essays written by annie dillard

Total Eclipse

“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

Ever since the essay was first published in 1982, readers—including this one—have thrilled to “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard’s masterpiece of literary nonfiction, which describes her personal experience of a solar eclipse in Washington State. It first appeared in Dillard’s landmark collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk , and was recently republished in The Abundance , a new anthology of her work. The Atlantic is pleased to offer the essay in full. — Ross Andersen

It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place—a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early in the next morning.

I lay in bed. My husband, Gary, was reading beside me. I lay in bed and looked at the painting on the hotel-room wall. It was a print of a detailed and lifelike painting of a smiling clown’s head, made out of vegetables. It was a painting of the sort that you do not intend to look at, and that, alas, you never forget. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember—but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel. The clown was bald. Actually, he wore a clown’s tight rubber wig, painted white; this stretched over the top of his skull, which was a cabbage. His hair was bunches of baby carrots. Inset in his white clown makeup, and in his cabbage skull, were his small and laughing human eyes. The clown’s glance was like the glance of Rembrandt in some of the self-portraits: lively, knowing, deep, and loving. The crinkled shadows around his eyes were string beans. His eyebrows were parsley. Each of his ears was a broad bean. His thin, joyful lips were red chili peppers; between his lips were wet rows of human teeth and a suggestion of a real tongue. The clown print was framed in gilt and glassed.

To put ourselves in the path of the total eclipse, that day we had driven five hours inland from the Washington coast, where we lived. When we tried to cross the Cascades range, an avalanche had blocked the pass.

A slope’s worth of snow blocked the road; traffic backed up. Had the avalanche buried any cars that morning? We could not learn. This highway was the only winter road over the mountains. We waited as highway crews bulldozed a passage through the avalanche. With two-by-fours and walls of plywood, they erected a one-way, roofed tunnel through the avalanche. We drove through the avalanche tunnel, crossed the pass, and descended several thousand feet into central Washington and the broad Yakima Valley, about which we knew only that it was orchard country. As we lost altitude, the snows disappeared; our ears popped; the trees changed, and in the trees were strange birds. I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out.

The hotel lobby was a dark, derelict room, narrow as a corridor, and seemingly without air. We waited on a couch while the manager vanished upstairs to do something unknown to our room. Beside us on an overstuffed chair, absolutely motionless, was a platinum-blond woman in her 40s wearing a black silk dress and a strand of pearls. Her long legs were crossed; she supported her head on her fist. At the dim far end of the room, their backs toward us, sat six bald old men in their shirtsleeves, around a loud television. Two of them seemed asleep. They were drunks. “Number six!” cried the man on television. “Number six!”

On the broad lobby desk, lit and bubbling, was a 10-gallon aquarium containing one large fish; the fish tilted up and down in its water. Against the long opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage. Beneath the cage, among spilled millet seeds on the carpet, were a decorated child’s sand bucket and matching sand shovel.

Now the alarm was set for six. I lay awake remembering an article I had read downstairs in the lobby, in an engineering magazine. The article was about gold mining.

In South Africa, in India, and in South Dakota, the gold mines extend so deeply into the Earth’s crust that they are hot. The rock walls burn the miners’ hands. The companies have to air-condition the mines; if the air conditioners break, the miners die. The elevators in the mine shafts run very slowly, down, and up, so the miners’ ears will not pop in their skulls. When the miners return to the surface, their faces are deathly pale.

Early the next morning we checked out. It was February 26, 1979, a Monday morning. We would drive out of town, find a hilltop, watch the eclipse, and then drive back over the mountains and home to the coast. How familiar things are here; how adept we are; how smoothly and professionally we check out! I had forgotten the clown’s smiling head and the hotel lobby as if they had never existed. Gary put the car in gear and off we went, as off we have gone to a hundred other adventures.

It was dawn when we found a highway out of town and drove into the unfamiliar countryside. By the growing light we could see a band of cirrostratus clouds in the sky. Later the rising sun would clear these clouds before the eclipse began. We drove at random until we came to a range of unfenced hills. We pulled off the highway, bundled up, and climbed one of these hills.

