imagination || craft: Freedom, Constraints, and 'Writing Down the Bones'

An exercise from my last generative workshop; and spring courses are up!

This past Saturday, I taught the first generative workshop in my current drop-in series. As usual, I enjoyed seeing the faces of other writers— all of whom were returning students this time— and creating a space for us to slow down in our lives and think communally about writing craft and creativity, in general.

In these workshops, the general flow is that I give the group a short amount of text (a poem, flash piece, or essay excerpt); I point out a couple things about the piece, usually in relation to some specific craft element; we discuss it briefly; and then I give them a timed writing exercise. The timed exercise is meant to provide students with a constraint that will help them make new connections they wouldn’t otherwise make. This strategy is informed by the work of Natalie Goldberg and Lynda Barry, as well as poetry classes I took as an undergrad and also a great writing group I was in when I lived in New York.

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is the first book I owned about how to be a writer. I bought it at the University of Kansas bookstore for my first undergraduate creative writing class— Intro to Poetry Writing with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg— lo, these many years ago. For last week’s workshop, I decided to return to Natalie Goldberg’s rules for what she calls writing practice. For Goldberg, the practice of writing in timed chunks in your notebook is what keeps you “in shape” as a writer, allowing you to hang on to your chops, as musicians might say. I love using Goldberg’s guidelines for writing practice in generative workshops; they highlight the relationship between the constraint of timed writing and the wildness available in our first thoughts. Here’s Goldberg on the subject:

On Saturday, after we reviewed the writing practice rules à la Goldberg, I gave the students a poem by Margaret Ray, from her wonderful 2023 collection Good Grief, the Ground (Boa Editions). The poem, “Haunted,” has the feeling of wildness and uncensored “beginner’s mind” that I was hoping to help students tap into. [Note: A poem having the feeling of wildness and “first thoughts” doesn’t mean that it was written in one timed exercise. Rather, the timed exercise can help us get to some language with that quality that we can work with later.]

Here’s the Margaret Ray poem:

Here was the exercise for this one: I read a poem aloud and ask students to write down words and phrases that are resonant for them. Then the instruction is to write your own piece incorporating some of the words you wrote down. I usually suggest that students write a piece based on a memory sparked by the poem and/or something that comes to mind based on the words they chose to write down. Use Natalie Goldbergs rules for writing practice and write for 12 minutes!

In this case, the constraints of the timed exercise and the instruction to incorporate words and phrases from the poem helped set up a situation in which a writer’s mind might make new and exciting leaps and connections, even and including small ones that they might lift for use elsewhere, as in Goldberg’s example, “I cut the daisy from my throat.’ If you try this exercise, keep your hand moving, lose control, and go for the jugular, as Natalie Goldberg would have us do. It isn’t always easy to stay with it, but the feeling of surprising yourself with an unexpected turn or metaphor can be very satisfying!

We can return again and again to first thoughts, to beginner’s mind. It’s a lifelong practice.

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Spring courses are up at Muse!

Courses start April 28th. Early bird prices through February 29th! Payment plans available. See current courses here.

Shapes of Stories

This ten-week course will help you expand your writer’s tool kit by experimenting with a variety of structures—everything from straightforward, traditional presentations to offshoots of the lyric essay.
Instructor: Nancy McCabe

Memoir in Collage

This five-week course provides a collaged approach to memoir composes a narrative through fragments and found items, building a story from many smaller pieces.
Instructor: Megan Baxter

Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry and Nonfiction Play

In this five-week course you will read and write lyric essaysusing techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking.
Instructor: Joanna Penn Cooper