Thoughts on "Writing Down The Bones"

So I've read the first sixty pages of Writing Down The Bones and, generally, I really like the book. It's easy to read, it's humorous, and it has a lot of great advice. I really do enjoy writing so I find the author's tips helpful and insightful. I think that everyone who enjoys writing should probably read this book and try to follow the advice.

She talks a lot about writing absolutely everyday. No excuses. I don't think I could discipline myself to do that, but she gives advice on how to do that as well. Writing every single day, to me, sounds enjoyable actually, therapeutic even. But still I don't have the time to sit down everyday to write for any amount of time. Other than that, I find that all her advice is pretty reasonable and very helpful.

I find that I see many parallels between how she talks about writing and how I think about art. Art is my major so I think about it a lot, and many of the process for making art and writing are the same. For example, when I was in my first drawing class my professor encouraged us to draw every day just as Goldberg encourages us to write everyday.

My drawing professor also encouraged us to find a new way to see things in life so that we may translate what we see onto the page. It's really very complicated to explain now that I think about it. Basically, us artists must learn to see things without a filter, so to speak. We try to see simply what is there. Not what we think we know is there. For example, if you were asked to draw a tree maybe you would start with two vertical lines for the trunk and then some diagonal lines for branches and then maybe some wild scribbling to describe the leaves, and it would look like a tree. Anyone who's ever seen a tree before could look at your drawing and identify a tree. But if I was asked to draw a tree I would spend a lot of time looking at trees in real life and I would see the trees as what they are, and then try to draw that. I know that if I drew a tree with simple lines and scribbles it would still look like a tree to everyone because everyone knows what a tree generally looks like. To draw a realistic tree I have to see the tree first. Goldberg says kind of the same thing about writing. She talks about seeing daily life as a writer and how it is different from how other people see daily life. A writer looking at a tree not only sees a trunk and leaves; the writer sees every little detail. When the writer writes about the tree they describe it with accurate detail so that when someone reads what they've wrote they picture the tree. Detail, I've learned, is extremely important to both writers and artists.