Writing Down the Bones
Finished — 2025-12-01
Started — 2025-10-30
This turned out to be an exhortative “stop worrying, go ahead and be creative” sort of book. Not the clever, systematic, architectural approach that Stephen and I both assumed from the title. But Goldberg has become a welcome character in my mind, reminding me again and again, in new ways each time, to stop worrying and go ahead and be creative.
DISCIPLINE HAS ALWAYS been a cruel word. I always think of it as beating my lazy part into submission, and that never works. The dictator and the resister continue to fight: “I don’t want to write.” “You are going to write.” “I’ll write later. I’m tired.” “You’ll write now.” All the while my notebook remains empty. If those characters in you want to fight, let them fight. Mean-while, the sane part of you should quietly get up, go over to your notebook, and begin to write from a deeper, more peaceful place. Unfortunately, those two fighters often come with you to your notebook since they are inside your head. We can’t always leave them in the backyard or basement or at the day-care center. So you might have to give them five or ten minutes of voice in your notebook. Let them carry on in writing. It is amazing that when you give those voices writing space, their complaining quickly gets boring and you get sick of them.
This seems like advice for the ages
Chapters about detail Original Detal, The Power of Detail Goldberg writes about details that always come from the local and the homemade and the individual quirk One argument: The more our lives become homogenized by consumerism, chain restaurants and mass produced fast fashion, algorithmic brainrot entertainment, the less unique detail they have Perhaps even measurably so with information theory Your life has fewer bits of information in it the more you succumb to these regularities Thus the less any individual person matters? Argument two: No, human life always had infinite detail, or at least sufficiently more than the saturation capacity of what can be captured and regarded, and infinite dignity, so everyone’s life has always mattered as much as anyone else’s Middle argument: You matter just as much but as your life gets homogenized, it’s harder to capture and recognize that detail effectively
A friend living upstairs from me once said, “Natalie, you have relationships with everything, not just with people. You have a relationship with the stairs, your porch, the car, the cornfields, and the clouds.” We are a part of everything. When we understand this, we see that we are not writing, but everything is writing through us. Kate and I wrote through each other and through Mondays and through the streets and the coffee. Like bleeding one color into another.
I feel that way about Jonbell And Zroundbls and Stephen
In Japan there are stories of great Zen poets writing a superb haiku and then putting it in a bottle in a river or nearby stream and letting it go.
So this is good but it is very tricky. Form alone will not create art. For instance, we are taught that a haiku is a Japanese short poem form. It has seventeen syllables and is written in three lines. It often mentions a season and something from nature. Children in elementary schools all over the United States are taught to write these three-line poems, but in truth, they are not haiku. If you sit down and read a lot of Basho, Shiki, Issa, Buson, four of the greatest Haiku masters, in good translation by R. H. Blyth, you will see that, in fact, his translations do not even follow the form of seventeen syllables with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Japanese is a very different language from English. Each syllable in Japanese carries a lot more weight than it does in English, so in order to write haiku in English, just use three short lines. “Okay. I’ve got it. I’ve studied Blyth’s translations. It’s three short lines to make haiku, and I can skip the syllable count.” Yes, but then what makes it haiku and not just a short poem? If you read a lot of haiku, you see there is a leap that hap-pens, a moment where the poet makes a large jump and the reader’s mind must catch up. This creates a little sensation of space in the reader’s mind, which is nothing less than a moment’s experience of God, and when you feel it, there is usually an “Aah” wanting to issue from your lips. Try reading these, translated by R. H. Blyth. Take your time and pause after each one. Among the grasses, A flower blooms white, Its name unknown. — SHIKI Spring departs, Trembling, in the grasses Of the fields. — ISSA The scent and colour Of the wisteria Seem far from the moon. — BUSON The voice of the pheasant; How I longed For my dead parents! — BASHO
That sensation of space is a true test of haiku. No matter how well we learn to write three-line poems, it takes much practice to fill those three lines with an experience of God. Basho has said that if you write five haiku in your life, you are a haiku writer, and if you write ten, you are a master.