The Writing Life

The Writing Life

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04  ·  rating details  ·  4,488 ratings  ·  368 reviews
Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Paperback, 113 pages
Published August 17th 1990 by Harper Perennial (first published 1989)
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Malbadeen
Feb 26, 2008 Malbadeen rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: chicken man
I do not, nor do I aspire to live "The Writing Life" but I have recently found myself in a writing class by virtue of necessity for my degree and I have been horrified by the enormity of the task of writing something/anything without feeling like a complete fool!
I came across this book at a used store and picked it up as my brother has been trying to get me to read Dillard for awhile.
I immediately loved it for her brutal words of reality. After sitting in the class were I have to listen to a ci...more
Elise
Every paragraph is stunning, and I especially like the previous owner's occasional marginalia in my hardback copy.

On page 14, Dillard writes: "Flaubert wrote steadily, with only the usual, appalling, strains. For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years. My guess is that full-time writers average a book every five years; seventy-three usable pages a year, or a usable fifth of a page a day. The years that biographers and other nonfiction writers spend amassing and master...more
Carol
Excellent book! It is anything but dull. So informative, entertaining and candid as well as inspiring.

Quotes: "Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at it's most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, i...more
Sarah Law
Jan 04, 2009 Sarah Law rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone who has ever had writer's block
Recommended to Sarah by: Mykle
Mykle and I read this book together. (He had read it before.) Overall, I found it very funny and easy to relate to. No one can match Annie Dillard for descriptions. That being said, she is sometimes a bit too flowery, so you really have to be the type of person who likes that kind of thing.

I tried reading some of her other books and could not get past the first chapter. I guess she's too intense for my taste. My mom read this and liked it a lot.
Jaime
Many quotable sections in this piece, and I am forcing myself to select only one: "Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you."

Like Stephen King in On Writing, Dillard has useful observations on revisions and on input/output issues (what you read becomes what you write). I am thinking about Elizabeth Gilbert's essay on her website, on the same topic, where she says something along the lines of "Write, write like your hair is on fire" in response to the question these work...more
Jayne Bowers
Although The Writing Life was not what I expected, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I thought it was going to be full of advice, a how-to book about how to craft the perfect sentence, write believable dialogue, or "show, not tell," but instead the small volume was about Annie Dillard's daily life and her writing struggles.

A student of life in all forms (including moths and cats), Dillard illustrates that everything can be a subject worthy of writing about. How does she do it? Is there a secret?...more
Lindsey
I'm not a writer, so I couldn't really identify with anything in here. I also did not have the desire to become a writer after reading this book! Dillard makes it sound completely non-glamorous - spending time in places that offer the best sensory deprivation (i.e. a blah room with no view) and continuously poisoning the body with loads of caffeine and cigarettes. I have never read any of her other work, but I guess she writes a lot about nature? I was surprised to find, then, that she does not...more
David A.
My Year of Overdue Books--books I honestly should have read by this time in my life--continues with The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. I rescued this book from the free table at work a few years ago; as an editor and a writer myself, I thought it was certainly worth giving some time to. Then it sat on my shelf for years. Probably my coworker who left it on the free table has seen it sitting there and silently judged me on more than one occasion.

Annie Dillard published The Writing Life in 1989, w...more
Richard Gilbert
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 be...more
Ben Dutton
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard’s commentary on the creative act, is a distinctive, deeply personal tract. A short piece – just 68 pages – it nevertheless manages to pack a wealth of detail, both biographical, philosophical and bibliographical that, as the Detroit News said, “has the power and force of a detonating bomb”.

Annie Dillard is an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The majority of her work is non-fiction, and is often imbued with the s...more
Shayda
This is not a practical book, like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; it's more of a writer's confession, with descriptions of enclosed workspaces and the tyranny of the "line of words." The final chapter leaves writing behind (ostensibly) to talk about a stunt flyer's work.

I re-read this for purely selfish reasons: to see how it felt to read about writing, having finished my dissertation. Because of this frame of reference, I was most attentive to Dillard's desc...more
Miriam Johnson
"One rainy day, this member of the real world gave me a ride home. I invited him in for a minute, and somehow all hell broke loose.

Politely, he asked me about my writing. Foolishly, not dreaming I was about to set my own world tumbling down around my ears, I said I hated to write. I said I would rather do anything else. He was amazed. He said, 'That's like a guy who works in a factory all day, and hates it.' Then I was amazed, for so it was. It was just like that. Why did I do it? I had never in...more
Julie Luekenga
I was first introduced to The Writing Life in a creative non-fiction writing course I took several years ago. This was one of my first introductions to Annie Dillard and her style of writing. The instructor chose an excerpt from this book about Ms. Dillard playing a game of chess with an unknown opponent as she spent long hours sequestered in a library trying to write. Taken out of context, the excerpt was bizarre and difficult to interpret. Taken in context, the excerpt was still bizarre and di...more
Mike
The semester's over: Hooray for everything! And now back to reading.

