The Writing Life Annie Dillard Read Free Download
Clarification
"For nonwriters, information technology is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." —Chicago Tribune
From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a drove that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer'southward life.
In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author ofPilgrim at Tinker CreekandAn American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, applesauce, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving business relationship of Dillard's own experiences while writing her works,The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.
About the author
Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Babyhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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The Writing Life - Annie Dillard
Chapter 1
Do non bustle; practice not balance.
—GOETHE
WHEN Y'all WRITE, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver'due south gouge, a surgeon's probe. You lot wield it, and information technology digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is information technology a dead terminate, or have yous located the real subject? Y'all will know tomorrow, or this time adjacent year.
You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you discover a box canyon. You hammer out reports, acceleration bulletins.
The writing has changed, in your easily, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new identify interests you considering it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the before writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is non the work. I hope your tracks take grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not wait back.
The line of words is a hammer. You lot hammer against the walls of your business firm. Yous tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. Afterward giving many years' attention to these things, y'all know what to listen for. Some of the walls are begetting walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls tin can go with impunity; you tin hear the departure. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot exist helped. In that location is just 1 solution, which appalls you, but at that place it is. Knock it out. Duck.
Backbone utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the earth. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. Y'all must demolish the work and start over. You can salvage some of the sentences, like bricks. It volition be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or difficult-won. You tin can waste matter a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)
The function yous must jettison is non simply the best-written part; information technology is also, oddly, that office which was to accept been the very indicate. It is the original primal passage, the passage on which the residue was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to brainstorm. Henry James knew it well, and said information technology best. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, he pities the writer, in a comical pair of sentences that rises to a howl: "Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered, nether dire difficulty, the best matter he meant to have kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done, doesn't he ask himself what has go of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to continue to that extremity?"
So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed every bit the volume's class hardened. The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon,
Thoreau noted mournfully, or maybe a palace or temple on the globe, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.
The writer returns to these materials, these passionate subjects, as to unfinished concern, for they are his life'due south work.
It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.
A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays before versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary piece of work begins somewhere in the work'south middle, and hardens toward the end. The earlier version remains lumpishly on the left; the piece of work'southward starting time greets the reader with the wrong paw. In those early pages and chapters anyone may find assuming leaps to nowhere, read the brave beginnings of dropped themes, hear a tone since abandoned, discover blind alleys, track red herrings, and laboriously learn a setting now false.
Several delusions weaken the writer'due south resolve to throw away piece of work. If he has read his pages too oft, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, similar verse known by heart; they volition perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will retain them. He may retain those pages if they possess some virtues, such every bit ability in themselves, though they lack the fundamental virtue, which is pertinence to, and unity with, the volume'south thrust. Sometimes the writer leaves his early on chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling over again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words get-go appeared—relief that he was writing annihilation at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, also, every bit background. But no.
Every twelvemonth the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an erstwhile, honored lensman, seeking his judgment. Every year the quondam man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into ii piles, bad and good. Every yr the one-time man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young homo: Yous submit this aforementioned landscape every twelvemonth, and every yr I put it on the bad stack. Why do y'all like it so much?
The young photographer said, Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.
A cabdriver sang his songs to me, in New York. Some we sang together. He had turned the meter off; he drove around midtown, singing. One long song he sang twice; it was the simply dull one. I said, Y'all already sang that one; let'due south sing something else. And he said, You don't know how long it took me to go that ane together.
How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts exercise we open up from which the author neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for the states to learn what it cost the author personally?
You write information technology all, discovering it at the end of the line of words. The line of words is a cobweb optic, flexible as wire; it illumines the path simply before its fragile tip. You probe with it, fragile as a worm.
Few sights are then absurd as that of an inchworm leading its dimwit life. Inchworms are the caterpillar larvae of several moths or butterflies. The cabbage looper, for example, is an inchworm. I oft see an inchworm: information technology is a skinny bright light-green matter, stake and thin as a vein, an inch long, and apparently totally unfit for life in this earth. It wears out its days in constant panic.
Every inchworm I have seen was stuck in long grasses.
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Reviews
What people think virtually The Writing Life
4.2
Reader reviews
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This book defenseless me past surprise by how much I enjoyed information technology. I'yard no "writer". I have no craft and don't claim whatever or look to gain whatever in the future. I feared that the slender book might either be: (A) a tediously boring how-to book, filled with rules, like "Ever have fresh typewriter ribbon" or "Employ only #3 pencils", or (B) heed-numbingly esoteric and touchy-feely in reaching writing nirvana. Amazingly and beautifully so, it was neither. One could argue that the book is not then much a treatise on writing but a collection of essays, but it felt very, very continued to me. Early sections could be described as a fleck "how-to", or more precisely, how-information technology-is, to write, that is, seriously write, and, if the author is to be believed, information technology'due south quite painful. Just then, later sections belie that impression in remarkably bright means. I was especially impressed by a story the writer relates near existence told a story past another writer, involving rowing a boat in waters in which I have actually kayaked in myself. Touching on something I was so familiar with helped draw me in, but the point made by the story was 100% spot on for making its betoken. This slim work is very much worth the time for anyone who thrives on good writing.
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Anecdotal journeying of a writer's career. Introspective and illuminates some of the biggest difficulties a dedicated author has to overcome. Good insights to think about for kickoff or struggling writers.
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A book that makes me think and smile on every page. My first read from this author that has me searching for more. Language that inspires thought and words that inspire action. Delightful! I'll exist back!
