I’ve been doing writing practice for close to 20 years, but every so often, I like to review the rules. I just spent 10 minutes tracking down my copy of Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (affiliate link, btw) to reread them, so I think it’s time I put them somewhere I can find faster.
The basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise. You may time yourself for ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour. It’s up to you. At the beginning you may want to start small and after a week increase your time, or you may want to dive in for an hour the first time. It doesn’t matter…
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
The formatting on that block quote is pretty large, so I’ll continue with something a little more comfortable. Goldberg continues:
“What does matter is that whatever amount of time you choose for that session, you must commit yourself to it and for that full period:
- Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)
- Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.)
- Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.)
- Lose control.
- Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
- Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or nake, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)
These are the rules.”
Goldberg goes on to note that the point of the rules is to “burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”