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Zusatztext “Guidance and wisdom gathered from more than two decades of firsthand experience.” — Shambhala Sun “In her inimitably candid style ... Goldberg coaches us to work despite the ranting of that universal critic inside.... This book is like a good conversation with a writer friend who cares enough to tell it like it is.” — The Tennessean “This book is alive and slightly feral at the same time! encouraging and unsettling at once. Whether or not you are a writer ... please read Thunder and Lightning .” — Inquiring Mind Look for: Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America Banana Rose Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World Available wherever Bantam Books are sold Informationen zum Autor Natalie Goldberg Klappentext In this long-awaited sequel to her bestselling books Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg, one of the most sought-after writing teachers of our time, takes us to the next step in the writing process. 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? Drawing on her own experience as a writer and a student of Zen, Natalie shows you how to create a field big enough to allow your "wild mind” to wander — and then gently direct its tremendous energy into whatever you want to write. Here, too, is invaluable advice on how to overcome writer's block, how to deal with the fear of criticism and rejection, how to get the most from working with an editor, and how to learn from reading accomplished authors. With humor and compassion, Goldberg recounts her own mistakes on the way to publication — and how you can avoid the most common pitfalls of the beginning writer. Through it all there is a deep celebration of writing itself — not just as the means to an end, but as a path to living a deeper, more fully alive life. 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 writer...
