The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

NATIONAL B E S T S E L L E R AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Critics Praise The Writing Lifi "Annie Dillard is a wonderful writer, "A kind of spiritual Strunk & White, a small and brillinnt uid ·boo lo dw .ual THE WRITING LIFE is full of joys." landscape of a writer's task.... Dillard brings the same pa ssion nnd t' OI IIIt'<' • - NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW tive intelligence to this narrative as she has to her other w rk. " - /J o1 /011 U/olw "For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions o · , lift· , pt' lll with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling conversation with :1 stimlll11 1ing and extraordinarily talented colleague." - hi ago 'lribtlilr "Her book is ... scattered with pearls. Each reader will be attra t d lo dill!· r· ent bright parts .. Gracefully and simply told, these little stori ·s ill um in.1tr the writi:1.g life .. Her advice to writers is encouraging and invigorn1·ing. '' -Cleveland P!ttill I ,.,tf,•r "The Writing Life is a spare volume ... that has the power and force o a d L<l· nating bomb. A book bursting with metaphors and prose bristlin with incident." - Detroit N1'''' "We may fairly ask that a book about writing be, itself, a work of art. An I that is what Dillard offers .... Anyone hoping to see inside the process of lir erary artistry is unlikely to find a more lucid, sensitive or poetic view." -Philadelphia Inquirer "The Writing Life is as f,lim and potent as the Tao Te Ching, that ancient hi nese manual on the art of living .... You want to copy out what it says, tape it to your typewriter, fix it with a heavy magnet to your fridge. Her words giv courage. They make the daring life seem worthwhile." -USA Today : HarperPerennial A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers http:/ /www.harpercollins.com ISBN 0-06-091988-4 ANNIE DILLARD Cover design © 1998 by Marc Cohen 51 1 0 0 Cover painting: The Toilers of the Sea by Albert Pinkham Ryder, courtesy of T he Metropolitan Muse um of Art, George A. H earn Fund, 1915 USA $11.00 Author of PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK 9 780060 919887 "'N CANADA $16.00 "'0 UG=O~ W~OUO~@ [SOCS~ ANNIE DILLARD 11: HarperPerennial A Division ofHarperCollinsPublishers Excerpts from this book appeared in Black Warrior Review, Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, Tikkun, and TriQuarterly. For A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1989 by Harper & Row, BOB Publishers, Inc. THE WRITING LIFE. Copyright © 1989 by Annie Dillard. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. First HarperPerennial edition published 1990. The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Dillard, Annie. The writing life/ Annie Dillard.-1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-016156-6 1. Dillard, Annie-Biography. 2. Authors, American-20th century Biography. I. Title. PS3554.1398Z478 1989 818'.5409-dc19 l B) 89-45034 ISBN 0-06-091988-4 (pbk.) 98 99 RRD 20 19 THE WRITING LIFE No one suspects the days to be gods. -EMERSON Do not hurry; do not rest. -GOETHE wHEN YOU WRITE, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the 3 ANNIE DILLARD THE WRITING LIFE angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and care preface to The Spoils of Poynton, he pities the writer, less. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path in a comical pair of sentences that rises to a howl: is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; "Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered, I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have all and not look back. kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done, The line of words is a hammer. You hammer doesn't he ask himself what has become of the thing against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, all for the sweet sake of which it was to proceed to lightly, everywhere. After giving many years' atten that extremity?" tion to these things, you know what to listen for. So it is that a writer writes many books. In each Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hard go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Un ened. "The youth gets together his materials to fortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. build a bridge to the moon," Thoreau noted mourn It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, fully, "or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. and at length the middle-aged man concludes to Duck. build a wood-shed with them." The writer returns Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is to these materials, these passionate subjects, as to such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Cour unfinished business, for they are his life's work. age, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of away. the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in them A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from selves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying the ground up. The latest version of a painting over about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you lays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, a woman, or a mouse?) on the other hand, work from left to right. The The part you must jettison is not only the best discardable chapters are on the left. The latest ver written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to sion of a literary work begins somewhere in the have been the very point. It is the original key pas work's middle, and hardens toward the end. The sage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and earlier version remains lumpishly on the left; the from which you yourself drew the courage to begin. work's beginning greets the reader with the wrong Henry James knew it well, and said it best. In his hand. In those early pages and chapters anyone may 4 5 ANNIE DILLARD THE WRITING LIFE find bold leaps to nowhere, read the brave begin A cabdriver sang his songs to me, in New York. nings of dropped themes, hear a tone since aban Some we sang together. He had turned the meter doned, discover blind alleys, track red herrings, and off; he drove around midtown, singing. One long laboriously learn a setting now false. song he sang twice; it was the only dull one. I said, Several delusions weaken the writer's resolve to You already sang that one; let's sing something else. throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, And he said, "You don't know how long it took me those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of to get that one together.'' the inevitable, like poetry known by heart; they will How many books do we read from which the perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? retain them. He may retain those pages if they pos How many gifts do we open from which the writer sess some virtues, such as power in themselves, neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is though they lack the cardinal virtue, which is perti it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer nence to, and unity with, the book's thrust. Some personally? times the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that You write it all, discovering it at the end of the exalted him when the words first appeared-relief line of words. The line of words is a fiber optic, that he was writing anything at all. That beginning flexible as wire; it illumines the path just before its served to get him where he was going, after all; fragile tip.

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