Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
by Natalie Goldberg
Reviewed by Daniel Beck
/5
Writing Down the Bones is a writing guide by best selling author Natalie Goldberg, who wrote Wild Mind and Living Color. I approached this book with a certain excitement, as it was highly recommended to me by a person whose taste I respected very much at the time. However, such respect quickly passes when one encounters this blight in your admired’s “best of” list.
Goldberg attempts to write a guide for aspiring writers with a philisophical bent, billing writing as a medium for self-discovery. Unfortunately the book falls flat. The author, a long time student of Zen Buddhism (oft referring to the seminal Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), tries to infuse her religious studies into a her treatise on writing. The result is a new-age approach to authorship, involving an unhealthy dose of navel gazing and abandoning the tried standard of writing-as-communication.
Throughout the book, Goldberg insists that one of the best ways to write is to simply write without giving any thought to it, putting to paper whatever thought rises through the ennui. In the shuffle, the author seems to lose track of the difference between writing as an exercise – to stretch certain mental faculties – and writing for an audience. While the two may be allowed to coincide, suggesting writing exercises that nearly prohibit writing for an audience is not the path to coherent writing.
Unless Ms. Goldberg is actually trying to encourage a slew of pseudo-Joycean post-modern stream of conciousness nightmares, the author fails in providing any sincere advice (beyond buying a new pen) to an aspirant writer. She also fails in her secondary goal of encouraging writers to write; as anyone who wasn’t interested in writing before certainly won’t be after her all too casual style marginalizes the art of writing as a sexed up plaything.
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