Writing Down the Bones

Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones is a writing instruction book organized as a series of short essays that blend practical advice with Zen Buddhist philosophy. Drawing on over a decade of teaching writing workshops and years of formal Zen study, Goldberg argues that writing is a practice, much like meditation, that anyone can develop by learning to trust their own mind.

Goldberg begins by tracing her path to writing. As a student, she wrote dutiful, dull compositions and never imagined herself a writer. After college, she co-founded a natural food restaurant called Naked Lunch in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she first began trusting her own instincts. A turning point came when, after a day spent chopping vegetables, she discovered a poem about cooking an eggplant in Erica Jong's poetry collection Fruits and Vegetables. The revelation that ordinary experience could be valid material for writing led her to resolve to write what she knew, beginning with her family. She frames this as the book's foundational principle: "Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go" (2). She connects her writing practice to her study of Zen meditation with Dainin Katagiri Roshi, a Zen master at the Minnesota Zen Center, who told her to make writing her practice because going deep enough into it would take her everyplace.

The opening chapters establish the mechanics of what Goldberg calls "writing practice." She advises choosing a fast-writing pen and cheap spiral notebooks rather than expensive journals, which create pressure to produce something good. She introduces the timed exercise as the basic unit of practice and lists six rules: keep your hand moving, don't cross out, don't worry about spelling or grammar, lose control, don't think or get logical, and go for the jugular. These rules aim to help writers reach "first thoughts," the mind's initial, uncensored flash before the internal censor intervenes. She contrasts a raw first thought like "I cut the daisy from my throat" with its polished, censored replacement, arguing that first thoughts carry tremendous energy because they reflect what the mind actually sees and feels. She compares this discipline to Zen meditation, in which practitioners maintain their posture regardless of what arises internally.

Goldberg argues that writing improves through regular practice, not through waiting for inspiration. She compares it to running: The more you do it, the better you get. She sets her own rule of filling one notebook per month, prioritizing quantity over quality. She introduces "composting," a metaphor for how experience must sift through consciousness before it becomes writing material. She attempted to write about her father's death multiple times over several months before a complete poem finally poured out of her at a Minneapolis café. Composting cultivates patience, she argues, but it is not an excuse for inactivity; writers must keep working the compost pile.

Several chapters address the obstacles writers face. Goldberg uses Katagiri Roshi's phrase "fighting the tofu" to describe the futile internal battle between the part that resists writing and the part that demands it, a struggle in which both sides waste energy while the notebook remains empty. She advises giving resistant voices a few minutes of space on the page, where their complaining quickly becomes boring. She offers practical tricks: making dates with writing friends, setting a specific start time, and using treats as incentives. She recommends giving the internal editor full voice on the page so writers can recognize its patterns and dismiss it. She also discusses doubt, acknowledging that she herself is ready to quit writing every other month, and advises not listening to it.

A substantial portion of the book focuses on craft. Goldberg insists on specificity, urging writers to say "geranium" instead of "flower" and "pomegranate" instead of "fruit." She elevates the recording of details to a moral stance, connecting it to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, both of which honor individual names rather than anonymous masses. She teaches the principle of showing rather than telling: Instead of naming emotions, writers should present the situations that evoke them. She highlights verbs as the source of energy in sentences, offering exercises that pair random nouns with occupation-specific verbs to generate unexpected combinations like "Dinosaurs marinate in the earth" (97). She warns that details must be infused with the writer's emotional engagement; listing facts without personal investment is like mixing raw ingredients without heat. Conversely, emotion without concrete detail produces abstract writing with nothing for readers to grasp.

Goldberg describes writing as a physical act, not merely an intellectual one, and contends that deep, full-body listening is essential. She recounts learning from a Sufi singing master that singing is 90 percent listening, and argues that writing works the same way: Receptivity to the world precedes expression. She also discusses the importance of claiming one's origins. Years of Zen practice made her feel increasingly Jewish, and Katagiri Roshi told her, "The more you sit, the more you become who you are" (153). Cultural roots shape writing at the level of language rhythms, she argues, but going home should free the writer to feel compassion for all people rather than trap her in one identity.

Goldberg contends that writing is communal rather than solitary. Writers learn by reading others deeply and absorbing their techniques, which expands rather than replaces their own voices. She encourages telling stories aloud as a warm-up and describes story circles in Taos, New Mexico, where friends gathered and responded to prompts. She also outlines writing marathons: intensive group sessions of alternating timed writing and reading aloud, with no comments allowed, designed to dissolve self-consciousness.

Throughout the book, Goldberg identifies psychological traps. She warns against using writing to seek love or approval, and observes that writers often reject honest praise while readily accepting criticism. She describes a widespread inability among writers to recognize their own good work, citing a beloved Minnesota poet who went home depressed after sold-out readings, convinced she had "fooled another crowd" (165). She warns against dutiful practice that lacks genuine engagement, telling the story of a friend whose writing came alive only after she abandoned a joyless teaching career. She insists that honest writing must extend beyond the desk into daily life.

When writers are ready to shape their practice into finished work, Goldberg describes a shift into what she calls "Samurai" mode. Here writers must be willing to cut anything that lacks genuine energy, even if only one line in a poem survives. She advises waiting at least a month before rereading a notebook, then approaching it as though it were someone else's work and circling the strongest passages.

The book closes with a meditation on honesty and peace. Goldberg recounts the story of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, who said simply "I don't want to die" on his deathbed, modeling utter plainness of expression. She argues that the vitality writers express should come from a place of inner peace, and that reaching the level of saying what one truly feels will sustain a writing life indefinitely. In the epilogue, she reflects that the biggest struggle in completing the book was not the writing itself but working through fears of success and failure. She closes with Katagiri Roshi's advice: "It will toss you away. Just continue to write" (180).