Writing Practice

Last fall, my friend and blog co-conspirator, E, and I took a five-day writing retreat at Santa Fe's Upaya Zen Center with Natalie Goldberg, author of the bestselling writing bible, Writing Down the Bones. At the core of Natalie's philosophy is what she calls "writing practice," the act of writing steadily on a topic for five or ten or 20 minutes in one go. This isn't so much "practice" in the traditional way—meant to improve your grammar skills or narrative voice or spelling acumen—as much as a meditative exercise in patience, compassion, and good listening. We all have a true inner voice yelping to get free, and it takes practice to coax it out. This is stream-of-consciousness, freeform writing, and there are only two rules: 1) No editing, deleting, or crossing out and 2) as Natalie says, "You are free to write the worst shit in the world."

Natalie’s also a big fan of reading your work aloud afterward, either to a friend or yourself, because it's only then that you can really see what you've written. The person who's listening isn't allowed to comment, good or bad, on the writing. What it is, or what it will become, doesn’t much matter. The writing speaks for itself, and even when it’s total self-indulgent crap, it’s unexpectedly, thrillingly, liberating.

E and I were hooked. Determined to keep up with our daily writing practice but stymied by distance—she lives in St. Paul and I live in Santa Fe—we decided to do our writing practice on our own and then read aloud what we'd written over the phone a couple times a week (no blabbing or pandering permitted—just listening). Eventually we began to wonder what it would be like to use our blog as a way to share more of our writing with each other without burning up our long-distance minutes. (And who has time for endless yakking on the phone, anyway? No thanks.)

It sounded great in theory, but this morning as I scanned my spiral notebook for something—anything?!—I wanted to post, I realized immediately that there was a hitch: Namely, it’s tempting—and probably prudent—to want to edit the worst shit in the world before you post it for the whole world to read. 

But I had a hunch that my reluctance to put my writing practice online was a sure sign that I needed to do it. I used to make my living as a magazine editor, so I come equipped with a highly evolved, loudmouth inner critic that’s almost impossible to shut up. Posting unedited personal riffs ought to be good practice in ignoring this grouchy naysayer and letting my true voice come out (hellooo, anybody in there?).

So here goes. Our plan is to experiment with posting one or two writing practices a week, lifted straight out of our notebooks, as is— warts, weird confessions, and all. If anybody's out there reading this, please play by the rules: Read it aloud and just listen. No critiques, good or bad. Just watch where our writing minds take us, and then if you want, try it yourself. Feel free to submit your own topics: oranges, insomnia, Ferris wheels, fireflies, or whatever’s on your mind. We’re always desperate for good ideas. 

So away we go.....

10 min. writing exercise: Taking time

I should take more time, but I am usually in such a rush. There is one notable exception: marriage. Six years elapsed between meeting Steve and marrying him, though I think I knew the minute I saw him—really saw him—that he was it. “This is the guy,” I said to myself in a voice that came from nowhere, straight from the purest, oldest, deepest part of me. No a thinking voice, but an ancient feeling voice—this is your heart speaking. It’s easy to see why, even then, I would want to take my time. There was my parents’ divorce, the small distracting matter of someone who had come before, and the fact that I was only 28. I felt as though I had all the time in the world to take. Getting married had not yet crossed my mind. Having kids—an ambition for another universe. Was I so in the moment that I could set those aside, or not entertain future plans in the first place? I’m not sure I was in the moment, truly grounded, or present as much as in a different world altogether. Late adolescence had melded into my 20s and I was still the same girl. My external reality had changed, but I had not evolved. I now lived in Santa Fe in a shoebox casita above Palace, overlooking a weedy yard and below that, somewhere unseen, the Palace Laundry, where I did the wash every Saturday, begrudgingly, but only after punishing myself on a three or four-hour mountain bike ride. I rode my bike for hours at a time, skied nearly every weekend at Taos, cried myself to sleep sometimes for my lost boyfriend, for the loneliness of being 27, but it may have just been fear, not at the idea of being alone, but the reality of it. It was too quiet in the house. I was not mourning my future as much as my immediate past. The future had no shape, was intangible and abstract, and I allowed myself this luxury because I was young. I was unmoored. I worked long hours, drank margaritas at the Cowgirl, went dancing at El Farol, and did not ever seem to stop. I would not stop long enough to think or even breathe—mine was a blurred life of constant motion. Avoidance. I existed to burn through time, to get to the next thing. I was not writing. Saturday afternoons I would sit in a plastic orange molded chair at the Laundromat and watch my laundry chug round and round in the washing machine. My calves would still be dirty from riding that morning: a fine line encircling each ankle. Above: gritty grey brown, dirt or tan, a little bit of both. Below: still pale, clean, where the sock had been. I had not yet met Steve, who would ground me, settle me, slowly anchor me to earth, to this world, like a tether holding a hot air balloon from sailing away into storms and the sun, where it would burn up or crash into pieces. So when he said, “Do you want to see my sprinter’s muscle”—that was his famous opening line—I felt something shift, the earth on its axis and along with it my parallel universe of perpetual motion, and caught a glimpse of another slower, saner world, quieter, more real. I was 27 and I would remain a foreigner in that quiet land until 35, when the waiting was over and the time had been taken, and we were married at Stony Lake, I in bare feet and a gladness, and sureness in my heart. Worth the wait.