More book reports. I’m on a reading kick, and I want to make some notes about what I’m learning.

On Writing by Stephen King

This dude knows how to tell a story, and that is what he holds most sacred in his writing (story, story, story). Reading this made me want to relive my childhood practice of falling asleep to music and while making up worlds in my head. The parts of the book when he’s telling his story are the best — the writing “how tos” (which aren’t really how-tos, more like suggestions and guides) are fine but not revolutionary. I also found myself getting frustrated with the book editor because of numerous which/that confusions and subject/object pronoun mistakes (a la “Johnny and me went to the store”).

But no matter, I enjoyed it a lot. I’m taking away from it a renewed importance of letting your story develop organically when it can, letting your writing rest for a while and giving yourself permission to write the worst shit in the world (Anne Lamott says it best, though).

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

I’m still working my way through this and I love it so far. I think my adviser assigned it in college but I was so oversaturated with poetical prose that I skipped it (there’s only so much Mary Oliver a girl can take in one semester). Coming to the book now, it feels like I’m reading a Pema Chödrön–Anne Lamott hybrid. Goldberg draws from her Zen meditation practice and her Jewish faith, which means that I loved her almost immediately.

The idea of practice is the heart of this book, from what I can tell so far, and that hits very close to home. By making it a practice, and not expecting yourself to write something good (or great or even all right) every time you sit down with pen in hand, you are free to explore and play. The other thing that both Goldberg and King emphasize is honesty — not necessarily “writing what you know” but writing your first thought (not the second and third thoughts that are ripe with self-editing and criticism) and writing what is true to you in that moment.

Oh! That’s the other great thing I just read in this book. Let go of the feeling that what you are writing is a reflection of who you are. Sure, other people might see it that way, but it is only a reflection of where you were in that specific moment. You can leave it behind and come to the page a different person the next time.*

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*I fear this constantly when I write in my journal. I’m always wondering, “Geez, what are people going to think about me if they read this after I die?” This is stupid and morbid, I realize, but our journals tend to memorialize the less savory parts of our lives — i.e., the times we need to work some stuff out on paper. If that’s all our families are left with, boy they will think we were cranky potatoes. Of course I’m not giving my family enough credit here. They’ll also have all the memories and experiences and conversations, not just my ornery journaling, to judge me by. And why do I assume they’ll be judging, anyway?!