Write Right Now! Inspiration deck

Writing is a great journey, it is a path with the possibility of making us free. And it can do all of this while you sit at a desk.

--From Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind

Waiting to Read Write prompt from Natalie Goldberg

*Dani's notes- though I do believe in writing and not reading until later, I don't necessarily agree with Goldberg's time table. Feel free to revise this prompt so the timing works for you. write a week and go back to it a week later. Really you want to just give yourself enough time to distance yourself from your writing.*

Write every day for ten days in a row. Do not reread anything you have written for those ten days until two weeks later.

Then sit down in a comfortable chair and have a soft heart and read with interest and compassion what you have written. Underline sentences that stand out. Use those sentences as first lines for future writing practice. Put parentheses around sections you like. Develop those sections, if you want, not by reworking them but by re-entering them with more timed writing practice.

And be brave. Let some of the good writing go. Don’t worry. There’ll be lots of it over time. You can’t use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go. That’s just as good as writing poorly and letting it go. Just let go.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1990

I remember prompt from Wild Mind

**Note from Dani: When I first came across this exercise, I thought it was vanilla. However, I have to admit that this is my 'go to' exercise for free writing that I have repeated many times.**

Do a timed writing for ten minutes. Begin it with “I remember” and keep going. Every time you get stuck and feel you have nothing to say, write, “I remember” again and keep going. To begin with “I remember” does not mean you have to write only about your past. Once you get going, you follow your own mind where it takes you. You can fall into one memory of your mother’s teeth for ten minutes of writing or you can list lots of short memories. The memory can be something that happened five seconds ago. When you write memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.

Okay, after the ten minutes, stop. Walk around your kitchen table or get a piece of leftover fish from last night’s dinner to nibble on, but don’t talk. Now go for another ten minutes. This time, begin with “I don’t remember” and keep going. This is good. It gets to the underbelly of your mind, the blank, dark spaces of your thoughts.

Sometimes we write along one highway of “I remember,” seat-belt ourselves in and drive. Using the negative, “I don’t remember,” allows us to make a U-turn and see how things look in the night. What are the things you don’t care to remember, have repressed, but remember underneath all the same?

Now try “I’m thinking of” for ten minutes. Then, “I’m not thinking of” for ten minutes. Write beginning with “I know,” then “I don’t know,” for ten minutes. The list is endless: “I am, I’m not”; “I want, I don’t want”; “I feel, I don’t feel.”

I use these for warm-ups. It stretches my mind in positive and negative directions, in obvious and hidden places, in the conscious and the unconscious. It also is a chance to survey my mind and limber me up before I direct my thoughts to whatever I am working on.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1990

Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg--if you have ever picked up a 'how to write' book, you have come across this name millions of times. Natalie Goldberg is one of the top gurus for workshops, crafting writing, and everything else that is part of the creative generating process.

When I attended Deb McLeod's Novel Boot Camp Seminar a few weeks ago, I learned that Natalie Goldberg is actually the founder of free writing (the activity of placing pen to paper for a solid time limit without worry of logic or grammar). Also, I learned that clustering (or webbing) came out around the same time in the 80's. Oddly enough, it never occurred to me that these techniques wouldn't have existed before-- that someone, some generation, had to come up with these ideas.

In any case, the next few weeks of prompts will be coming from Natalie Goldberg's  Wild Mind: Living the Writer's  Life and Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.