An Old Friend Talks about Writing

I was in the car last winter when I heard Natalie Goldberg on NPR giving an interview about Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir.  (The book was published in 2007, so maybe the station was rebroadcasting an old interview.  Or maybe, because of the prevalence of memoirs on the best-seller lists in the last few years, the interview felt timely.)  I remembered Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (her Zen-influenced book of writing instruction) from somewhere in my undergraduate days, so I decided to check this out.

I’m not planning to write a memoir any time soon, but I thought that I might find some information and ideas that would serve me as a teacher of writing.  And I wasn’t disappointed.  For me, the best aspect of the book is its ten-minute writing warm-ups (of which there are approximately 80):

Tell me everything you know about ice cream.

When did you pretend not to care?

Begin a ten-minute writing with No Thank You.  Every time you get stuck, write No Thank You again and keep going.

We all come from someplace.  Where do you come from?  How did you escape?

What do you know by heart?

Write down the details of a funeral you attended in winter.

Over the years, what Halloween costumes have you worn?

What was missing?

What made you know something was over?

Between such writing prompts, Goldberg includes short chapters about her own writing experiences, samples of good writing by a variety of authors (with discussion of what makes it good), an examination of challenges to the writing life, her philosophy of writing, and some physical exercises for writers.  (This last is where Goldberg loses me a little.  Though not as central as it was in Writing Down the Bones, her new-age, hippie, Eastern perspective is still a presence; she spends several chapters on meditation, breathing, walking, and other ways in which writers can find the muse.)

Goldberg also has some insightful things to say about reading.  I think, for example, that I would like to turn this quote (from a chapter titled “No Whining”) into a big poster:

We start to read Moby Dick or Heart of Darkness, Native Son, Don Quixote and ten pages into it, we decide it’s too hard, it’s boring, we don’t like it . . . . We would be called immature if after ten minutes of meeting someone, we said to him, I don’t like you.  And yet this is often exactly what we do when we encounter a few pages of a new book.  Our job is to stay with the author’s words and see what we can learn.  Push through.  It takes a while to settle into a book’s territory.

If you’re thinking about writing a memoir—and Goldberg suggests that every life has multiple memoirs just waiting to be told—this is worth your time.  It’s not a book that you need to charge through in one sitting (although, with its short chapters and interesting anecdotes, you certainly could); rather, it’s the kind of book that you might return to when you need a little inspiration and encouragement.