How to Create Writing Voice? Natalie Goldberg Says to Ask, What Brings You to Your Knees? What Do You Love with Your Whole Heart?

In her book, Thunder and Lightning, free-writing expert Natalie Goldberg describes a writing exercise she created after reading Borrowed Time by Paul Monette. Borrowed Time is a memoir of Monette's experience with AIDS.

When one of her students commented that AIDS gave Monette his voice as a writer, Goldberg realized that voice is created when "something…