Writing Down the Bones

I've discovered a new book. I'm still in mid-breath, reading slowly and inhaling it deeply, but I already know God gave it to me. It was one of those strange moments in Barnes and Nobles (I think God really likes it there, I have lots of encounters with Him in those bookshelves). I was headed somewhere else in the store, and I passed one of those book displays they arrange on the ends of one of the shelves.

It was a collection of books about writing, and it just grabbed my attention. I knew that one of the books on that shelf was for me. It was a little strange actually, I didn't even stop to think about it until I was looking for a chair with five of them under my arm. Anyway, long story short, the fifth of them was this book, Writing Down the Bones.

Its basically a collection of essays by a very interesting woman about writing and creativity as a state of mind, a way of holding yourself in respect to the world and your own life. Very interesting/instructive/challenging for me, it's basically proving to be an excellent counterpoint to the technical focus on the craft of writing that I've been working on lately.

I've been tempted to just load this blog down under a backpack's worth of the quotes and thoughts I've been extracting, but that would kind of ruin the fun for everyone else, so I'll just put up two. Go read the rest for yourself!

This first quote is, so far, almost like an anthem for me. She's touched on so much of what's been burning inside me, a beautiful expression of why writing (though she's really talking about art in a larger sense) is so critical to life. I started to cry when I read this out loud to my parents, so I know there's a lot here for me:

"Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter."


The second quote is lighter, more of a mantra that I've adopted to push me past the dreaming and imagining stage, and into the early rounds of real creation and just plain hard work:

"Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write, just write, just write."

I'm going to go write.