The hill was 500 feet high. Long winter-killed grass covered it, as high as our knees. We climbed and rested, sweating in the cold; we passed clumps of bundled people on the hillside who were setting up telescopes and fiddling with cameras. The top of the hill stuck up in the middle of the sky. We tightened our scarves and looked around.

East of us rose another hill like ours. Between the hills, far below, 13 was the highway that threaded south into the valley. This was the Yakima Valley; I had never seen it before. It is justly famous for its beauty, like every planted valley. It extended south into the horizon, a distant dream of a valley, a Shangri-la. All its hundreds of low, golden slopes bore orchards. Among the orchards were towns, and roads, and plowed and fallow fields. Through the valley wandered a thin, shining river; from the river extended fine, frozen irrigation ditches. Distance blurred and blued the sight, so that the whole valley looked like a thickness or sediment at the bottom of the sky. Directly behind us was more sky, and empty lowlands blued by distance, and Mount Adams. Mount Adams was an enormous, snow-covered volcanic cone rising flat, like so much scenery.

Now the sun was up. We could not see it; but the sky behind the band of clouds was yellow, and, far down the valley, some hillside orchards had lit up. More people were parking near the highway and climbing the hills. It was the West. All of us rugged individualists were wearing knit caps and blue nylon parkas. People were climbing the nearby hills and setting up shop in clumps among the dead grasses. It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day. It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in a ring. There was no place out of the wind. The straw grasses banged our legs.

Up in the sky where we stood, the air was lusterless yellow. To the west the sky was blue. Now the sun cleared the clouds. We cast rough shadows on the blowing grass; freezing, we waved our arms. Near the sun, the sky was bright and colorless. There was nothing to see.

It began with no ado. It was odd that such a well advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.

I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it. During a partial eclipse the sky does not darken—not even when 94 percent of the sun is hidden. Nor does the sun, seen colorless through protective devices, seem terribly strange. We have all seen a sliver of light in the sky; we have all seen the crescent moon by day. However, during a partial eclipse the air does indeed get cold, precisely as if someone were standing between you and the fire. And blackbirds do fly back to their roosts. I had seen a partial eclipse before, and here was another.

What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and 15 years, we still could not figure out which way to set the clocks for daylight saving time. Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you. But during an eclipse it is easy. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.

You may read that the moon has something to do with eclipses. I have never seen the moon yet. You do not see the moon. So near the sun, it is as completely invisible as the stars are by day. What you see before your eyes is the sun going through phases. It gets narrower and narrower, as the waning moon does, and, like the ordinary moon, it travels alone in the simple sky. The sky is of course background. It does not appear to eat the sun; it is far behind the sun. The sun simply shaves away; gradually, you see less sun and more sky.

The sky’s blue was deepening, but there was no darkness. The sun was a wide crescent, like a segment of tangerine. The wind freshened and blew steadily over the hill. The eastern hill across the highway grew dusky and sharp. The towns and orchards in the valley to the south were dissolving into the blue light. Only the thin river held a trickle of sun.

Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The alpenglow is that red light of sunset that holds out on snowy mountaintops long after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.

I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal that the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.

I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist’s version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day. My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. Gary was light-years away, gesturing inside a circle of darkness, down the wrong end of a telescope. He smiled as if he saw me; the stringy crinkles around his eyes moved. The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: Yes, that is the way he used to look, when we were living. When it was our generation’s turn to be alive. I could not hear him; the wind was too loud. Behind him the sun was going. We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was pleasant; now there was no stopping it. Gary was chuting away across space, moving and talking and catching my eye, chuting down the long corridor of separation. The skin on his face moved like thin bronze plating that would peel.

The grass at our feet was wild barley. It was the wild einkorn wheat that grew on the hilly flanks of the Zagros Mountains, above the Euphrates valley, above the valley of the river we called River. We harvested the grass with stone sickles, I remember. We found the grasses on the hillsides; we built our shelter beside them and cut them down. That is how he used to look then, that one, moving and living and catching my eye, with the sky so dark behind him, and the wind blowing. God save our life.

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lit from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.