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My experience with NaNoWriMo this year reminded me of high school and, oddly enough, reading The Writing Life reminded me of NaNoWriMo. It's non mutual, however; this book only reminded me of high school in the sense that I could imagine being required to read and analyze information technology on a high school level. Maybe it's because Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Babyhood are both reading list titles here (though I was never required to read them), simply I still constitute myself picking out phrases here and there that in my brain sounded like the clanking and clinking of doing dishes. Those were the sort of wincing noises I hear now while reading phrases and excerpts that "discussion" questions would have been based on. (They were never really word questions, were they? Yous could answer them quite just in ii-iii sentences and being that they had correct or wrong answers, there wasn't much to discuss once someone got them right.)NaNoWriMo reminded me of loftier school primarily because of this excerpt on pages 70-71:Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as information technology happened, likewise chose Hansun and Turgenev every bit models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; East. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By dissimilarity, if you inquire a twenty-one-year-old poet whose verse he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody'due south." In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets similar poesy, and novelists like novels; he himself likes simply the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The piece of work'south possibilities excited them; the field'southward complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that suffer. And then, and only and so, the earth flapped at them some sort of chapeau, which, if they were still living, they ignored every bit well as they could, to keep at their tasks.It's non that I don't recollect anyone at NaNoWriMo is a real writer; it's more that the majority of the people I conversed with during my time at the forums weren't. This was their start foray into writing and they believed themselves to exist admittedly brilliant. Had they read annihilation in the by year? No, just magazine articles on pop celebrities. It's the idea that people only write to vesture "the hat," to have the function, to phone call themselves "an writer" later on they've spit out a load of filler material to make a certain word count. It's that people think writing a novel within a month is enough, that they'll get published immediately fifty-fifty sometimes without editing. Falling in dearest with the first draft never gets anyone anywhere. Most final drafts merely slightly resemble commencement drafts. That'due south how it should be, only the "twenty-one-twelvemonth-old poet" who likes "Nobody's" poetry ruined the whole experience for me. That's non to say that I discourage people from writing for the offset time, nor exercise I discourage anyone from striving to make a dandy work of writing fifty-fifty if it'due south their first time. This is why I've fallen in love with NaNoWriMo: because fifty-fifty if you lot have no experience with it, the community strives to encourage y'all to reach your goal. Some people might get high-hatted believing merely in their luminescence and their sure success, but the globe outside of NaNoWriMo is full of people who think they're more important than they are. It's one of those "double-edged swords" that people talk about, like the argument that Oprah'due south book club is awful in the mind of a reader of literature, because no ane would take read I Hundred Years of Solitude were it not for her choice. However, at the same time, it's and so wonderful that the book is getting exposure, that it's being read, considering (supposedly) it's a wonderful book! Information technology'southward the people who have that Tshirt that says "I mind to bands that don't be even so." People who, for some reason, feel that these things are personally theirs and belong to their group; they are threatened when "outsiders"* take interest in their things. *"Outsiders" existence housewives, new writers, younger generations, whatever. It'due south not something that is hands explained away. I don't know why people do this. I don't know why "I knew about them before you did" is such an important argument to make. I don't know why it bothers me that people who complete a NaNoWriMo novel then feel similar they tin walk around calling themselves authors, proverb that their brilliant piece of work is going to get published immediately because it embodies perfection. And I can't say whether information technology bugs me more that they haven't read a book for pleasure in their life, or that they are trying to take something that I've worked very hard for.USA Today's review on the back of this book says that "You desire to copy out what information technology says, record it to your typewriter, fix it with a heavy magnet to your refrigerator. Her words give courage." It is that courage that makes this volume remind me of NaNoWriMo. The positives. I've moved away from the loop of wondering why something I seek to encourage bothers me. Pages 78-79:I of the few things I know nigh writing is this: spend it all, shoot information technology, play information technology, lose it, all, right abroad, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a subsequently place in the volume, or for another book; requite 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 than will arise for later, something amend. These things make full from behind, from beneath, like well h2o. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what y'all accept learned is not but shameful, information technology is destructive. Anything y'all do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to yous. You open up your condom and find ashes.After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of newspaper on which he had written a note to his amateur, in the handwriting of his old age: "Depict, Antonio, draw, Antonio, describe and do non waste material time."This should exist the slogan over at Nanowrimo.org. Everyone should take this in listen when they write. NaNoWriMo is about getting the words out, letting the ideas striking the paper (or screen, as it were), about pushing yourself to write that masterpiece you lot've been putting off because of "lack of time" or "slim motivation." Annie Dillard encourages the same thing. Make a schedule and get it all out. Yous'll accept to breathe, you'll have to eat and sleep and possibly take walks, but when you're non doing those things, permit the words become.It's uninspiring to me to read books detailing a "author's life." Ordinarily they involve agents, publishers, problems with copyeditors and book encompass designers. I find it uninteresting because information technology doesn't apply to my life. Annie Dillard'due south Writing Life, however, doesn't include much if any of that. It's about what keeps her going, what things have inspired her, what are the frustrations and distractions that all writers face. Information technology'south inspiring to me because there is a whole chapter defended to watching an airplane airplane pilot spin circles in the air and finding the beauty in the lines that he creates; there is nothing most the life of an already published author. Information technology'south universal.I would like to larn two copies of this book so I can snip passages from the pages and stick them around my apartment. I might stop up with the whole book on my walls.
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Dillard is spare, thoughtful and truthful.
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A powerful mediation of the ache and joy of writing. Highly recommended.
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