The writing life
A meditative reflection in anecdote and vignette on Annie Dillard's writing process. Beautiful and vivid prose. 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.
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- 1. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
3. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White
4. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
5. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
6. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
7. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
8. The Art of Plain Talk by Rudolf Flesch
9. A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker
10. Writing Science by Joshua Schimel
- "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is her signature book and for many (myself included) a spiritual experience to read.
"The Writing Life" is the best book about the process of creating that I have ever read, and I often suggest it to my design teams. (Designers like to read books about design, but you don't hire designers because they're good at words. You want to read about creating? Read books by writers.)
One of my favorite excerpts from The Writing Life:
> 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 20 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."
- A quote I've always liked, from "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
"How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives."
- Hi. Some excellent suggestions in this thread already. Here are a few more.
1. Read great writing. If you want to write better nonfiction, read the masters of nonfiction. Michael Lewis. Tracy Kidder. Atul Gawande. Joseph Mitchell. Jon Krakauer. Christopher Hitchens. Tom Junod. If you want to write great fiction, read Murakami, Marquez, Palahniuk, Eggers, Hosseni, Oates, Atwood. (Shameless plug here, you can find stories by these folk at Byliner: http://www.byliner.com )
2. Read about writing. Some worthy books on this:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)
The Practice of Writing, by David Lodge
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, by Phillip Lopate
3. As already mentioned upthread, practice. Write something every day.
4. If you're not confident in your writing, apply your MVP lessons. Write short sentences. Use as few words as possible. Rid your sentences of adjectives and adverbs. Study your verb choices. Ditch the complex punctuation and dependent clauses. Ask yourself, What's the least amount of "writing" necessary to convey this idea or image?
5. Have fun.
- After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”
(The Writing Life by Annie Dillard)
- Writers have been despairing about writing in America for the last couple decades, maybe longer.[0] They are right to note that serious writing has been eclipsed by other media, like television, gaming, movies and the Internet.
It's hard to make a living as a writer. Lots of people want to write, but nobody owes them a living, and they end up caught between their own inclinations and an indifferent market. Most of them end up teaching to pay the rent, like Chee. (That of course is pyramid scheme, like others in academia, where teachers teach would-be teachers even though there are not enough teaching roles to go around.)
Chee has written some pretty good things.[1] He has also written some self-indulgent things, which, in my opinion, includes the essay through the link above.
Self-indulgence is one hallmark of contemporary creative non-fiction in America. It's frequently soft autobiography and banal scenes ginned up with internal melodramas. Whether or not one enjoys that is a matter of taste that we won't settle here.
Those who are put off by the self-indulgence will be less likely to read Chee in the future, which makes his expressions of despair the trigger of a vicious circle.
But Chee is not writing for a general readership here. He says he is writing for other writers, and the general readers among us just stumbled on his letter to them. Maybe it's just what they needed.
[0] Jonathan Franzen "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a reason to write novels" (Paywall) https://archive.harpers.org/1996/04/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1996... [1] Annie Dillard and the Writing Life https://themorningnews.org/article/annie-dillard-and-the-wri...
