Talk Is the Exercise Ground By Natalie Goldberg GET TOGETH…
Talk Is the Exercise Ground By Natalie Goldberg GET TOGETHER WITH a good friend and tell stories. Tell about the time you had your palm read in Albuquerque, how you sat zazen in a chicken coop in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, with your friend Sassafras, how your mother eats cottage cheese and toast every morning. When you tell friends stories, you want them to listen, so you make the stories colorful; you might exaggerate, even add a few brilliant white lies. And your friends don’t care if it’s all not precisely as it was ten years ago; it is now and they are entranced. A writing friend once said to me when I met him for lunch: “Tell me the best piece of gossip you heard in the last month. And if you don’t know any, make it up.” Grace Paley, a New York short story writer, said, “It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life.” It is good to talk. Do not be ashamed of it. Talk is the exercise ground for writing. It is a way we learn about communication—what makes people interested, what makes them bored. I laugh with friends and say, “We are not gossiping cruelly. We are just trying to understand life.” And it is true. We should learn to talk, not with judgment, greed, or envy, but with compassion, wonder, and amazement. I remember sitting after a concert in the New French Bar in downtown Minneapolis with a writing friend and telling her about how I became a Buddhist. Because of the intensity of her listening, the story, which I had told many times, took on a great brilliance. I remember the light off the wineglasses, the taste of my chocolate mousse. I knew then that I had to write the story—there was great material in it. Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. “Hey, that’s great; have you written about it?” “That’s a good line, ‘I lived here six years and can’t remember a thing, not a thing.’ Write it down and begin a poem with it.” Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, “Oh, he’s crazy about her.” She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, “How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did.” I laughed. You can’t make general statements around writers—they want me not to “tell” but to “show” with incidents. Another friend told me about her father who left the family suddenly when she was twelve and became a born-again Christian and embezzled money from the churches of three states. It was her personal tragedy. I told her it was a great story. Her face lit up. She realized she could transform her life in a new way—as material for writing. Talk is a way to warm up for the big game—the hours you write alone with your pen and notebook. Make a list of all the stories you have told over and over. That’s a lot of writing to be done.
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