Natalie Goldberg Offers Organic Approach to Writing

her view, "sometimes plot is a fast train running down a straight track; other times it's a fat pear rolling off our open palms. If we don't know where we're going in our lives and if the characters don't know, that's OK, as long as the author knows where he's taking us ...."

While she was working on Banana Rose her editor tolder her it lacked "narrative drive." She had no idea what this meant at the time, but she's managed to boil it down into one simple directive: "Narrative drive is simple but important .... Bluntly put, it's what propels us to turn the page." To make the reader keep turning those pages, there has to be forward motion, with one scene propelling the reader to the next.

Both Thunder and Lightning and Writing the Landscape of Your Mind build on Goldberg's earlier writing books, but they take us one step further along the path. With these tools, you can move from daily writing practice (you do try to write every day, don't you?) to structuring and plotting a novel. These are not "how-to" manuals with step-by-step instructions. Instead, they take us on a journey to explore our own minds and our individual writing voices.

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