From the Inside Flap
-awaited sequel to her bestselling books Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg takes us to the next step in the writing process: turning our flashes of inspiration the thunder and lightning of creation into a polished piece of work. Thunder and Lightning
You've filled your notebooks, done your writing practice, discovered your original voice. Now what? How do you turn this raw material into finished stories, essays, poems, novels, memoirs? That is the subject of this unique and inspiring guide, which taps the same rich sources of intuition and individuality that have made Natalie Goldberg one of the most sought-after writing teachers of our time.
Drawing on her own experience as a writer and a student of Zen, Natalie shows you how to develop a structure or plot that preserves all the odd, kinky turns of your one-of-a-kind mind and captures the completely authentic way you see the world. She tells you how to
From the Back Cover
Praise for Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind
"Wakes you up like a cross between morning
coffee and a friendly Zen Master."
--Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
"Natalie Goldberg gets my hand moving again when writer's block grips it. Her method is my method: Lose the censor, free the writer in yourself."
--Erica Jong, author of Any Woman's Blues
Long Quiet Highway
"This is a cathedral of a book. In it you hear only Natalie's pure voice, which builds and builds without pretension from the details of her life to an understanding of its source, which is the source of all of us."
--Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"I want to call up everyone I know and read long quiet highway to them over the phone. I want to give it to every writer that I love."
--Ellen Gilchrist, National Book Award winner and author of Net of Jewels
Banana Rose
"A passionate book...Natalie Goldberg writes in indelible ink."
--Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way
"Natalie Goldberg is a wise and delicate magician, also a wonderful writer; and this is a wonderful book."
--John T. Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War
"In this guide, Goldberg seeks to help students find the organic forms-the resonant questions and quests-that exist deep down within us. She guides readers without handing out any illusions about how easy the trip is. "
--Publisher's Weekly
About the Author
Natalie Goldberg (b. 1948) is the author of ten books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold over one million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages. She has also written the beloved Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, a memoir about her Zen teacher. For the past thirty years she has practiced Zen and taught seminars on writing as a spiritual practice. She lives in northern New Mexico.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MEETING THE MIND
Back in ninth-grade biology class when Mr. Albert Tint announced that we would study the involuntary organs--the heart and lungs--he forgot to mention the mind. My guess is he didn't know about it, but in truth it's as though the brain were an automatic thought-producing machine--I don't like this dress. I'm hungry. I miss New York. How did I get so old? I wonder where I put my keys? Did I mail that letter? I need to cut my nails. Next time I'm going to buy a car with automatic transmission. I hope I didn't bounce my last check. Maybe I should try acupuncture--just like the popcorn machine in the movie theatre lobby that explodes kernel after kernel.
What's remarkable is that before I sat meditation and tried to focus on my breath when I was twenty-six years old, I didn't know this about my mind: that I couldn't stop it from thinking. I was full of arrogance in my twenties. I thought there was nothing I couldn't do. And then I discovered I wasn't in control.
The first morning of my first retreat I woke early--it was still dark--dressed quickly and went to the meditation kiva, a small mud room, on the side of Lama Mountain, seventeen miles north of Taos, New Mexico. The bell rang--we were to sit still and focus our attention on the breath. What breath? I couldn't find it. Instead I was plunged into a constant yammering. Rushes of thought ran through me. Endless commentary, opinions, ideas, stories. The bell rang a half hour later to signal the end of the period. Wow! I opened my eyes. Who was that wild animal inside me?
It was my own human mind. I needed to understand it. Why? It's the writer's landscape. Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its eyes, the blue of its hump, the flash of its hoofs, the rugged shadow that it casts. We writers have that beast inside us: how we feel, think, hope, dream, perceive. Where do words come from, sentences, ideas? They manifest from our minds. Yikes! Suddenly we're blasted into a vast jungle, with no maps, no guidelines, no clues. How do we manifest a landscape so full of robust life? What do we say? When there's so much--it's boundless--we usually close down, disconnect, shut up.
