Product Description
With color, irony and sensitivity, Pulitzer prize-winner Annie Dillard illuminates the dedication absurdity, and daring that is the writer's life. As it probes and exposes, examines and analyzes, The Writing Life offers deeper insight into one of the most mysterious of professions.

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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 39 reviews)

FOR DILETTANTES & DABLERS & ROD McKUEN FANS.

THE WRITING LIFE is the dregs of inspirational, self-absorbed, soul-cleansing books, HOW-TO-WRITE books. I'm stumped for anything positive to say about this book. Rod McKuen and his cat would like it? I can imagine Rod reading it to his mom and cat at tea. Herbal tea, no doubt. It wouldnt appeal to Norman Bates or his mother, though.
December 17, 2008

Excellent Book for Any Creative

The Writing Life is an excellent read not only for writers, but for anyone who creates in any medium. Fine artists, photographers, and craftspeople would all benefit from this insightful book. It is for anyone who wished to get to the marrow of their creative endeavor.
November 13, 2008

A Gem of a Book

This book is a gem - the best book I have yet had the privilege of reading about the craft of writing. When finished, you are left with a sense of many aspects of being a writer - the mystery, the satisfaction, the needed humility, the sublimity... and most of all, the work and the waiting.

Though it may seem at times that Dillard makes the craft of writing too ethereal, too abstract, this is counterbalanced by austere sensibility. Her voice, though exceptionally beautiful and intelligent, is surprisingly conversational. One feels as though she is not writing artificially.

My favorite quote from The Writing Life has to be, "Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case" (68). Though Dillard does not write from a noticeably Christian perspective, this rings true for me in so many ways, including spiritually. She says, "Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?" (72).

And just when you think she is becoming too sublime, she says something like, "It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick" (71). She has an enviable power to say things in simple, precise, but imaginative terms. Her analogies are strong and brilliant - biting at one moment, dazzling at the next. She is a master at showing instead of telling.

Full of personal anecdotes, colorful imagery, and striking insights, The Writing Life is the perfect companion for anyone who cares about giving voice to his or her way of looking at the world.
December 29, 2007

Dangerously Engaging

I recently received this book in the mail.

I opened the package and sat at my desk in my college dorm room; I had no idea what was about to happen.

The clock read 11:46 pm as I started into this short read, and I seemingly did not take a breath until I was finished with the last page over an hour later. Annie Dillard once again captured every exciting aspect of writing in one of her works, and she managed to contain it all in little over a hundred pages.

Dillard is one of the best American writers of our time, and this book proves it. It is worth ten times what you will pay for it.

If you have any passion for writing, you will love this book.
If you would like to get inside the head of the great Annie Dillard, you will love this book.

Buy it, check it out, borrow it; read it somehow.
September 13, 2007

One writer's practice and wisdom

The 'Paris Review Interviews' which were started by George Plimpton interviewed over at least two decades scores of writers on questions of their writing habits and practices. Hemingway sharpened dozens of pencils before beginning the day's work, and Faulkner told us about how he read no contemporary authors but only returned again and again to the eternal favorites to Shakespeare and Cervantes. In her essay here Annie Dillard discusses her own unique habits as a writer, and tells how she thinks about it, and practices her craft. She discusses the difficulties for her of the writing life, and the intense and painful practice of bringing work to the level she finds right. A longtime reader and interpreter of Thoreau she has something of his devotion to nature, and his solitary reflectiveness. She hears her own drummer and has beaten a path to the heart of many readers.
But every writer has of course to find their own way. So not the whole of the story but some hint or suggestion along the way might well prove useful to the many aspiring writers who might read this work.
June 24, 2007

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
by Anne Lamott

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perrennial Modern Classics)
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Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
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An American Childhood
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On Writing
by Stephen King