After I wrote yesterday’s review of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, I went to my copies of The Golden Book on Writing and The Elements of Style to find out what they had to say about verbs.

As expected, they also recommend that you avoid adverbs and pick out more specific verbs. I’ve heard this advice many times and all it has resulted in is that I remove most “very”, “really” and “pretty” intensifiers before I publish. I don’t take the second step, which should have been to find better nouns and verbs. This leaves my sentences imprecise and boring. The advice failed me because it didn’t come with any instructions. They just dropped a few examples and figured you’d get the idea.

Natalie Goldberg uses one sentence to say that you should use better verbs and then spends the next few pages showing you exactly how to do that. She gives you an exercise that will train you to think up more precise verbs. More importantly, it’s kind of fun. Like a game.

It’s play.

My memories of reading Writing Down the Bones will always be tied to the beach. I read the book over several mornings on the Gulf Coast of Sarasota. It was early enough in the morning to beat the Florida-in-August heat, but late enough to let the truck rake the sand at the shoreline. I walked to the edge of the water, put my chair in the sand with my back to the sunrise, and settled in to read the wisdom of Natalie Goldberg. When I had about 50 pages left and didn’t have enough time to go out, I put my AirPods in and played some ocean sounds while I finished it.

Writing Down the Bones is a book about writing. It’s also a book about meditation. And, like many writing books, it’s a memoir. The three themes are intertwined in short, practical chapters that will get you writing.

It was written around the same time as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, more than 30 years ago. Like Cameron, Goldberg recommends that you “practice” writing. Her timed writing exercise is a lot like Cameron’s morning pages, and since Cameron wrote a foreword for this book, I’ve imagined them as lifelong friends and cross-influencers.

The main difference in their daily practice is that Goldberg recommends that the writing be directed. Like Goldberg, I have come to the conclusion that I should try to guide my pages a little more. She has a chapter with some suggested prompts. My favorite is to start with “I remember” and then just write what comes to mind. Whenever you get stuck, just repeat “I remember” and start again. I have used this idea often since I read it.

Goldberg uses the name “writing practice” for her timed writing exercise to evoke the “practice” of meditation. She draws comparisons between writing and meditation throughout the book. A through line of work is her accepting her guru’s attempts to convince her that writing was meditation. She is a much more serious practitioner than I am, but I have meditated regularly for more than five years, so these comparisons made sense to me. I consider my morning pages a kind-of meditation.

Another chapter, “The Action of a Sentence,” is a practical way to find good verbs. First she lists 10 random nouns. Then, she picks a vocation (in this case a Chef) and lists all the verb associated with it (chop, mince, slice, cut, taste, etc). Then she matches a noun, a verb and completes the thought. As a poet, these serendipitous combinations might go right into her work. For me, just expanding the list of verbs in my mind makes it possible to avoid adverbs and make verbs exert themselves to describe the scene.

I reread books like this every so often, so I am sure I’ll read it again in a few years. But, right now, I’m going through the book again and trying to figure out how I will keep it fresh in my mind as I continue to write. I was too enthralled to take good notes the first time.

Perhaps it’s a book I just need to consult more often. Pulling it off the shelf when I need a boost. Or maybe it will be my perennial beach read—with me when the waves remind me to flip through it again.

I started this blog in December 2003. Up to 2020, I made an average of 9 posts per year, with a high of 38 posts in 2008 and had several years with none.

During this time, I wrote a book, wrote on App-o-Mat and for Smashing, and so generally, I’m at peace with my writing output. Honestly, though, I had intended to write a lot more. I just never did it.

I finished reading The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin in early January. It’s essentially 219 short, blog-like chapters making the argument that you can choose to ship every day.

Here’s my review.

It is 30 days since I finished reading The Practice, and I have shipped 30 blog posts and an update to one of my apps. Will I keep this up? I have evidence and confidence that I will, mostly because I buy his argument that I can just do it, and doing it will improve my writing. It’s a practice only if I practice it. It’s an infinite game.

The Practice helped me understand “the why” to shipping daily, and that’s enough for me. Doing it with this mindset has made me realize that it’s actually not that hard.

That’s it. That’s the review. I read the book. It changed by behavior.

I have a lot more to say about my practice, but to add more info to prior posts, my daily Big 3 almost always includes writing a post, and a time-block is reserved for it. I chose my yearly theme, Hone, because it’s about improvement via repetition. I put “Practice” on my Habit Totem so that I am reminded to do it constantly.