Aspiring writers have long turned to Natalie Goldberg's Zen-fueled guidebooks--most notably Writing Down the Bones--to help them find their way to the page, and some of the phrases she's coined have entered the wider vocabulary of creative writing: monkey mind, writing practice, wild mind.
By connecting her own life to language in The True Secret of Writing, Goldberg creates a work that is half memoir and half writing manifesto. She extends the concept of writing practice beyond the 10-minute timed writings that lie at the heart of her work to "all the time in which you also live outside the notebook." Much of the book focuses on the writing retreats she has taught for 35 years; she describes not just the nuts and bolts of the events themselves, but the way in which writing practice enriches and is enriched by the traditional meditation practices of sitting and slow-walking. Along the way, she offers more examples of the combination of innovative writing exercises and hard-nosed inspiration for which she is known. The final, most personal section, "Encounters and Teachers," pays tribute to the way writing and life bleed into each other.
At the very end, though, she introduces yet another phrase that seems destined to become a koan for a generation of writers: "Shut up and write." She is the first to admit this advice is both absolutely simple and unbelievably hard. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins