I’ve been reading this book for nearly a year and a half. You know those books, usually fiction or memoir, that you pick up which ring so true in your life that you can’t put it down while at the same time you don’t want to pick it up? It’s just too much. Something about it makes you sad, you cry at every other chapter, there’s some kind of emotional involvement that you can’t avoid. Wild Mind didn’t create such sadness for me; it created frustration. I wanted to get through Goldberg’s writing memoir, I wanted to see what hint towards better writing she’d throw out next, but this book guided me through a year of discovering my purpose in writing, and it wasn’t until I graduated the course that I could finish the last fifty pages or so and move on to whatever’s next.

I recommend all writers find a book like this, one that doesn’t so much tell them why they write, but reminds them in a way they can’t quite explain. One that helps them learn how to embrace the skills they possess and utilize them positively. This book is not just a writer’s prompt book, but it’s not just a writer’s memoir. Goldberg is not mouthing off everything she does to write and telling you to do the exact same; she’s encouraging you to find your own way as she had to, showing you how she found her way and which experiences influenced her, and teaching you to find those guides in your life.

There are prompts every now and again, and you could open the book and go straight to those prompts (they’re in the table of contents), write them, close the book until you need another. But I don’t think you’d quite get the meaning of it; you’d be writing because someone told you to write, not because you needed to for yourself. Goldberg explains the prompt and then has you do it, and it was while reading that explanation that I found I yearned to write on it. I have writer’s prompts books that have words, pictures, sentences, ideas on pages, but I open them and I stare at the prompt for an hour trying to think of anything that could possibly become a story or blog post from it. Maybe my brain doesn’t accept prompts. I wrote on several of the prompts from Wild Mind, however, and I think it’s because they came with writing.

It was so difficult to get through it, so hard to keep picking it up. It was hard to come to terms with my own writing life, but when I finally did, I understood that Wild Mind helped me get there. Now what are my plans? To review a book on this blog at least once a month and find my “reviewing style.” To write a serial adventure novel on my personal domain. To build puzzles in my free time, allowing me to work through ideas that aren’t quite getting out on paper. The biggest speed bump I hope to cross over this year is allowing other people to read my unedited writing.

Perhaps Wild Mind won’t change your life, but if you’re a creative type struggling with the why and the how of your art, I recommend picking it up. Just give it a try.