ENL 3 Revised Adaptation: Goldberg's "Fighting the Tofu"
Adaptation of “Fighting the Tofu”
Writing is hard. It definitely does not always come naturally to me. It takes time to really figure out a thing that you yourself want to write about that also doesn't make you feel overwhelmed and scared of the project you are deciding to tackle. I constantly find myself thinking the same things in my mind every time I try to get started with writing a piece:
"I have way, way, way too many ideas in my head! How can I go about them and address them without overwhelming myself and my readers?"
"How do I want to get started?"
"Okay, I'm going to start writing right now... Okay, I'm going to start writing in five minutes... [ten minutes later]... Okay, I'm going to start writing in a half an hour."
"What the heck should I even write about?"
Meanwhile I have yet to make any progress on how to go about writing down any of my ideas on the page. I learned this term; it's called "fighting the tofu." (Goldberg, "Fighting The Tofu"). Natalie Goldberg describes tofu as "dense, bland, and white. It is fruitless to wrestle with; you get nowhere" (Goldberg, "Fighting the Tofu," paragraph 1). And this is not necessarily the way we want to go about the writing process or how we want our writing to be described.
We have to fight to not take the easy road - to just write what seems comfortable and easy, but neither thought provoking nor original. So we all need to find ways to keep us fighting - whatever it takes. Some need to go to a quiet peaceful place like a park or their own room alone; and others need to be in a place like a coffee shop or other places with constant blank noise in order to tune everything out to keep focus. Some people need to get into a groove in order to start writing something they feel is worthy of what they want to actually produce and maybe allow the outside world to see. Others need to do little bits of writing here and there to make a final product. Whatever way helps you write best, stick to it, and let yourself go there anytime you feel like you want to write. In order to write something that's maybe out of our comfort zone, we need to allow ourselves a little comfort blanket; and that blanket is us giving ourselves our favorite space or state of mind we like to be in when we write. By giving ourselves a safe space to write, we can now venture out into the strange world of our mind and really explore what new thoughts and ideas are living inside.
But sometimes we don't really know what we want that will help us start writing. Sometimes, we just need to sit down and force ourselves to write. We need to stop whatever we are doing and write. We have to act like robots - no decisions, no questions, no thought - just sit down and write. Once we are there, we can just let our hands do the work. Whether it's at a computer or with a pen and paper, just let your hand go and let it write whatever it wants to write. So here are some things that I have discovered help me get to that point - to where I have sat down, and I've let my hands start doing the work, and to where I can just watch and see what happens:
1. If I feel like I need to be in a particular state of mind when writing something, whether it's an analytical piece for school, creative writing, or even just in my journal, I sometimes put on some 'mood music' to help me enter whatever state of mind I want to be in for that piece. Something not too distracting that still enters my brain to get my neurons firing and feeling the way I want to feel in order to write what I want to write.
2. If I feel like I am stuck with way too many ideas in my head that all want to come out on the page but have no idea how to tie them all together in one writing piece, I like to free-write for a bit. Just start writing whatever (and I mean anything and everything) that pops into my head pertaining to my writing subject of interest. Sometimes I need to give myself a time limit as to how long I can free-write, or else I end up making a two page essay of gibberish. But once I've done a free-write, I can go back, pick out the ideas I like, and can start to make sense of all the madness that I've written down into cohesive ideas.
3. If I already have an idea of what I want to talk about and what things I want to emphasize, I write a detailed outline for each individual paragraph. This especially helps when I am trying to write more analytical work: I like to make outlines of exactly how I want my essay to proceed. I say what topic I want to talk about for each paragraph, accompanied with evidence I plan on using and a brief description of how it adds to my paragraph and my argument for the whole essay. It almost becomes an abstract for each paragraph so when I start writing, I just have to add in my own writing style and make sure it all works cohesively together as one fluid paper.
So these are just some things that I've found that help me. But if you know what helps you, stick to them. The less you have to focus on finding a good space to write or just trying to get to the point of sitting down and writing, the more you can focus on the actual content of what you're writing about. And always let yourself write when you want to write. You never know what will come out of it. Natalie Goldberg says, "When it is your time to write, write."