Review of Writing Down the Bones

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

This book has lingered on my bookshelf for years. I often picked it up, flipped through it, and read a single chapter before putting it back on the shelf. I finally decided I needed to read it all the way through to determine if it was necessary for it to stay on the shelf.

Published in 1986, there are some outdated bits. The discussion of the novelty of wrap-around text in the first chapter was one such point. However, the discussion of choosing your tools is still valid. Even on Twitter, I’ve seen writers who swear by writing everything in notebooks before transferring their writing to computers for editing.

I enjoyed reading this book. It seemed a bit slow at first, but I thought the advice gained more momentum throughout the book. This is a book about bringing your "writer self" out. The author is a poet, and her prescribed exercises focus a lot on writing like a poet. She also studied Zen formally in the late 70s through the early 80s. She mentions the Zen master she studied with throughout the book, which sometimes feels a bit woo-woo, but can also be enlightening. There are some great tidbits that stretch across all genres, such as her discussion about writing spaces.

The chapters are all separate topics and can be read in any order. Some contain advice or writing prompts. One chapter, “Don’t Marry the Fly,” resonated strongly with me. In it, the author discusses maintaining a focus and direction when writing. As someone who likes to wander in thinking and writing, I found the imagery she used to be a helpful reminder to maintain my direction while writing.

I believe any writer will find at least a couple chapters that really jump out at them within this book. Another one for me was “Make Statements and Answer Questions” which addresses a study in the 70s that found women (and minorities) tended to speak with indefinite modifiers (e.g. “perhaps, maybe, somehow”). Although many years have passed, I have heard of recent studies that still find this to be true. I am sometimes aware of it in my own speaking and writing patterns. The author’s discussion of this topic was valuable to me.

I don’t feel that I wasted time by reading this book, but it also was not life-changing, and it did not help me with my craft in a large way. As someone whose focus is on writing novels, this book did not speak to me the way it might speak to a poet.

Writing Down the Bones is worth reading, but it's time for that shelf space to be claimed by something that focuses more on honing the craft of novel-writing. Pick it up for inspiration, not instruction.

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