The first thing that I learned from Natalie Goldberg is the writing like life is fluid. We can’t rest on past laurels, because that is not us now. That was us for only the moment.  I also there is no recipe to writing. We may start out with one idea in mind and end up with something entirely different than we had imagined. Mary Pipher supplies a good example of this when she tells the story of an aspiring sports broadcast who ended up as an activist. She also talks about obsessions and how they relate to your. Obsessions are thoughts that most concern you, that are a part of you. It is your own intimate knowledge of self. I am paraphrasing but also acknowledging Pipher’s “Know Thyself”. She also mentions attention to detail to add passion to your writing. Attention to detail is a concept expressed by Joan Didion, Annie Dillard as Pipher in their essays. Wasting time over insignificant issues is a particular problem of mine and I could identify with “Don’t Marry the Fly”. Both Goldberg and Pipher express the value in sharing your work with others. Personally, I appreciate the help I’ve gotten from Smarthinking, your evaluation and other student’s comments from the discussion posts. I realized that not everybody thinks as I do and the volley of different ideas is enlightening and useful to my on thoughts. The statement you learn something new everyday is true. I value the different perspectives, and say to myself, why didn’t I think about that. “A Tourist in Your Own Town” as well as Pipher’s Voyage of Discovery Both emphasize the power of perspective. Right now I am focused on revising and I am using some of the techniques from Goldberg’s, “The Action of a Sentence”, Pipher’s “Cooling Down--- Revising” and the Purdue OWL article, “Strategies for Variation”. I’ve changed many sentences and now I wished I had started the revision process for Essay 3 earlier. It truly is a creative process and Ive got more to do.