I'm actually reading another book, but found this on the bookshelf and wondered where it came from. Ruth probably picked it up at Housing Works or else at a stoop sale. Anyway, it was a nice surprise to see it hanging out on the bookshelf and so I flipped it open out of boredom to gander at the first page. And the writing just took over from there, as I couldn't put it down. The book has a wonderful pace to it and many extraordi...more
Rachel
This book seems to be simply a series of meditations on writing and being a writer (and avoiding writing and being a writer, as well). I use the word "simply" because, ultimately, this is rather a simple book. It's not idiotic, but no great insights are revealed, and nothing comes to the surface to provide any new or revelatory description of The Writing Life. The book seems, instead, to be a collection of thoughts about writing and any other subject that seems to come up. It is almost as if Ann...more
Michael
I had to read this for a course and my professor said that some people will love Annie Dillard, while others will hate her. I am of the latter camp.
I'm not sure what I was expecting from reading this book. Maybe some kind of interesting wisdom about writing? What I got, though, was a highly pretentious piece of work that read like a self-help book. It spoke about a bunch of things but the sum of the message was basically empty.
Dillard seems to assume that all writers can live her lifestyle of se...more
Krista
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

As I understand it, Jack Benny had always dreamed of being a virtuoso violinist and could play reasonably well, but...more
Cheryl Klein
A lovely extended prose poem on writing in the vein of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, though it actually predates the other book. Bird by Bird offers more practical advice, which either makes it more useful or more audacious, depending on your take (mine is mostly the former). At times Dillard's rustic metaphors almost made me cry--see her description of a sphinx moth fighting fate: "It gained height and lost, gained and lost, and always lost more than it gained, until its heavy body dragged in the...more
Skipper Ritchotte
It doesn't happen often. A book comes along, dressed in a plain, paperback wrapper, and sears you from the first word. Like a kiss from Glinda the good witch, the mark doesn't wash off once the book is put aside to make way for other matters; it lingers in the subconscious, where the meanings can be fully appreciated and understood.

"The Writing Life" is a kiss, but it's also a slap, a bugling wake-up call; pay attention! it says. Annie Dillard practices what she preaches--she writes like she is...more
Cheryl
Audio e-library download to my Sansa Clip. I picked up this book because I have always been fascinated by the writing process. Surprisingly, the book is more poetry than a literal instruction of writing. The beginning of the book is full of analogies of painters, photographers, singers, inchworms and June bugs (yes, June bugs), snakes and alligator wrestlers (who is ultimately killed and eaten by the gator). Interspersed are tidbits of writers and writing mechanics, and the art of chopping firew...more
Doreen
It's a pithy book, one to be savored and reread; it contains insight, advice, homespun anecdotes, and experiential terror about writing. Much of it is quotable and usable and practicable as when she discusses a writer who asks: Who will teach me to write? and she replies: "the page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time's scrawl as a right and your daring as a necessity;" (58). There is a certain heroics of writing that she invokes but...more
Tawny
Favorite lines:
1. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. . . . There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by” (32).
2. “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” (52).
3. “The writer studies literature, not the world. . ....more
Angela
Although it's clear that Dillard has a wonderful command of the English language, her writing flowing more like poetry than prose, I really don't feel as though this book shared any real insights into being a writer. She writes that writing is hard and all-consuming, but these are things that any writer already knows. She also writes that writing a book, especially a first book, could take years...this is also something that anyone striving to write a book already knows. There were actually time...more
Mark
As a writer with only one published novel I am always looking to learn more about the writing life, looking to hone my skills, to improve. I had hoped to glean some rare look into how to write skilfully from Dillard's writing. This 111 page book took me three days to read (normally I would have finished in 30 minutes) however I wanted to absorb each gem of knowledge, and so kept reading intently, taking breaks hoping it would get better the next time I picked it up. Most writers seem to spend an...more
Kate
Feb 22, 2009 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fragile people who wish writing was an option (not a necessity)
Dillard presents a load of carefully chosen and exquisitely complimentary examples of what writing does to a person. This is by far the most helpful (and most humble) meditation on writing as a discipline and an art. It's useful to regard a rather un-glorious discipline as Dillard does, without alluding to the hoopla of modern publishing deals and the hollywood-inspired, iconic treatment of writers.
Adam Shand

It's taken me a long time to read this really quite small book. For a book which is this beautiful and this poetic, it's a surprisingly easy read. Yet for all that ease, every few paragraphs I found myself somewhere else, drifting on a current to somewhere else.

I'd been expecting some kind of "howto", instead I discovered some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read. Some of it is just silly, some of it made me want to rush home and write and some of it made me want to curl up on the beach an...more
L.M. Ironside
This might be the only book about writing anybody needs.

It's not a book that tells you how to write. But I've never found those books to be useful anyway. This is a book about what it is like to be a writer. Not "be a writer" as in "being able to tell strangers that you're a writer and then enjoying the instinctive looks of awe on their faces," nor "be a writer" as in "manage a career writing books." It is a book about what it's like to obsess over a single sentence for days or weeks, what it's...more
Carol Apple
This is certainly not a how-to book on writing. This is more of a collection of poetic essays that describe what it's really like to live life as a writer, showing through metaphors from the sea, the wild landscape of the Northwest U.S., and the animal kingdom (e.g., an inchworm struggling for hours to travel from one grass blade to another) that the writing life is not all that glamorous. It's a life of sacrifice and inner struggle. The books warns you off if you are not in love with writing en...more
Charlotte
Because writing is my passion and because I retired a week ago, a friend gave me this book as a retirement gift. I was surprised to read that the author, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner hates writing. Perhaps that is because she feels she must write only books and because books take her years to write.
I hope to continue to write columns for newspapers, and articles for magazines as well as contribute to anthologies. Therefore, there will be less effort for each project, and I feel certain that...more
Colly
I remain torn about how I feel about this book - one the one hand, many of the challenges and torments that one faces after the decision to be, in whatever capacity, a writer for life appear in all their visceral glory. Dillard has a spectacular turn of phrase and frequently encapsulates the worst of what it means to be a writer. The best often gets communicated peripherally, through the mention of the cabins and locales of her writing, and the apparent ease with which she borrows cabins and cre...more
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“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.” 55 people liked it
“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.” 55 people liked it
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