Mary O'Gara

Posts Tagged ‘Goldberg’

If you’re a writer, writing every day is as important to your creative health as brushing your teeth is to your physical health.   I don’t remember whether it was Heifetz or Menuhin or Casals who said that if he didn’t practice scales for a day, he could tell; if he didn’t do scales for a few days, the audience could tell.  Twyla Tharp writes about the importance of exercise and daily practice for dancers.

Daily work is probably the best-kept secret of the top artists in every creative field.   It’s certainly the secret the wanna-bes overlook.  You can work in a journal and keep your notes or work on napkins and toss them.   Personally, of course, I favor journals, but the essential part is working however you can on a particular day.

And here’s the bottom line.   If you don’t love writing so much that you’re willing to do five minutes a day of work on the craft of writing, you don’t love it enough to sustain the ups and downs of a career.

Why are writers the only creative group that actually seems to take pride in not working?

Why do I teach The Artist’s Way workshop (based on Julia Cameron’s book)?  Because it’s easier to coach writers who do their daily work.   Cameron makes it simple:  three pages of flow writing every morning to let the subconscious mind spill its contents, whether those contents are brilliant plots or threadbare whines, plus an hour a week devoted to filling up the creative well and entertaining your muse.   In later books she recommends a weekly exploratory walk.

Natalie Goldberg recommends timed writing, with a topic or starter sentence.  You still just let the words flow and let the subconscious mind pour out its thoughts.

Recently, I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of sentences, and I’ve been spending my daily time playing with sentence structure.   But soon I’ll return to morning pages.  Maybe I’ll do morning pages and sentence structure, which feels like a musician’s scales.

For you it might be making lists or vocabulary study or some other skill.

However you do it, that daily five minutes keeps the mind focused on stories and looking for material.

Artists sketch items over and over in their journals.  Leonardo da Vinci sketched noses and more noses, then ears and more ears.  Whenever he saw a new shape, he sketched it.

Poets do the same thing with turns of phrases or items of speech and new words.

Novelists seem to work more loosely and to collect plot ideas, character development ideas or even word sketches of settings.

Julia Cameron’s morning pages tend the writer.  But the working notebook or journal brings focus and structure to the work at hand.

Morning pages clear our minds and bring ideas to the surface that give us stories and motivate us to write.

Natalie Goldberg suggests timed writings that focus our attention on one object or idea–and of course free us to move from that single idea to whatever is really lurking under the surface.

A working notebook may be even more focused and structured than Goldberg’s timed writings.  It may have lists of possibilities, research notes.  It’s where writers complain about research problems, plot holes, and fatigue.  And it’s where the problems get solved.

Sometimes a blog is a journal form.  I’m blogging as I’m thinking about material for my journaling workshop in September.  A blog is a public journal, and I’m looking for and welcoming comments, ideas, questions.  Sometimes it’s good for a writer not to be alone.