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Experience a modern classic on writing as you've never heard it before. With nearly one million copies of Writing Down the Bones in print, Natalie Goldberg has helped change the way writing is practiced in homes, schools, and workshops across America. Through her heartfelt personal reflections and her ingenious Zen-based exercises, Goldberg makes writing available to you as a tool for personal expression, self-exploration, and healing. In this enhanced reading of her seminal work, Goldberg offers new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. Join her as she looks back on her life, sharing the story of how her meditation studies with Zen master Katagiri Roshi inspired her to develop practices for "writing down the bones": the essential, awakened speech of the mind. Here is a treasury of tested ideas, suggestions, and exercises that help new writers get started, and seasoned writers keep going. Includes an exclusive interview with the author available nowhere else.… (more)
User reviews
One quote, in an interview at the back of the expanded edition, really spoke to me. Goldberg said, "Daily life is very seductive. Weeks go by and we forget who we are." That happens to me all the time. So, since I started the book, I've tried to take at least ten minutes a day to write and focus. And I've tried to pay more attention to daily life so that I have something to write about.
Thanks for writing this book. Nowadays I have dreams about the sagging wooden cottage I was living in some 20+ years ago, the period in which I first read your book, dreams in which the ‘possums and ‘coons and snakes living underneath it crawl up and take it over. In those days I
Sincerely,
A humbled reade
I am the worst sort of wanna-be writer. I love to read about writing but rarely actually do it. This book is
The exercises can be done in any order and changed to fit your style or mood. I highly recommend it for anyone who writes anything -- journals, web pages, poetry, or short stories. It's that good!
More so than any other book this is the one I recommend to anyone who is a writer. Though it was written long before blogging, the exercises in here would add
And by "practice" Natalie Goldberg means in the Zen sense of the word - as an ongoing way of life, a daily activity, a form of meditation.
I try to reread this once a year, at least, when I haven't been writing (or when what I have been writing has been diluted and far from what I really want to be writing).
What am I going to write? How am I going to write? If these are your questions or if you often find yourself staring down a blank piece of paper and the paper winning, then Natalie Goldberg’s book, WRITING DOWN THE BONES, is for you. Of course there are thousands of other
Goldberg is the master of no stopping, no editing, no fear writing. Listening to the book-on-tape version, I felt I sat at her feet while she read her work and she stopped to comment on it from time to time. She giggles and chuckles while she relates stories on her writing practice. She encourages you to write in a notebook, try different locations, meet with a friend for a writing session, and to write whatever comes to mind. She helps you find your creative center.
The six cassettes, nine hours of play time, I found to be a delight. I found myself smiling and eager to write.
Just write
And write
And DO IT
Students will find the meditative style of her prose soothing, and this may encourage them to
Although Goldberg is primarily concerned with creative writing, I see no reason why her tactics can't be applied to academic writing as well.
The full title of the book is Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer
I've read several books on this subject. Writing Down the Bones may have been the first of this sort in the mid-'80s, but there are several other more recent books I feel I connected with more strongly - Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and The Mind of Your Story by Lisa Lenard-Cook. I loved how Goldberg connected the fundamentals of Zen Buddhism with writing, and I really wish that could have been more prevalent. In all, it's a good book, and one with hundreds of inspirational quotes for writers... but it's not necessarily the best available.