Write as if No One Will Read It
May 28, 1989
Write Till You DropBy ANNIE DILLARD
eople love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves all-time, but after what he alone loves at all. Strange seizures aggress us. Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of lite; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum, Faulkner the muddy bottom of a footling girl's drawers visible when she's up a pear tree. ''Each educatee of the ferns,'' I once read, ''volition take his own list of plants that for some reason or another stir his emotions.''
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic idea you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because information technology is up to y'all. At that place is something you lot find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. Information technology is hard to explain because you have never read information technology on any page; there you begin. You lot were made and prepare hither to requite voice to this, your own astonishment.
Write as if you were dying. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of last patients. That is, later on all, the case. What would you lot begin writing if y'all knew you would die soon? What could y'all say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk-bound in Italian republic; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk-bound in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Marker Twain wrote ''Blueberry Finn'' in Hartford. Recently scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
The author studies literature, not the world. She lives in the globe; she cannot miss information technology. If she has e'er bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial aeroplane flight, she spares her readers a report of her experience. She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write. She is careful of what she learns, because that is what she will know.
The author knows her field - what has been done, what could exist done, the limits - the way a lawn tennis thespian knows the court. And like that practiced, she, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. She hits upwardly the line. In writing, she can push button the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now gingerly, can she enlarge it, tin she nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild ability?
A well-known author got collared by a academy student who asked, ''Do you think I could be a writer?''
''Well,'' the writer said, ''I don't know. . . . Do you like sentences?''
The author could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and exercise I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could brainstorm, similar a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ''I liked the odour of the paint.''
Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Vocalizer, every bit information technology happened, besides chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if y'all ask a 21-twelvemonth-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ''Nobody's.'' He has not even so understood that poets like poesy, and novelists like novels; he himself likes but the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The piece of work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their beloved and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and simply and then, the world harassed them with some sort of wretched hat, which, if they were notwithstanding living, they knocked away also every bit they could, to keep at their tasks.
It makes more sense to write one large volume - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project yous can fit or pour all you possess and larn. A project that takes 5 years will accumulate those years' inventions and richnesses. Much of those years' reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is hard whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in ''Moby-Dick.'' And then you might equally well write ''Moby-Dick.'' Similarly, since every original piece of work requires a unique form, it is more prudent to struggle with the outcome of only 1 form - that of a long work - than to struggle with the many forms of a collection.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as before long as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; information technology is why no 1 can ever write this volume. Complex stories, essays and poems accept this problem, as well - the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes information technology in spite of that. He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into sparse air and it holds. Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the author isolate and vivify all in experience that most securely engages our intellects and our hearts? Tin can the writer renew our hopes for literary forms? Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer volition magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, backbone and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we e'er know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set downwards hither bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why beloved? We still and always desire waking. If we are reading for these things, why would anyone read books with advertising slogans and brand names in them? Why would anyone write such books? Nosotros should mass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch idiot box and miss the show.
No manipulation is possible in a work of art, merely every miracle is. Those artists who dabble in eternity, or who aim never to manipulate but only to lay out difficult truths, abound accustomed to miracles. Their sureness is hard won. ''Given a large canvas,'' said Veronese, ''I enriched it as I saw fit.''
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded past dearest and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
At its best, the awareness of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you lot await for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, so - and only so -it is handed to y'all. From the corner of your eye yous meet move. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; yous can read your name on it. If information technology were a baseball game, you lot would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you come across in slow motion; its wings vanquish slowly as a hawk's.
One line of a poem, the poet said - merely one line, but thank God for that one line - drops from the ceiling. Thornton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler's hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something yous memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips abroad your breath. Yous find and finger a phrase at a fourth dimension; y'all lay information technology downward as if with tongs, restraining your strength, and wait suspended and fierce until the next one finds you: yeah, this; and yep, praise be, then this.
Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken's laying an egg: ''Kieks - auf einmal ist es da.'' Scritch - and all at once there information technology is. Of course, Einstein was not above playing to the crowd.
Push information technology. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of fine art; do not leave it, do non course over it, equally if information technology were understood, just instead follow information technology down until you see information technology in the mystery of its own specificity and strength. Giacometti's drawings and paintings show his bewilderment and persistence. If he had not acknowledged his cliffhanger, he would not accept persisted. A master of drawing, Rico Lebrun, discovered that ''the draftsman must aggress; simply by persistent set on will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line.'' Who but an artist vehement to know - not fierce to seem to know - would suppose that a live image possessed a clandestine? The creative person is willing to give all his or her force and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe whatever fashion merely with the instruments' faint tracks.
Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away.
One of the few things I know virtually writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play information technology, lose it, all, right away, every fourth dimension. Practise not hoard what seems expert for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it at present. The impulse to salve something skilful for a amend identify later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for after, something better. These things make full from behind, from below, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to continue to yourself what you accept learned is non only shameful, it is destructive. Annihilation you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You lot open up your safe and find ashes.
After Michelangelo died, someone constitute in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a notation to his amateur, in the handwriting of his old age: ''Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste product time.''
Annie Dillard'south most recent volume is ''An American Childhood.'' Her narrative, ''Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,'' won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-drop.html?_r=3
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