Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

A few weeks ago I shared with you how freewriting freed me. The book Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, played a big part in that during my college years, introducing me to the idea of timed writing as a means to write and discover. Even though I wasn't all that interested in Goldberg’s frequent references to Zen Buddhism, I liked her basic approach: "When I teach a class,” she says, “I want the students to be 'writing down the bones,' the essential, awake speech of their minds."1 When I tuned into to my own inner voice and wrote down that "awake speech" of my mind, I began to know myself better. And the better I knew myself, the better and more interesting my writing became. But when I look back, I realize the practice of self-reflection started even earlier, in high school. Write to Discover One afternoon when I was about 14 years old, I was glancing through books on writing at my local library and noticed a title: Write to Discover Yourself, by Ruth Vaughn. I looked both ways and plucked it fr