Finding your writing voice in those crazy messy shameful thoughts

I’m reading Writing Down The Bones again. I bought it and first read it in 1995. I read it again last year, just 20 wasted years after first reading it. And here I am again.

Natalie Goldberg is wonderful on the way writing and meditation form a symbiotic practice. They are both about self-discovery. They are both about accepting thoughts as they come and as they are.

I often hear people who say that meditation is about emptying your mind, of trying to stop thinking. Good luck with that. This is like those religious nuts who would police our minds for impure thoughts. A thought is a thought: you let it go with little notice or you act on it. It is the acting on our baser thoughts that causes harm — whether to ourselves or others — not the thinking itself.

And so meditation is about noticing thoughts and realising that one thought is no worse or better or bigger or stronger than another — unless we choose to make it so. The thought comes, the thought goes, and we return to noticing our breathing.

What has that to do with writing?

Writing is also about accepting thoughts and setting them free. But instead of waving them into the ether we put them on paper. It is those primal thoughts that give life to writing. At the same time, they’re a canary in the coal mine for the presence of your inner critic or the constant censor who tells you what you can and cannot write — or should and shouldn’t write.

Listen to your inner critic and censor and your writing is lifeless. Listen to your inner critic and censor and you’ll write stuff that sounds like a badly translated washing machine instruction manual.

Those primal thoughts may puzzle, shock, or amuse you. The thought of others seeing them or reading them will scare you shitless. But that’s where the work comes in.

You will still edit your writing. But the difference now is that you will edit words that carry energy and passion and shards of your truth rather than a dull set of phrases that bury your voice rather than revel in it.

The time to criticise and censor your words is after the page is covered, not before. It’s easier to be brave and defiant in the face of both these psychic saboteurs when the power of your writing confronts them in black and white.