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I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Months
Experience
Fourteen
Memoir
Cancer
Wrote

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Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.
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Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
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The problem is we think we exist.
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The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.
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It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.
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I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.
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When you are present, the world is truly alive.
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I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
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I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life.
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I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.
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Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
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I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
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Understand that writing is like an athletic activity. To play tennis well, you expect to keep practicing, but for some reason with writing, you think you should come out fresh the first time.
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Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life
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If I didn't have that, fear and projections over what was coming next could have taken over. But it was tough. Don't think I was an angel. It was hell.
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Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning. We should not be ashamed of this. It is good. It's like drinking water.
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Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.
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Wherein we discover that many of the rules for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.
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Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.
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I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.
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