Why Going Wild is Exactly What Your Writing Needs
/This post is a part of a series; if you want to start at the beginning, read this first.
Here’s our last and final writing strategy for how to get your thoughts out of your head and onto the page.
In her list of guidelines for how to write your first thoughts, Natalie Goldberg says to go for the jugular.
She goes onto explain that "if something scary or naked comes up in your writing, dive into it."
(To be honest, I don't readily have a copy of the book in front of me, so that quote may not be exact, but it's pretty darn close.)
She is encouraging you to not shy away from bold, outrageous, or gut-wrenching truths that emerge as you allow your thoughts to flow.
This can apply to both introspective journaling, as well as creative writing.
When teaching these guidelines, I often ask my students, "Go for the jugular, what does that mean?" There would almost always be at least one student to answer with, "Go for the kill!"
Though this is a figure of speech, I will often extend the metaphor and say, "Who is it that we want to kill? …That's right, the Inner Critic."
I'd then go onto admit that it's almost impossible to kill the Inner Critic, but we can at least allow our bold moves to put it in it's place.
Perhaps you say to the Inner Critic:
"Oh, you think I need to be more timid, simplistic, and vanilla in my writing, Inner Critic? Well, I think you need to go to your cozy cave in the back of my mind, put on your creativity-canceling headphones, play your Dungeons and Dragons video game and not come out until I'm done so we can do some constructive editing because this writing is going places!"
If that doesn’t get you excited to dive into the places the Inner Critic is afraid of, maybe this anatomy lesson is more your style.
This command to “go for the jugular” also makes sense on a physiological level. The jugular is a major vein in the neck. It's the place where wild animals tend to aim for when fighting to the death.
The jugular vein functions to remove deoxygenated blood from the head, to return it to the heart to then get pumped to the lungs to be oxygenated again.
In less fancy language, that means that the jugular is the pathway through which the waste materials of head get released. Remember how I called this practice of writing down your first thoughts as the "great brain drain"?
Writers, creatives, and those on the healing journey can all attest to the process of how releasing what is old and not useful can lead to creating something new. This is part of why it's not uncommon for people to get more creative in times they are struggling.
Just like how the food scraps from your kitchen can compost to create soil that enriches your vegetable garden, doing a writing practice where you let go and let flow can create the foundation for your next creative work.
In the least, it can help you to feel lighter, more at ease, and less weighed down by the trials the life brings your way.
Tell me:
Have you been able to "go for the jugular" in your own writing?
What has emerged from that process?
