Listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you

Several years ago I took a singing lesson from a Sufi singing master, and he told me there is no such thing as tone-deafness. “Singing is 90 percent listening. You have to learn to listen.” If you listen totally, your body fills with the music, so when you open your mouth the music automatically comes out of you. A few weeks after that, I sang in tune with a friend for the first time in my life and thought for sure I had become enlightened. My individual voice disappeared and our two voices became one.

Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. If you capture the reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don’t only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

by Natalie Goldberg (born 1948)
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986)
Listening
image – qthomasbower

Listening with your whole Body

Are you listening and “with your whole body” this month? Between Script Frenzy, National Poetry Month and National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), creative writing in April can feel like a total body experience! 20,000 Script Frenzy participants are diving into creating their 100 page scripts, the Academy of American Poets has a wide list of special offerings, and participants of NaPoWriMo are writing a poem each day all month long. A few people in my Twitter stream have talked about doing both Script frenzy and NaPoWriMo, on top of school and other responsibilities. That’s a lot of focused writing and reading!

That’s also a lot of Internet-enhanced creativity. Besides the good stuff that can be found on each of the the sites I link to above, there are thousands of us who know there are thousands like us, reading and writing our hearts out – or getting a contact high from the possibility. In the 64 years since ENIAC was first unveiled, we’ve gone from one “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer,” the giant computer “brain” used to help develop the bomb, to bazillions of us typing away at our personal computers.

I hear dancing fingers.

……………………

On Creativity

All month long I’ll be on the lookout for more interesting excerpts that are related to writing and creativity. Expect to see quote snacks from scripts and poems, and writers writing about their craft.

Here are seven favorites from previous posts:

• Writing a memoir gave me nowhere to hide; it forced me to own up to my life
  by Adrienne Kane
• The most daunting ideas turn into the best books
  by Barbara Kingsolver
• Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip
  by Elmore Leonard, from his 10 Rules of Writing
• We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection
  by Anais Nin
• I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.
  by Anne Frank
• A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself
  by Isaac Asimov
• Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.
  by Steven Spielberg

Tags: Listening, Writing
Posted in Natalie Goldberg

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