A good prelude to my retreat next week... ( )

I still love her. I enjoy listening to her perspective on things. I will give this a “Pick” but only ⭐️⭐️⭐️. Her writing “secrets” are repeated from “Writing Down the Bones”. I think the title is kind of misleading. She talks mostly about the details of and memories from the writing retreats which she conducts. I am ending the with a shrug. 🤷🏽‍♀️ ( )

I should have known better after reading Writing Down the Bones. This book did not offer much different. It was also a mix of stream of consciousness and zen and contained tales of the author's writing retreats. Whilst it is always good to be mindful of what you are writing and how you get to your writing head space, this felt like 250 pages of repetition. I found it very boring and skimmed a lot of it because I simply was not interested in reading about the author's health problems or digestion issues, or that they managed to sit down and write for 20 mins each day for x amount of days, quoted like this for over a page:

Date: wrote for 20 mins.
Date: skipped.
Date: skipped.
Date: wrote for 20 mins in a coffee shop.
Date: went for a walk, sat and wrote for 25 mins.
Date: skipped.

There were several scattered portions with examples of student's work during retreats, which I also found boring and a blab of words on a page. The kind of stuff you write during a practice and generally keep to yourself or to a class, not expect to see published. I did not enjoy reading about a random person's 5 min exercise writing about the word 'spoon' or a sardine tin.
I suppose I should not be too judgmental, some people may enjoy that kind of thing, it just wasn't for me...again. ( )

Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, was the first book I read about writing. How easy this is! I thought. It set me on the road to daily writing, a road I’ve walked every day for over thirty years.

How could I resist Goldberg’s latest, The True Secret of Writing? I could not. And I’m glad I couldn’t. Chatty, with the same confident voice as Writing Down the Bones, and filled with little anecdotes that emphasize the ease and worth of writing, The True Secret of Writing is an excellent book for anyone who writes. ( )

I like to read books about writing that take a practice-focused approach. I don't necessarily expect to find much that's new from one to the next, I just like to periodically use them to focus my attention on the practice of writing both because I enjoy doing so and also because it is one minor tool in my own overall writing practice. I've read a couple of Goldberg's earlier books, and those two were focused on writing but were very much informed by her long experience as a Zen practitioner and teacher. This book was a little different in emphasis than those, and different than I expected based on my earlier reading and on this book's title -- it was more focused on Buddhist practice as a whole while incorporating writing as part of that practice. Its main goal is to communicate the essence of a kind of Zen retreat that she has lead in different forms over the years, which is distinctive from many other such retreats in its incorporation of writing practice along side sitting practice, walking meditation, and so on. I didn't exactly mind this. I've quite appreciated her application of Buddhist insights to writing in various pieces of work that she has done, and I do have a general interest in that kind of practice even if I am not a practitioner myself, so I enjoyed the book and felt I got something out of it even if it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I would say, if you already like Goldberg's work, it couldn't hurt to read this, but if you are new to her and thinking about writing is your main motivation, you might be better off starting with the book that made her name two or three decades ago, Writing Down the Bones.