Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Natalie Goldberg/Writing Practice

I have been rereading Natalie Goldberg's books, Writing Down the Bones and Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft.

This makes me happy for several reasons.

1. She's a fab writer and it's fun to read her work.

2. It makes me feel like I'm digging deeper into my craft. You know, a serious writer.

3. It's very inspirational. Makes me want to write.


But the whole writing practice thing is creating a bit of anxiety. Writing practice as she portrays it, includes heading for a coffee shop or other venue and writing for thirty minutes without stopping. I haven't started practicing with topics yet. I kind of just wanted to let loose for a while. I have discovered several worry-causing things about myself.

1. Damn, I'm self centered!

2. My hand won't last for thirty minutes of nonstop writing with a pen. Now thirty minutes of typing is a whole nother ball game.

3.I'm afraid that I'm just not really that deep and this seems to be for deep literary types who get off on phrases like, "the ball rolled," and make it all metaphorical, while I'm just like, "Well, yeah, that's because it's round, dumbass.

But it is pretty cool to cart her books into my fav stbux (next to the book store), along with my notebooks and set up shop.

Just the fact that I care about cool makes me uncool doesn't it?

2 comments:

Keri Mikulski said...

No way, Teri, caring about cool makes you way cooler.. :)

Amanda Ashby said...

I can't wait to read that book - it looks great. I use to do Julia Cameron's morning pages for about five years and that was a great because it was so self-indulgent and about whatever I wanted it to be about (er, normally me!!!)