Lit Hub shares a few excerpts from Annie Dillard’s instructional book, The Writing Life.
In these passages, Dillard skewers the modern taste for writing excess, noting that serious works take years to write and that some of our most respected novelists completed a book only every few years.
While there are examples of writers who claim to have written classic literary works in a short time, they are few and far between. More importantly, we shouldn’t assume that the acme of productivity is average. “Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year,” Dillard wrote (in the 1980s). “Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”
“On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away,” Dillard wrote. “These truths comfort the anguished. They do not mean, by any means, that faster-written books are worse books. They just mean that most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace.”
Dillard also suggested that you should edit as you go. “The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form,” she wrote. “Any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces.”
But then, she adds that maybe you shouldn’t. “The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen,” she explained. “Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.”
