Eshtine

quote of the day

There is a Zen saying: "Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die." Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.
But after saying all this, I will tell you a few tricks I have done in the past to nudge me along:
1. I haven't written anything in a while. I call a writing friend and make a date with her to meet in a week and go over our work. I have to write something to show her.
2. I teach writing groups and have to do the assignments I give the class. I didn't wait for years of writing before I began to teach writing. I was living in Taos, and there were few writers there ten years ago. I needed writing friends, so I began a women's writing group. In teaching them, I learned to write. Baba Hari Dass, an Indian yogi, says "Teach in order to learn."
3. I'll wake up in the morning and say, "Okay, Natalie, you have until ten A.M. to do whatever you want. At ten you must have your hand on the pen." I give myself some space and an outside limit.
4. I wake up in the morning, and without thinking, washing, talking to anyone, I go right to my desk and begin writing.
5. These past two months I have been teaching all day, five days a week. I come home very tired and resistant to writing. There is a wonderful croissant place three blocks from my house that makes the best homemade chocolate-chip cookies for thirty cents. They also let you sit there and write forever. About an hour after I am home from work I say to myself, "Okay, Natalie, if you go to the Croissant Express and write for an hour, you can have two chocolate-chip cookies." I am usually out the door within fifteen minutes since chocolate is one of my driving forces. One problem: on Friday I had the nerve to have four cookies instead of my quota of two, but anything to get me writing. Usually, once I'm in the midst of actually writing, it's its own greatest reward.
6. I try to fill a notebook a month. There's no quota on quality, just quantity--a full notebook, no matter what garbage I write. If it is the 25th of the month and I have only filled five pages and there are seventy more to fill by the end of the month, I have a lot of writing ahead of me in the next five days.

You can make up all kinds of friendly tricks. Just don't get caught in the endless cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure. When it is your time to write, write.

--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones