Writing Off The Page
An exercise from Natalie Goldberg's 'Writing Down The Bones'
While I’ve been writing fairly regularly on my main blog - Everyday Gyaan and my Substack newsletter - Bytes of Gyaan, I’ve been struggling to get posts out on The Frangipani Creative and here.
I’ve decided to do a bit of a cheat and share part of what I posted on The Frangipani Creative recently, asking you to go there to read the rest of the post.
Today, I’m doing a free write using an exercise that Natalie Goldberg refers to in her Writing Down The Bones (Amazon affiliate link). It’s called writing off the page.
Writing Off The Page Explained
Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there. A friend calls it ‘writing off the page.’ If you begin with a great line, it helps because you start right off from a lofty place…..Every time you get stuck, just rewrite your first line and keep going. Rewriting the first line gives you a whole new start and a chance for another direction…
I chose a poem by
and used the first line of it to continue writing.This Thing In You
will not take no for an answer....To read my response, please go to my post Writing off The Page on The Frangipani Creative.
How would you respond to this prompt? Which poem would you choose?
Hi Corinne - this reminds me of "found poetry" - something that's completely new to me and I'm finding really inspiring - it's like literary collage. I've been dabbling in incorporating it into my actual collaging to kick my creativity off again and I'm in the process of writing a blog post on it that I'll share in a few weeks. I guess any inspiration is a bonus isn't it? I enjoyed your example and that you could write so eloquantly from a small prompt.