Craft Lessons #2: I Read Annie Dillard's 'The Writing Life' So You Don't Have To
Every word should matter. Ask yourself: what would you write if you knew your time was short?
As writers, we often grow by learning from those who’ve walked the path before us. One such writer is Annie Dillard. I picked up her book, The Writing Life, for practical writing tips but what I found was more valuable. It’s a book full of wisdom and deep insight into the writer’s journey. Some of Dillard’s views push against the grain of today’s writing culture, but that’s what makes her perspective refreshing. Dear reader, I think you’ll enjoy this week’s craft lesson, so don’t forget to like, share, and bookmark. It’s one you’ll want to revisit.
Annie Dillard, born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is an acclaimed American author known for her rich narrative prose across fiction and nonfiction. Her work is heavily influenced by nature. She gained widespread recognition for her book ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, which earned the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975. The Writing Life is a brief account of Dillard’s experience as an author.
At the start of the book, she introduces a fresh interpretation of the concept of killing your darlings:
The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin. Henry James knew it well, and said it 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, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done, doesn’t he ask himself what has become of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to proceed 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 as the book’s form hardened.
Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: “You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?” The young photographer said, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”
How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?
To Dillard, writer's block stems from either structural laws in existing writing or deficits in what the writer hopes to add to the story. She writes:
You notice only this: your worker—your one and only, your prized, coddled, and driven worker—is not going out on that job. Will not budge, not even for you, boss. Has been at it long enough to know when the air smells wrong; can sense a tremor through boot soles. Nonsense, you say; it is perfectly safe. But the worker will not go. Will not even look at the site. Just developed heart trouble. Would rather starve. Sorry. What do you do? Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing.
Perhaps this may come as good news to many writers that Dillard affirms that it takes years to write a novel:
It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant… 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 people 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. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.
It's interesting to note that Dillard rebukes the idea that books must be as entertaining as movies to encourage reading. She writes:
The people who read are the people who like literature… 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. 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.
So, how do you write to appeal to your audience? She instructs:
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not be enraged by its triviality?
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris… Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it... He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.
In a passage, she describes the best environment for a writer to harness her creativity:
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder-block study was, but it will do. “The beginning of wisdom,” according to a West African proverb, “is to get you a roof.”
According to Dillard, a writer must be prepared to learn from the works of other writers:
Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s.”
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…. Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”
Are short stories worth the effort? Dillard answers:
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. Much of those years’ reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.
Although one might disagree with her take on short form literature, her best offering remains:
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.
The Key Takeaways
Kill your darlings.
Writer’s block signals deeper issues.
Writing takes years.
Don't write to entertain non-readers.
Write as if you're dying, and your audience is too.
Study literature, not the world.
Work in an unappealing space.
Learn from great writers.
Love sentences.
Long projects are more fulfilling.
Use your best material now.
As usual, if you found this post beneficial, please share with your family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances!
Best wishes,
Halima from Qalb Writers Collective
As a long-term deep reader of Annie Dillard's work, I really loved your take on this classic. I hope your online process introduces more writers to AD's radiant writing.