I read Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” yesterday.
It’s great. Many times I was nodding, smiling, agreeing. It captures a lot of the craziness of sitting in a room alone for months working on a thing. In her case writing, mine too, but “writing” could mean code or non-fiction or fiction. It’s the same thing though.
It’s exhilarating!
“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 its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.”
The very next paragraph, it’s a nightmare!
“The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality.”
Then:
“Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?”
Hehe. She’s a genius.
I could quote most of the book. I won’t, but it’s great!
“This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.”
And:
“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
Yes! Yes!
“I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.”
Yes! I laughed out loud at this :) You DO have to get it just right.
The reason why this book is so marvellous is because it is full of true things. So very true.
“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
This book’s a keeper.
The reminder of urgency:
“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.”
Get to it!