The Practice of Writing: Natalie Goldberg

“Talent is the desire to practice.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell

“To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.” ~ Natalie Goldberg

If I could have only one book on writing, it would be Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life a very close second). It was one of the first books on writing I ever read, and I’ve read individual chapters more times than I have fingers to count.

Writing Down the Bones is about not just practicing writing so as to become a better writer, in the sense of the Malcolm Gladwell quotation above, but also making writing our practice, in the sense of disciplining the mind, or, in her words, “as a way to penetrate your life and become sane.”

You can read an excerpt from the expanded edition, where Natalie writes that her wish is for writing students to “come to know themselves, feel joy in expression, trust what they think. Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.” She continues,

“Believe me, you too, can find your place inside the huge terrain of writing. No one is so odd as to be left out.

Now, please, go. Write your asses off.”

For more information about Natalie Goldberg, visit her website, and watch this video where she talks about her book Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (thank you to fellow Wisconsin writer E. Victoria Flynn for the link!):