okay, maybe i’m not quite done yet for another week (remember, no blogging on the weekend). i want to say that i don’t owe anything to natalie goldberg, but that would be selfish and untrue.
when i was sixteen or so my parents came to terms with the fact that i liked to write. no surprise, my dad has always been a writer and at that point i’d been penning silly stories for five or six years.
maybe they didn’t even recognize that i was a writer but that i was beginning to experience writers’ block for the first time in my life. when you’re a kid and your dad buys a word processor and it’s pretty cool because it’s technology but it’s only a word processor so writing is about all it’s good for (well, writing and adventure, the game), you write.
i wrote. i wrote a story about four dogs that rafted downstream from near marine on st. croix to st. croix state park. for those unfamiliar with the great st. croix river, well i’ll just say that that would have been upstream but my grasp of geography was nothing like it is today. it was a good story and a little tragic and a little funny. it had a beginning, a middle and an end. there were some episodes, but always it was moving toward the next thing.
it was probably the last time anything i wrote had such a solid structure.
anyway, then i tried to repeat that amazing success by writing a sequel. it had all the same characters and issues, but no plot. it wasn’t nearly as good, but what sequel is?
i don’t remember what i wrote then but my next story was my biggest project. it was a few years later i think but it was inspired by a dream and by war. it had to do with guerilla fighters and an oppressive government. it was far too short to tell the story, it ended with a fatal sled ride, and i think it probably showed the first signs of being burdened with self-consciousness. i realized i didn’t know much about my subject matter and that made me nervous. i remember consulting a tourist map of washington, d.c. so that it would seem halfway plausible.
anyway, back to natalie goldberg. when i was 15 or 16, my parents gave me wild mind as a christmas gift. my parents have always given me at least one book for my birthday and for christmas. bless their hearts. this book got me writing. she started out with her rules for writing, which i remember she scandalously claimed were the same as the rules of sex. keep your hand moving.
i thought it was great. she told me to quit listening to my monkey mind and just write. she had great exercises, almost all of which were simply things to write about non-stop for 10 minutes. it was then that i began writing in a stream-of-consciousness style. pot helped that too. my growing self-awareness actually fed my writing, instead of hindering it.
after a couple years of learning to turn off the self-editor for rough drafts, it became an invaluable writers instinct ingrained in my pens, my notebooks, my hand and my brain. write. keep writing. don’t look at what you’ve written. look at it later. stopping to re-read a paragraph or a sentence or even a word is usually nothing more than a cheap excuse to pause in your writing.
more than a well-constructed sentence, more than a perfectly-captured image, it is the therapy of writing that is what keeps bringing me back. it’s only when i’m writing without pause that i am able to figure some things out. i work through an idea and it leads to another idea and another and so on. i reach places, memories, ideas, dreams that i didn’t even know i possessed. it can be breathtaking.
so this weekend, goodbye monkey-mind. it’s a good time of the week to shut it down. just try it: live and write without pause. that’s what i’m liking about this blog so far. it keeps me honest. i haven’t gone back and re-read this post and i won’t. i’ll just click publish, turn off my computer and head home to a cold beer and some chips and salsa.
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