Who knows who actually invented the Writing Marathon, but Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, usually gets credit for it. Here’s what she has to say about how it works:
“Everyone in the group agrees to commit himself or herself for the full time. Then we make up a schedule. For example, a ten-minute writing session, another ten-minute session, a fifteen-minute session, two twenty-minute sessions, and then we finish with a half-hour round of writing. So for the first session, we all write for ten minutes and then go around the room and read what we've written with no comments by anyone. . . . A pause naturally happens after each reader, but we do not say "That was great" or even "I know what you mean." There is no good or bad, no praise or criticism. We read what we have written and go on to the next person. . . . What usually happens is you stop thinking: you write; you become less and less self-conscious. Everyone is in the same boat, and because no comments are made, you feel freer and freer to write anything you want.
Keep your hand moving. (Don't pause to reread the line you have just written. That's stalling and trying to get control of what you are saying.)
Don't cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn't mean to write, leave it.)
Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar. (Don't even care about staying within the margins or lines on the page.)
Lose control.
Don't think. Don't get logical.
Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)
"These are the rules,” Goldberg says. “It is important to adhere to them because the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel."
A writing marathon can be adapted to any period of time, in any situation. It’s a particularly great way to spend the last day before Christmas vacation or spring break! Or to start off a new class, “mining” for stuff that can be used all semester. The important thing is to have fun, be flexible. Students may write about the prompts provided—or not. If somebody wants to stick with any one prompt for the whole marathon, that’s fine, too.
I have numbered all my things.
I didn’t start stealing from my grandmother until I knew she was senile and wouldn’t miss anything.
The quarter rolled to the farthest part of the room, right under the chair of Aunt Melinda, who, at 24, was eight years older than me and knew all about marijuana.
Stubby Flynn failed as a coach because he inspired in his players neither love nor fear but indifference.
The last straw came at Christmas when Mother gave my twelve-year-old a crib toy.
Can he be a hermit if I’ve already seen him twice?
It didn’t’ smell like my toothbrush.
No one is fond of putting the animals down, but it’s even worse to run the chamber during the Christmas season.
The woman in front of me in line had thirteen items—one more than she was allowed.
I was first arrested in a toy store on December 20, 1987.
Charlie Cline slept for a living.
When you’re missing a finger, people ask some questions.
For several weeks now, our library has been plagued by a vandal who puts chewing gum between the pages of our most expensive reference books.
Every year on take-your-kid-to-work day, I had to go and sit for eight hours in the corner of my father’s bail bonds office.
Rudy went to the wholesale club and bought every battery in the store.
No way succotash is an Indian word.
My father no longer likes to bathe.
Every time my aunt talks about meeting Elvis, the story is wildly different than the time before.
Welcome to Atherton High, Home of the Underdogs.
My mother said it was only a warning shot, so I have to believe her.
We had a betting pool on which would get Bruno first: lung cancer or mattress fire.
She was a child conceived in anger.
You ask me, one monkey is one monkey too many.
Everywhere he went, Roland wore kneepads.
Like a miniature clothesline, a piece of red yarn stretched across one corner of my grandmother’s kitchen, and there she would hang paper towels to dry.
The children were out on the porch smashing butterflies with a fork.
My grandmother, who is eight-six, keeps a loaded .38 on her wheelchair between her thighs.
Baby monitors can be used to listen to adults, too.
Miranda waited for the train in the fog.
I am reevaluating my relationship with insects.
I was sitting at the lunch counter reading the sports page when the stranger dunked his donut in my coffee.
In junior high, I was the only guy with guts enough to take dance lessons, and I have been reaping the rewards ever since.
These were not the fifteen minutes of fame that Cleo had always imagined.
I was standing in the classroom doorway drinking a quick cup of coffee when I noticed that all the children on the playground had stopped cavorting and were looking up at the sky.
Outside my daughter’s window, there lives a creature whom she calls the Bad Monkey.
As a letter carrier for the US Postal Service, I am daily faced with a burning ethical dilemma: is it permissible for me to read other people’s postcards?
What do the 42 year-old physicist and the 14 year old babysitter talk about on the five-mile ride back to her house?
What I want to know is, who died and made Oprah Miss Thing?
He was born older than his mother.
Camille has been burning incense again.
Todd King changed his first name (legally) to Coach.
Oversized snowflakes floated to earth like an army of paratroopers.
I have just eaten the world’s most perfect banana.
Dr. Heidi Vincent is a fine obstetrician and an even better ventriloquist.
The closet is filled with reams of onionskin, each sheet covered with smudged, single-spaced writing.
X is doing Y again, and I can’t stand it.
We all want heroes. Even those of us who know better want heroes.
Any day the water wasn’t frozen, Rhoda washed her hair.
These things really happened:
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