Picture this: 

It’s a rainy Spring morning in New England and you’ve got both an oversized mug and time to kill. Your mug is porcelain white, but pained a bit at the lip (from accidentally dipping a paintbrush in it a few too many times). You think the paint blends in with the coffee splotter, anyway, and tell yourself that perhaps it gives the cup some personality (happy accidents).If you hold the handle with your left hand the World might read a tiny type-face script in Peace Lily Green that says “𝙱𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚆𝚘𝚛𝚖”. But you’re a righty and you’ve purchased the mug for yourself, anyway, so the little green letters greet you happily with every fleetingly warm sip.

You are a bookworm, so you read a book. It’s the best way to spend a grey morning. You like to save the sunny days for tidying and cleaning, they don’t have the proper blue hue to offset the warm beige of a book page, and you like any excuse to fire up the heated mattress! But you never read very far, do you? How many lines do you fight down before the urge to pen a note turns into a whole notebook page of poetic expressions?

After hours of what feels like total procrastination you say to yourself, “I’m not a bookworm at all, I’m a fraud!”—The day gets away from you and you shelve that book feeling defeated, and prepare to edit that poem for your Poetizer.

You’re a slithering writer who finds relevance to yourself in every line you read that mirrors something extra-terrestrial, or ultra-cosmological, or incredibly mundane… Doesn’t matter, you’re in it, you’re there! But that’s alright!

Lately I’ve been reading a wonderful book on writing, it’s called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and for the first time I feel the permission to write without the guilt of finishing, and of order. Sometimes (most of the time) I’m too analytical and I forget that sometimes taking divergent paths is a way to grow. 

The irony that I find these things in structured books could be a peculiarity to me but I don’t think it is. What’s most appealing to me about Goldberg’s book, so far, is that as opposed to other great books on the writing process (On Writing by Stephen King is a favorite of mine), is that Natalie speaks to the poetic process frequently.

I highly recommend. (*sips cold coffee*)

Links:

• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
• On Writing by Stephen King