Annie Dilliard writes some amazing sentences. So I found The Writing Life to be a fascinating look into the workings of her process. This isn't a how-to guide, but it will inspire writers, no matter where they are in the process (of writing and of becoming a published writer). Some of the passages are stunning, not only for their aesthetic beauty but their insight about writing and reading. For my writer friends, take a gander:"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?" (72-73)"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." (78-79)"The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged." (15)and then this beauty, which I quote at great length:The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the sublest senses – the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing – and the moral sense, and the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader’s ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can’t yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.An intriguing entomological experiment shows that a male butterfly will ignore a living female butterfly of his own species in favor of a painted cardboard one, if the cardboard one is big. If the cardboard one is bigger than he is, bigger than any female butterfly ever could be. He jumps the piece of cardboard over and over again, he jumps the piece of cardboard. Nearby, the real, living female butterfly opens and closes her wings in vain. Films and television stimulate the body’s senses too, in big ways. A nine-foot handsome face, and its three-foot-wide smile, are irresistible. Look at the long legs on that man, as high as a wall, and coming straight toward you. The music builds. The moving lighted screen fills your brain. You do not like filmed car chases? See if you can turn away. Try not to watch. Even knowing you are manipulated, you are still as helpless as the male butterfly drawn to painted cardboard. That is the movies. That is their ground. The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not. You can describe beautiful faces, car chases, or valleys full of Indians on horseback until you run out of words, and you will not approach the movies’ spectacle. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous odor. I cannot name what, in the text, alerts the reader to suspect the writer or mixed motives; I cannot specify which sentences, in several books, have caused me to read on with increased dismay, and finally close the books because I smelled a rat. Such books seem uneasy being books; they seem eager to fling off their disguises and jump onto screens.Why would anyone read a book instead of watching big people move on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing – a poor thing, but our own. In my view, the more literary the book — the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep – the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be. They like, or require, what books alone have. If they want to see films that evening, they will find films. If they do not like to read, they will not. People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books. I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place. (17-19)
Appreciated this little treasure every bit as much the second time around. Dillard is a miner of meaningful truths from the ordinary world—her prose is fierce, invigorating, and unrelentingly beautiful._________Original review (2013)A short, wonderful, straight-to-the-point book. Read it for sympathy in your struggles as a writer: I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. Read it for vindication: Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. Read it for Dillard’s uncommon advice on the craft: The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces. The strain … enlivens the work and impels it toward its truest end. A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope, too; his pride emboldens and impels him. Though she presents reasons for the opposite approach as well—writing the book straight through, beginning to end, before returning to perfect the bits and pieces (in other words, cranking out the first draft in a mad rush, as Stephen King and many other masters of the craft advise)—it’s worth noting that Dillard herself seems to prefer the first method: laying the story one brick at a time. Testing the wall, checking that everything is plumb, before moving on. She tells of whole days spent when only a paragraph is produced; when she consumes coffee after coffee, cigarette after cigarette, and searches her cabin for anything to do but write. She compares crafting a sentence to wrestling an alligator. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque, lightless, chunky ruinous work. Read it for Dillard’s strong voice and exhilarating sentences: The line of words is heading out past Jupiter this morning. Traveling 150 kilometers a second, it makes no sound. The big yellow planet and its white moons spin. The line of words speeds past Jupiter and its cumbrous, dizzying orbit; it looks neither to the right nor to the left. It will be leaving the solar system soon, single-minded, rapt, rushing heaven like a soul. The time it takes to breeze through this little book is well spent indeed.
What do You think about The Writing Life (1998)?
Sometime after the excitement of beginning her book a serious writer will discover her work’s own “intrinsic impossibility,” says Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. Eventually she’ll probably throw out the main point, her grand vision, and settle for the more modest discovery she made in writing.If a writer had any sense, she’d devote herself to a career selling catheters. The Writing Life is about persistent inquiry and love. A sort of commiseration, it contains rules of thumb: throw out the beginning; the book begins in what you thought was the middle. It can take years and heartbreak to see that—another given.“Once, for example, I learned from a conversation with a neighbor that I had been living in a fool’s paragraph,” Dillard says.Neighborly advice is unintentional, however. Anyone who’s written a creative book is full of woe and wonder, but Dillard notes in her dry way that civilians really don’t care. (How much do you crave tales of your brother-in-law’s plumbing supply business?) However, as a veteran, she offers this: “It makes more sense to write one big book—a novel or nonfiction narrative—than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses.”There’s a lot of reading: a writer must study literature, must know what’s been done so she can try to exceed it. Dillard adds this spooky caution: “He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”She’s on record elsewhere as advising writers to read history. She counts a life spent reading as a good one, though her fascination with bugs and rocks and stars draws her outside. She’s the plucky one with binoculars around her neck. When writing her books, she stared at the wall: “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”Years after The Writing Life she worked on a novel set on Cape Cod. She piled up 1,200 pages. It took ten years. Then she saw the book’s heart, a love story, couldn’t bear the weight of geologic history and began cutting. The Maytrees, a shimmering work of art published in 2007, is 216 pages. [Since reviewed here.) She said it almost killed her and announced her retirement after twelve books.Her book on writing is rare because it isn’t aimed at complete beginners—of course, she calls it a memoir. Sometime during the two to ten years it takes someone to write a decent book (another precept) the writer should read The Writing Life. The book (Dillard’s, that is) won’t make much sense otherwise. It isn’t much of a how-to guide unless someone has sweated through a manuscript, and then it’s the best.
—Richard Gilbert
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” ― Annie Dillard, The Writing LifeOf all the writing books I've read, this one speaks to me the most.
—Tiffany Reisz
Some books don't have an ending. What they have to say will linger on and surround you like a mental landscape. Annie Dillard's impassioned plea for the writing life is as hypnotic as it is tangible. She will take you to writing desks in remote cabins and isolated studies (keep the world out, as much as you can) to evoke the various stages of writing (elation, excitement, despair, immobility, doubt). Time will slow down and expand in electrified sentences that you will want to highlight and write down, word for word, in your own writing notebooks. Her uses of metaphor will thrill you to bits and stretch your understanding of the craft in ways that you had never thought about before. She will become a little ghost sitting on your shoulder as you toil away on the page, so haunting are her lines.Some books are written to be reread. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Annie Dillard distills the elements that make writing as alive, elemental and necessary as it can be. A literary call to arms.
—Melanie
