far afield. Stay with the details and with your direction. Don’t be self-absorbed, which eventually creates vague, muddy writing. We might really get to know the fly but forget where we are: the restaurant, the rain outside, the friend across the table. The fly is important, but it has its place. Don’t ignore the fly; don’t become obsessed with it. Irving Howe wrote in his introduction to Jewish American Stories that the best art almost becomes sentimental but doesn’t. Recognize the fly, even love it if you want, but don’t marry it.