That's how I was anyway: confused. I knew my teachers in public school were trying to teach me something--mainly, they were good, earnest people. But I couldn't figure out, not even a hint, how a writer wrote. I managed to squeeze out dry little compositions; nothing burst into flame. Carson McCullers, Steinbeck, Joyce--the writers we studied were a million miles away from me. How did they do it? They might as well have been nuclear scientists. Yet they possessed the same things I did: pen, paper, English language, mind.
My teachers couldn't teach me because they hadn't connected with writing's essential ingredient: the mind and how it functions. Instead, they taught me how to organize what was outside and around the pulsing lifeblood. I learned to make an outline, but that skeletal plan was built exterior to the heat of creation. Why was this? Western intelligence, preoccupied with thinking, avoided examining the mechanism of thought. Only saints or the insane traveled that interior territory. And what was the result? They cut off their ears, shot themselves, or were burned at the stake. Better not go there. We looked suspiciously on the inner world. It wasn't productive: it could lead only to suffering or turning nutty as a fruitcake. We in the West were better at developing athletes. We knew about bodies.
But then suddenly in the sixties large numbers of young Americans ingested psychedelics, which blasted us inward. Wanting to understand what we experienced with these "mind altering" drugs, we turned to Eastern religions to find answers.
What the East gave the West was a safe, structured way to explore the mind. Those of us who sought meditation were taught a fundamental, disciplined posture. The directions were specific: cross legs, sit at the edge of a hard round cushion, hands on knees or held just below the navel, chest open, crown of the head a little higher than the forehead, eyes cast down and unfocused. When the bell rings, do not move. Go! And where did we go? No place, at least externally. The instruction was to pay attention to our breath, but as soon as we tried we found instead hurricanes of thoughts and emotions--rebellion, desire, restlessness, agitation.
It was all I could do to sit still. Suddenly I wanted to sob at the memory of my grandmother and the feel of her thin skin; I recalled why my tenth-grade boyfriend had dropped me ten years earlier, and how it felt when the novocaine on my first root canal ran out while Dr. Glassman was still drilling. No wonder our schoolteachers stayed away from the meat of writing. To have us contact our raw minds in class would have incited immediate chaos: hordes of teenagers bolting from their neat rows of wooden desks and dashing for the water fountains as though the roots of their hair were on fire.
But with meditation we found a steady tool to enter this wild space and explore it. The sitting bell rang again, marking the end of the period. We uncurled our legs and looked around. The earth was still patiently beneath us, and we had had a small opening--say, thirty minutes--to taste our minds. Zen was smart: it did not just lower us into the hot water and leave us there to boil. We were dipped in and out. We went under and then came back up to sip green tea and munch cookies. In this way we slowly cooked and digested ourselves.
There was another reason some of us were drawn to Zen meditation. It told us what to do: wear black in the zendo, bow to your cushion, don't make any noise, be on your seat five minutes before the beginning of a sitting session. After an initial rebellious tantrum where I walked out of the instruction class, I loved it. I longed for order. My guess is others in my generation craved that, too. I had had a laissez-faire upbringing. As a child I lounged around the kitchen eating boxes of Oreo cookies. My mother simply walked by, patted me on the head, and commented, "That's nice, dear." I missed at least one day of school a week. "I just don't feel like going," I'd tell my mother, looking up from under the bedsheets. She nodded, endlessly understanding, turned around in her housecoat and left the room. "Natli doesn't learn that much there anyway," I could hear her thinking. I sat in front of the TV all weekend in my pajamas. No rules, no requirements. On my own I decided it might be a good idea to brush my teeth and wash my face once a day.
When my friends hear this they feel envy: "Why it's ideal for raising a writer." Not true. Life was staggering. I needed organization. And the sixties didn't help. Those years only made me more confused instead of free. In Zen there were precepts: Don't lie. Don't steal. Don't create suffering through sexuality. That one I read over and over. I wasn't sure what it meant, but at least there was a scent of guidance, an intimation of direction.
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