Natalie Goldberg

Come out from behind your disguise

The more I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing, the stronger it resonates. I am even reading the book front to back. Richard Ford, in a review of the book, wrote “You don’t even need to read it front to back (probably you couldn’t, anyway).” I took that as a challenge, obviously, because I’m an overgrown teenager when it comes to that sort of thing. (Then again, I tend to read books front to back.) And from what I’ve read of the Klinkenborg, I think it’s meant to be read from the start, following the sentences like a carefully crafted argument. The sentences build one upon the other. One after the other. Dipping into the book at random would offer meagre rewards unless the book had been previously digested whole.

Klinkenborg has at last made clear to me why I love reading Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg on writing. It’s not just the subject matter. What Klinkenborg has explained in his wonderful little manual on sentences is how sentences can express sincerity and honesty. How they are used to build trust. And with Goldberg and Lamott trust is what I feel when reading them. I trust them because I believe them. I believe the sentences they build. I recognise in their sentences and the vocabulary and structure within those sentences that they are sincere.

I can look to apply this to my own writing. The most frequent criticism I had about my writing when I was younger — much younger — was that it was mannered. Mannered writing is a sure sign that the writer is trying to both hide emotion and to make extra claims for his writing at the same time. The sentences read as if they were written to sound like writing rather than to express thought honestly and openly. Mannered writing, in short, fails to convey sincerity.

This was true, of course. I was writing in a style that I thought made me look clever. Made me look and sound like a writer. It was more important to look flash than to say what I meant in a form that allowed people to discover what I meant. Writing, in other words, as a form of disguise.

And the bad habit of mannered writing is a hard habit to kick.

There is a certain irony in this. One of the freelance writing jobs I’ve done from time to time in the past twenty years or so is as a consultant helping business executives break away from ‘corporate speak’ in emails and websites and press releases. Coaching them to find their voices. To try to be both genuine and human enough to connect with their readers, whether inside or outside the company. Anyone who has ever read ‘official’ company emails or scrolled through yet another corporate website full of ‘services’ and ‘offerings’ without ever quite discovering what the company does will understand the problem.

But, as with many things, it appears it is easier to teach than to learn.

It is both heartening and distressing to realise that at my age I am still learning things. Heartening because learning gives you new life; distressing because some of the things I learn I feel I should have learned a long time ago. Many of these things make me sit back, sigh, and say to myself “how come you didn’t know this?” The only way to move forward from that is to shrug.

Is it a good sign that I’m doing a lot of shrugging these days?

For the best part of a year in the early 1980s I lived with my then girlfriend in the wee village of Crail in the East Neuk of Fife. Meg was in her final year of university — studying French at nearby St Andrews — and I was doing what I often did when given the opportunity; I was acting the writer.

The only heating in our small dwelling was from a coal fire in the living room. This also served to heat the hot water. During the worst of the winter, we ended up putting on more clothes to go to bed, the bedroom being so cold. The flat itself was like a raised bungalow attached to the back of a much older house on Crail’s high street. It was a modern build with thin walls but the fact that it was raised above a large cellar meant there were decent views from the back door — approached from a steep climb of steps from the narrow wynd between the houses — and the bedroom window to the shore behind the house.

And it was to the shore that we went every morning to scour the beach for wood for the fire. Stormy nights always presaged a good haul. Often, after such a night, the sky was clear and the water calm, as if everything was resting, either gathering strength for future exertions or having boiled the anger from its system.

It was fun to walk the shore with Meg because she knew the names of birds and plants. Although she was the product of the city, like me, she had had a father passionate about nature, with whom she had walked the hills around Edinburgh. Where I could point and say ‘gull’, Meg could identify Skuas and Fulmars and Herring Gulls. She could even tell me that Skuas and Fulmars were not really gulls.

The shore at Crail was also rich in sea anemones, their compact fleshy purple so obviously phallic in the clear water as they clung to the side of ricks. I identified them immediately as fellow Hearts fans because of the colour and was happy to discover a like-minded group so close to where I lived.

I was thinking of Crail and the way Meg identified plants and birds when reading a chapter from “Writing Down The Bones” this morning. In the chapter ‘Be Specific’, Natalie Goldberg talks about being precise with description. Name a flower; name a tree. It works with people, too. I could have written the whole piece above talking only of ‘my girlfriend’. And although I haven’t seen Meg in almost thirty years, I think using her name makes this whole piece stronger than it would have been, had I left her unidentified.

I was sad to leave Crail and its beach and its wild weather and its harbour where a few boats still landed with a daily catch. A few months later I was living by the sea again but in Crete, where new birds and new plants — and new food and drink — added to my vocabulary. I acted the writer on Crete, too; this time for a whole year.

When I next returned to Crail, it was with my wife — Laura — and our first daughter, Isla. It was winter, then, too, and Isla was wrapped in many layers in a small buggy that we pushed up the hill from the harbour and passed the house I had shivered in for many months more than a dozen years before.

There is a wee promontory above the harbour at Crail and if you stand on it and brace yourself against the wind you can watch in wonder as the gulls — or Skuas and Fulmars and Herring Gulls — dance on the currents of air and threaten and cajole each other and swoop to their cliff-side nests or dive heroically, their wings tucked back against their sides, into the white-tipped waves.

(Image of Sea Anemone by Gwen and James Anderson [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

Stop hiding behind mannered writing

Come out from behind your disguise

Give Names To Your People, Places, And Things