NONFICTION - Feb. 21, 1993

LONG QUIET HIGHWAY: Waking up in America by Natalie Goldberg (Bantam Books: $19.95; 238 pp. ). Most aspiring writers fail at their chosen craft because they haven’t plumbed the essence of their beliefs. The desire, the need, even the fine-tuned ability to express is insufficient: What’s lacking, more often than not, is the willingness to give up control, to wait until the fitting words, the fitting ideas, have arrived. Natalie Goldberg, best known for the book “Writing Down the Bones,” expresses this idea somewhat differently when she tells her writing students that they need to contact “first thoughts,” those intuitive insights that so often become “fettered with second and third thoughts.” Goldberg’s advice is good, but problematic in that the writing she has in mind is more appropriate for private reflection than public discourse. “Long Quiet Highway” is largely the chronicle of a writer’s search for meaning, and distinctive in that Goldberg focuses on her relationship with Zen master Katagiri Roshi. Katagiri taught by example, and that, fundamentally, is what Goldberg hopes to do through this book--with mixed success, in that neither the facts nor lessons of Goldberg’s life, baldly stated, hold special power. Goldberg doesn’t pretend otherwise, however, for good writing, at bottom, is writing that is good for the author. “Success is none of our business,” Goldberg writes. “Our job is to write.”