Book Review of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg

“When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn’t leave you. Walk with an animal walk and take in everything around you as prey.”

Natalie Goldberg

For years, I’ve wanted to write book reviews, simply because I get excited about books and enjoy sharing that excitement with others. I’d planned to pick a novel for this, my first review, but when I got overwhelmed by all the options, I decided on a nonfiction book instead. This one inspires me on multiple levels: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

I first read Writing Down the Bones in college, and as I mentioned in a recent blog post on resources for writers, it gave me a profound sense of freedom back then. It’s still freeing to read, but now what I love best about the book is its balance. Goldberg gives practical advice; she tells hard truths and asks us to do the same; she offers us beauty and wisdom.

On the practical side of things, she says, “It’s pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won’t take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.” She advises, “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.”

As for keeping that pen of yours moving, she recommends writing practice, and plenty of it. If you persist, she says, the moments will come when “you are in alignment with the stars or the moment or the dining-room chandelier above your head, and your body opens and speaks.”

The backbone of this recommended practice is the timed writing session. To help us along, Goldberg offers a collection of prompts; she also encourages us to list our obsessions and use those as prompts, and she gives us instructions with headings like, “Keep your hand moving,” and “Lose control.” Even “Go for the jugular” is included. Essentially, for a given amount of time, you should break all rules but this: write, and write deep.

That depth is central to Goldberg’s teachings. She chose to name her book Writing Down the Bones, after all. One of her best-known lines is, “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” Why ask so much of ourselves? If we can be brave, Goldberg tells us, “We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs.” There’s also another, secret gift inside all that courage: “If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”

Practicing what she preaches, Goldberg lays down her own truths throughout the book. She confesses “Every other month I am ready to quit writing,” shares that she writes “terrible self-pitying stuff for page after page,” and lists specifics among her many insecurities. “I write because I am alone and I move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me, and even more amazing, I don’t know.” She breaks down barriers and invites us to do the same.

Tempering all this practical advice and raw honesty is beauty. Natalie Goldberg is a Buddhist and a poet, and Writing Down the Bones is full of presence and insight and poetry. “We shouldn’t forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do,” she says. “Writing is everything, unconditional. There is no separation between writing, life, and the mind.”

One of my favorite paragraphs in the entire book reads

“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.”

Writing Down the Bones was and will always be one of my favorites.

“There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.”

Natalie Goldberg

Thanks for reading, and please contact me at Three Quills Editing to discuss just about anything: books and poetry, rescue pets, your favorite pollinator-friendly native plants, or—one of my personal favorites—to request a free sample edit. I’d love to hear from you!