In case you missed this week’s Writing Practice, we began with a three-minute sitting silent meditation and then got into two writing topics back-to-back taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones Deck.
Pictured above, the Writing Down the Bones Deck by Natalie Goldberg, that was used in in this week’s meeting, and Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones that describes her writing practice that we try to emulate in these meetings as best we can.
The Topics
When doing writing practice, after a silent meditation, we open a notebook and write for ten minutes straight. In order to focus the mind, we begin with a topic, but we are not obligated to stick to it, we are only obligated to keep our pen moving, no matter what, for ten minutes. Here are the topics we used yesterday.
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Topic 1
Topic 1, from Card #10:
Write about weather.
write for ten minutes
I will add that the topics can seem quite mundane when you first hear them, but we are encouraged to take them wherever we need. In our meeting this week, some of us wrote about our own experiences, where others took the weather to their work in progress. The choice is yours, just write. To get a little more understanding of Natalie Goldberg’s thinking behind the topic, read below.
The cards Natalie Goldberg developed for the Writing Down the Bones Deck can inspire in many ways because each card has a little nudge from Natalie as well. Here is the front and back of card 10 from the deck
card 10 from the Writing Down the Bones Deck reads: “All of the sadness in the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.” (A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway) Write about weather.
the back of card 10 reads: This line is in the first chapter of Hemingway’s Paris memoir. You might never have been to Paris, but you can feel that rain —cold and penetrating at the beginning of a dark season. Especially in the context of climate chaos, weather is important. Urgency exists. Weather impacts everything else; it always has but many of us had the luxury of being nonchalant about it. Whether you want to write something political or remember that Midwest storm, the land under un-moveable snowfor days —the extremes all are important. Write what you remember about hail or mid-March thawing or a place of constant tropical heat. Make it personal. Explore how it impacts you. For Hemingway, all the city’s sadness was connected to thain rain. You know he walked through it for blocks to reach a café to write — and probably drink. It was immediate for him, even if he wrote about it decades later. It’s immediate now too, and important.
Topic 2
Topic 2, from Card #11:
Write what you can accept without judgment, no criticism.
write for ten minutes
card 11 of the Writing Down the Bones Deck reads: You’ve finally eked out space to write, notebook before you, but there’s nothing you feel like writing about. Don’t pop up or pull a different card. Sit there for ten minutes, feeling your breath. Allow everyhing to be as it is. Just for now I’m asking you to be.
the back of card 11 reads: Now write what you can accept with no judgment, no criticism. The weird green roses someone gave you that looked like small cabbages at the end of a dozen stems. Not weird anymore. They just are on your kitchen table. What else can you accept? The more we accept what’s around us, the more we can accept what’s in usand what comes out on the page. Let’s face it, we are all a little odd, maybe demented. From another angle, delightful. From our ten minutes of just sitting, we can put our arms around it all and write from a softer place.
The Deck and Beyond
To get your own copy of the Writing Down the Bones Deck and to support a local book store along with Stop Writing alone, use the link below:
