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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
Fourteen
Memoir
Cancer
Wrote
Months
Experience

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Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.
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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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Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them things they can’t forget stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
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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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In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.
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When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing.” (p.90)
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I read Eve Ensler and thought it was fabulous. Not only that, but it was really the only thing I could relate to about cancer.
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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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This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.
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When you write, don't say, I'm going to write a poem. That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself say, I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
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The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
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It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.
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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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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it
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If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.
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It is simply that person's time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.
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Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.
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After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
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