"For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." —  Chicago Tribune From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a collection that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer's life. In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood —illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions. 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 "A kind of spiritual Strunk White, a small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer's task...Dillard brings the same passion and connective intelligence to this narrative as she has to her other work." - Boston Globe "For her book is...scattered with pearl. Each reader will be attracted to different bright parts...Gracefully and simply told, these little stories illuminate the writing life...Her advice to writers is encouraging and invigorating." - Cleveland Plain Dealer "For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the tirals and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." - Chicago Tribune "The Writing Life is a spare volume...that has the power and force of a detonating bomb...A book bursting with metaphors and prose bristling with incident." - Detroit News 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. Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living  and  The Maytrees . She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Writing Life By Dillard, Annie Perennial Copyright ©2004 Annie Dillard All right reserved. ISBN: 0060919884 Chapter One When you write, you lay out a line of wards. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it, digs a path you, follow. 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. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your cracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will to