Author Dani Shapiro quotes from the essay “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years” by Ted Solotaroff, in which he comments about so many talented writers disappearing.

“It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared.

“As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”

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For Japan’s cellphone novelists, proof of success is in the print

One teenager who wrote a three-volume novel on her phone has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies, grossing more than $611,000 in sales.

By Yuriko Nagano, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Tokyo

Photo: “Bunny,” a 15-year-old cellphone novelist, tapped out a three-volume bestseller. The teen, shown at a Tokyo train station, does not want even friends to know of her publishing success, with 110,000 paperback copies of her novel sold since it was published in May.

She likes Care Bears, doesn’t wear makeup yet, and took her nom de plume from a character in the Disney classic “Bambi.”

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In his book Literature and the Brain, Professor Norman N. Holland details how we may respond so deeply in both creating and experiencing literature – novels, plays, poems, tv and movies – and the neuropsychology underlying our often intense engagement with stories and characters.

See a video below.

He writes of one iconic film: “The cute blond starlet, looking for her missing friend, opens a creaking door. She walks down a dark hall. And we’re thinking, Don’t go there! Don’t go there!

“And then the maniac in the hockey mask lunges out from a dark corner, brandishing a chain saw. You jump and I jump and all the people around us jump.

“Yet you and I and all of us know deep down that the blond and the maniac are just light flickering on a screen. We still jump—why?”

[The photo is Jessica Biel in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). Another actor in the film, Erica Leerhsen, had an interesting comment: "My biggest fear would be life... or definitely, myself. I think that's at the core of most horror movies or even movies like The Wizard of Oz. You think you have to go through this thing, but you end up having to face yourself."]

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Her first book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, has sold more than a million copies in ten languages.

In an interview, Natalie Goldberg talked about writing to access your energy and creative intuition :

A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is faster than the hand — and doing timed writing exercises.

The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for your inner editor to come in.

I consider writing an athletic activity: the more you practice, the better you get at it. The reason you keep your hand moving is because there’s often a conflict between the editor and the creator.

The editor is always on our shoulder saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t write that. It’s no good.” But when you have to keep the hand moving, it’s an opportunity for the creator to have a say.

All the other rules of writing practice support that primary rule of keeping your hand moving. The goal is to allow the written word to connect with your original mind, to write down the first thought you flash on, before the second and third thoughts come in.

Because that’s where the energy is. That’s where the alive, fresh vision is, before society, which we’ve internalized, takes over and teaches us to be polite and censor ourselves.

Another way of putting it is that you need to trust what intuitively comes through you, rather than what you think you should be writing. What comes through you arises from a much larger place than that of the editor, the critic, or society.

From interview article Keep The Hand Moving, Genie Zeiger The Sun.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg  (Paperback)

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within – audiobook

Natalie Goldberg audio clip below is from Writing Down the Bones [speech]

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