Be Specific About Books As The Writing Life
| Original Title: | The Writing Life |
| ISBN: | 0060919884 (ISBN13: 9780060919887) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Ambassador Book Award for American Arts & Letters (1990) |
Annie Dillard
Paperback | Pages: 113 pages Rating: 4.02 | 12657 Users | 1039 Reviews
Details Appertaining To Books The Writing Life
| Title | : | The Writing Life |
| Author | : | Annie Dillard |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 113 pages |
| Published | : | 1998 by Harper Perennial (HarperCollins) (first published 1989) |
| Categories | : | Language. Writing. Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Essays |
Narrative During Books The Writing Life
This is a brief yet intense essay on the art, or as Dillard would say, the burden of writing that will delight readers and aspiring writers alike.Writing is a way of life, and Dillard’s relationship with words is, to say the least, controversial.
Her lucid ponderings on the obsessive nature of those who devote their lives to squeeze the world out into sentences, limited by expression and linguistic patterns, are as petrifying as they are eye-opening.
Far from the romantic idea of a genius struck by sudden inspiration, incessantly scribbling away in otherworldly vision and transforming it into polished and clearly defined paragraphs, Dillard describes the endless struggle the writer has to undergo to put down a handful of fragmented sentences per day. The mundane is the worst enemy: constant battles against distraction, physical needs, the vertigo of a blank page or the looming weight of others’ expectations; and more philosophical dilemmas on the impossibility to capture the untainted beauty of the world of ideas into the prison of form and restrictive words, set the orbit to Dillard’s limitless universe.
And yet. And yet. Dillard uses the pen as a magician would use his wand and puts the reader under the irresistible spell of her spiritual writing. Her personal anecdotes and exquisite meditations on the implications of building one’s life around literature reminded me of great masters such as Thoreau, Julian Barnes and Rebecca Solnit, who blend autobiography with prose poetry of the finest quality.
Beauty and eloquence need not be at odds; if you think they are, please pick this short essay and be proven wrong by Dillard’s magic. Fireworks for the blind.
“I lived on the beach with one foot in fatal salt water and one foot on a billion of grains of sand. The brink of the infinite there was too like writing’s solitude. Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean or sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing.”
Rating Appertaining To Books The Writing Life
Ratings: 4.02 From 12657 Users | 1039 ReviewsCriticize Appertaining To Books The Writing Life
Beautiful essays on writing. Its not a how-to guide, but more of a metaphorical deglamorization of what it means to be a writer. The gist is that writing is agonizing work and those who are sane should probably avoid it.In her most dramatic moment, Dillard compares being a writer to being a stunt pilot. Stunt pilots write poetry in the sky with their loops and spins. The audience is amazed by this beauty and imagines how wonderful it must feel. In the cockpit, however, the pilot is experiencingEh, it was ok. Dillard describes the difficulties of writing, the long wrestling match that goes into a writer fighting with his or her subject and the way that original subjects are sometimes lost along the way in the process of writing. I could feel the amount of struggle that goes into her writing, almost in every line, and personally I feel like it saps some of the power from her work when you can almost feel that each every sentence has been crafted over and pounded into 'perfection'. There
Appreciated this little treasure every bit as much the second time around. Dillard is a miner of meaningful truths from the ordinary worldher prose is fierce, invigorating, and unrelentingly beautiful._________Original review (2013)A short, wonderful, straight-to-the-point book. Read it for sympathy in your struggles as a writer: 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
This is the first book I've read by Dillard, but it won't be the last. Her writing is forceful, muscular and insightful, and I'd love to see how that translates into her fiction. The only reason I'm giving this 4 stars instead of 5 is because I got bogged down in the last chapter about her experiences flying with the stunt pilot, which probably says much more about me than it does her. Anyone interested in knowing how a writer works and thinks should read this.
Short, quick 70-pager (at least in the version I read) that really reads like an extension of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with its tone and ample use of quotes and anecdotes. The only difference, really, is that this work focuses more (and at times less) on writing.A few things of interest: Dillard has little use for using brand names in your writing, so I guess she's of the belief that it spoils your chances for classic status when you embed stuff that is sure to become dated. She also espouses a
Tunnel through. Stretch the line to the limits of the possible. It will be hard, and it will be a torment, but that is the writing life. Its easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people arent writers, and very little harm comes to them.Julian Barnes, Flauberts ParrotThe writing life is tough and you will often hate it, but choose it if no other life will make sense.A day spent reading/writing, cooped up in this silent struggle, while life passes you by might not be considered by many as a
In this short collection of essays on craft, Dillard meditates on what it means to become a writer as well as why someone might want to write in the first place: her seven essays, read in sequence, frame the writing life as a quasi-religious vocation that demands both hard work and curiosity, daring and endurance, from those drawn to it. Dillards language is clear, her transitions smooth, her pacing swift. Her prose flows calmly from one point to the next, and her attention to detail makes the
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