The Writing Life [Hardcover]

Annie Dillard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1989

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Annie Dillard has spent a lot of time in remote, bare-bones shelters doing something she claims to hate: writing. Slender though it is, The Writing Life richly conveys the torturous, tortuous, and in rare moments, transcendent existence of the writer. Even for Dillard, whose prose is so mellifluous as to seem effortless, the act of writing can seem a Sisyphean task: "When you write," she says, "you lay out a line of words.... 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." Amid moving accounts of her own writing (and life) experiences, Dillard also manages to impart wisdom to other writers, wisdom having to do with passion and commitment and taking the work seriously. "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.... Something more will arise for later, something better." And, if that is not enough, "Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients," she says. "That is, after all, the case.... What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"

This all makes The Writing Life seem a dense, tough read, but that is not the case at all. Dillard is, after all, human, just like the rest of us. During one particularly frantic moment, four cups of coffee and not much writing down, Dillard comes to a realization: "Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever." --Jane Steinberg --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

"Every morning," writes Dillard, "you enter your study . . . and slide your desk and chair into the middle of the air . . . your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair." In this collection of short essays, the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood probes the sorcery that levitates her own writing, discussing with clear eye and wry wit how, where and why she writes. Dillard invokes the places that have helped to inspire her craft: the "cinderblock cell over a parking lot" where she completed Pilgrim ; the freezing cabin on Puget Sound where she chopped firewood every day before tackling her current work-in-progress, literary criticism. She recalls the day her typewriter erupted in a shower of fire and soot, and an epic ride with a fearless stunt pilot who conducted himself with reckless imagination and superb craft, like "any fine artist." Self-aware but never self-absorbed, these luminous meditations examine an extraordinary writing life. QPBC alternate; Writer's Digest Book Club alternate.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 111 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (August 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060161566
• ISBN-13: 978-0060161569
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #648,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. 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. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refusing to be pigeon-holed, August 22, 2000

By 

Todd C. Truffin (Tiffin, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Writing Life (Paperback)

All of the negative reviews of this book I've seen so far mention that it's not a "how-to" book. Very good! You got the point. Dillard writes about writing, what it means to write, what happens when you write. Sure, there are insights into writing that others may use just as a book about someone's life might produce some insights into living. However, this book never claims and never is a "how-to" book. There are enough cheezy "here are the secrets to writing" out there; Dillard knew better than to add to the drivel. Instead she gives us a brilliant look at the life that one writer leads.

Don't judge this book for being something that it isn't. That would be like saying an orange didn't perform so well at being pasta.

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Annie Dillard gave me hope and faith, April 2, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Writing Life (Paperback)

If someone of Annie Dillard's stature can write like this while claiming to abhor the whole process, then there's hope for all of us writers. Writing is a lonely process, as I quickly learned when I began writing my memoir, Baby Catcher (Scribner 2002). It helped considerably to know that the agonizing moments I experienced while trying to craft just the right phrase, the perfect sentence, the hang-together paragraph were shared by Ms. Dillard and, by extension I suspect, most other serious writers as well.
As we authors and as-yet unpublished writers sit alone and get RST of wrists and fingers and forearms from incessant pounding of the keyboard, staring out the window at a telephone wire or a bare tree or a garage wall, it's immeasurably helpful to know that Annie Dillard is sitting in a remote cabin somewhere, doing the same thing. It makes it possible to go on and get down to the business of writing for yet another day.
Now: if only I could write as beautifully and with such seeming lack of effort as she does...

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry Avoidance and Fear, May 21, 2001

By 

Joanne Jerrell "Creative Diva" (San Diego,, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Writing Life (Paperback)

Most writers avoid writing because they are afraid. My writing career came to an abrupt pause in high school when a English teacher read my anon piece and proclaimed it poetry without an explanation. What did that mean? Annie Dillard's Writing Life speaks to the poet in me. It speaks to the writer's avoidance I see in myself and fellow writers. It talks of other writer's who have also had such difficulties. It talks about writer's writing spaces. It told me how writers that I admired were able to hold down normal jobs and still be prolific writers. I consume books about writing, this is the only book, small and sweet which spoke to my heart. I bought it because it was a book about writing, but found that it was a book about life.