Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

A few weeks ago, I finished teaching a ten week fiction workshop at Grub Street. The class met every Wednesday night, from early January until mid-March, an extra week tacked on at the end due to a canceled class during one of the storms. I have been teaching for a couple of years now, and I've noticed that teaching three hours once a week for ten weeks makes me acutely aware of time. As the instructor I had to divide our three hour sessions into 40 minute intervals, each interval focused on discussion of a student's story, and then those 40 minutes were split in half so the student being workshopped could redirect our conversation. I began to count Wednesdays as numbered weeks. Week 1, Intro to Workshop, Week 2, Characterization, Week 3, Plot - until the weeks began to take on the color of whatever craft element we were discussing: stranger's quirks became character traits, conversations overheard on trains examples of direct dialogue. And then there was the season. What a winter to teach. But as each week passed by I noticed that the sun lingered a bit longer. First, accompanying on my walk, then waiting with me for the bus, eventually trailing me up Boylston Street on my way into class. Pretty soon it was spring, no major snow storms were forecasted, and I had to send twelve people back out into the world hopefully a little wiser about writing fiction.

I bring up time because nearly every workshop the question came up - how do you find the time to write? when do you write? Predicting this question, I tried something new. Periodically throughout the course, I assigned excerpts from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg.

Natalie Goldberg preaches only one thing in Writing Down the Bones: writing practice. To her, writing practice is like a warm-up. Timed writing sessions where you don't lift your pen, where you don't pause to think, where you just let the act of writing - of translating thoughts to page, of shifting what is in your mind to your hand and onto a piece of paper - take over.

Goldberg spends the first few chapters discussing writing practice and then the rest of the book contains two-three page personal essays about her own experience with writing. In that way, Writing Down the Bones is less of a guide and more like a companion. She's become my friend this past year, as I try to steal hours away for my own work. I have this enormous desk. It's a dining table, really, that my husband and I bought at a thrift shop down the street and then hauled up and down our hill to our apartment. I love having a big desk, and on it I have short stacks of books for research, for inspiration, scribbles, stories and essays covered in red ink.  Those mornings when I'm sitting at my desk, tempted by the novel that I'm currently reading (reading is my favorite form of procrastination), I instead reach for Writing Down the Bones. Almost every time, I put the book down after reading less than ten pages and start with my daily writing practice. 

I'm not sure why, after all these years, she's the one who gets me to the page faster than anyone else. Maybe it's how she talks about filling spiral notebooks with writing. Spiral notebooks - the kind that you get at the supermarket during back to school shopping, with cartoon covers. She doesn't take herself too seriously, or what comes out during practice too seriously, because it's about "keeping in tune, like a dancer who does warm-ups before dancing or a runner who does stretches before running." Or maybe it's because she answers that question about when and how do you write most simply: you just do it, you find the time, you make the time, and if all you can give is 15 minutes that day then make them a good, focused, fifteen minutes. Her style and method are not for everyone. But there are plenty of books on writing for all different styles of writer. And, if you're a (struggling) (young) writer, I think it's important to find that book. Ultimately, when you're alone at your desk, they will be the sole advocate for what you're doing, the only book that will encourage you, gently, to put them down and to pick up your pen.

Journaling

Hello! I'm Booksmith's newest blogger, and one of it's newer booksellers (I started last October). I have to admit, I was a bit reluctant to agree to write for the blog. For the past year or so, I've started to slowly step away from the internet so that I could focus more on my own writing. I tend to obsessively check email, spend more time than I'd like on Facebook, and I wanted to keep the time I spent on my computer more or less focused on working on my novel. But then I realized that I talk my co-workers' heads off about a lot of book and writing related things. So, for their sake, I think it's time I subject you, our dear, loyal, blog fans, to that rambling instead.

As part of my commitment to spend less time on the internet, I've started to write more in longhand. I had this journal that my old co-workers gave me as a parting gift a few years ago, one that I had only written in sporadically. It was a hardcover journal with blank pages. I had to crack the spine a bit so that I could lay it flat to write in it, and on the blank pages, my handwriting started to slant. But I found that I really liked having to slow my thoughts down so my hand could keep up. And growing up with one of those lock and key diaries, it felt like going back to the roots of what made me want to be writer.

I filled my old journal quickly, and treated myself to a new one. Have you seen our collection of journals here at the Booksmith? We have *so* many beautiful journals, in every size imaginable. We even sell those lock and key ones I used to write in as a kid. The one I ended up buying is a soft cover, 7.5 x 10" Moleskine with an expandable pocket in the back. I love it. I put postcards and pictures in the back pocket, and I like how easy it is to curl up and write with it on my lap. I can't think of a time since I bought it in January that I haven't had it with me.

I recently taught a one-day jump start your fiction writing workshop at Grub Street, Inc. here in Boston, and  I started the class with a journal writing exercise. We read a passage from The Journals of John Cheever (which I'm currently reading, and love) and as a warm-up before the fiction writing, the students spent twenty minutes free-writing about a recent, memorable day. A few had come in with a laptop and I asked that for this exercise, they write longhand only. For the next exercise, I told them they could bring back out their laptops, but no one did. They said they actually liked writing in longhand.

So if you're looking for something new to try this summer, try writing in a journal. Maybe I"ll convert you to the longhand form too!