Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

Author:Natalie Goldberg [Goldberg, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Composition, Nonfiction, Writing
ISBN: 9780834821132
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 1986-10-11T23:00:00+00:00

A Tourist in Your Own Town

WRITERS WRITE ABOUT things that other people don’t pay much attention to. For instance, our tongues, elbows, water coming out of a water faucet, the kind of garbage trucks New York City has, the color purple of a faded sign in a small town. I always tell my elementary school students, “Please, no more Michael Jacksons, Atari games, TV characters in your poems.” They get all the attention they need, plus millions of dollars in advertising to ensure their popularity. A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.

When we live in a place for too long, we grow dull. We don’t notice what is around us. That is why a trip is so exciting. We are in a new place and see everything in a fresh way. I have a friend who lives in New York. The last time she’d been to the Empire State Building was in fifth grade when her public school took her there. When friends came to visit from Minnesota, of course, they wanted to go to that great skyscraper. She was thrilled to go to the top again, though she would never have done it on her own or cared about it.

A writer is a visitor from the Midwest to New York City for the first time, only she never leaves the Midwest; she sees her own town with the eyes of a tourist in New York City. And she begins to see her life this way too. Recently I moved to Santa Fe, and since there were few writing jobs here, I worked as a cook part-time in a local restaurant. Waking up at six on Sunday to cook brunch all day, I questioned my fate. At eight A.M. I was busy cutting carrots at a diagonal, noticing the orange of them and thinking to myself, “This is really very deep.” I fell in love with the carrots. I laughed. “So this is what has become of me! Too easily satisfied with so little.”

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.

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