It is now that the temptation is strongest to leave these regions. We have seen enough; let’s go. Why burn our hands any more than we have to? But two years have passed; the price of gold has risen. I return to the same buried alluvial beds and pick through the strata again.

I saw, early in the morning, the sun diminish against a backdrop of sky. I saw a circular piece of that sky appear, suddenly detached, blackened, and backlit; from nowhere it came and overlapped the sun. It did not look like the moon. It was enormous and black. If I had not read that it was the moon, I could have seen the sight a hundred times and never thought of the moon once. (If, however, I had not read that it was the moon—if, like most of the world’s people throughout time, I had simply glanced up and seen this thing—then I doubtless would not have speculated much, but would have, like Emperor Louis of Bavaria in 840, simply died of fright on the spot.) It did not look like a dragon, although it looked more like a dragon than the moon. It looked like a lens cover, or the lid of a pot. It materialized out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in flame.

Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them further over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether that buoys the rest, that gives goodness its power for good, and evil. Its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for one another, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

The world that lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.

You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card. I assure you, if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three-by-three photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid. More fearsome things can come in envelopes. More moving photographs than those of the sun’s corona can appear in magazines. But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky.

You see the wide world swaddled in darkness; you see a vast breadth of hilly land, and an enormous, distant, blackened valley; you see towns’ lights, a river’s path, and blurred portions of your hat and scarf; you see your husband’s face looking like an early black-and-white film; and you see a sprawl of black sky and blue sky together, with unfamiliar stars in it, some barely visible bands of cloud, and over there, a small white ring. The ring is as small as one goose in a flock of migrating geese—if you happen to notice a flock of migrating geese. It is one-360th part of the visible sky. The sun we see is less than half the diameter of a dime held at arm’s length.

The Crab Nebula, in the constellation Taurus, looks, through binoculars, like a smoke ring. It is a star in the process of exploding. Light from its explosion first reached the Earth in 1054; it was a supernova then, and so bright it shone in the daytime. Now it is not so bright, but it is still exploding. It expands at the rate of 70 million miles a day. It is interesting to look through binoculars at something expanding 70 million miles a day. It does not budge. Its apparent size does not increase. Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken 15 years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday. Some lichens are similar. Botanists have measured some ordinary lichens twice, at 50-year intervals, without detecting any growth at all. And yet their cells divide; they live.

The small ring of light was like these things—like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, like a perfectly still explosion 4,200 light-years away: It was interesting, and lovely, and in witless motion, and it had nothing to do with anything.

It had nothing to do with anything. The sun was too small, and too cold, and too far away, to keep the world alive. The white ring was not enough. It was feeble and worthless. It was as useless as a memory; it was as off-kilter and hollow and wretched as a memory.

When you try your hardest to recall someone’s face, or the look of a place, you see in your mind’s eye some vague and terrible sight such as this. It is dark; it is insubstantial; it is all wrong.

The white ring and the saturated darkness made the Earth and the sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. With great effort we had remembered some sort of circular light in the sky—but only the outline. Oh, and then the orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid down the valleys and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been people on Earth, nobody knew it. The dead had forgotten those they had loved. The dead were parted one from the other and could no longer remember the faces and lands they had loved in the light. They seemed to stand on darkened hilltops, looking down.

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add—until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.

I do not know how we got to the restaurant. Like Roethke, “I take my waking slow.” Gradually I seemed more or less alive, and already forgetful. It was now almost 9 in the morning. It was the day of a solar eclipse in central Washington, and a fine adventure for everyone. The sky was clear; there was a fresh breeze out of the north.

The restaurant was a roadside place with tables and booths. The other eclipse-watchers were there. From our booth we could see their cars’ California license plates, their University of Washington parking stickers. Inside the restaurant we were all eating eggs or waffles; people were fairly shouting and exchanging enthusiasms, like fans after a World Series game. Did you see ... ? Did you see ... ? Then somebody said something that knocked me for a loop.

A college student, a boy in a blue parka who carried a Hasselblad, said to us, “Did you see that little white ring? It looked like a Life Saver. It looked like a Life Saver up in the sky.”

And so it did. The boy spoke well. He was a walking alarm clock. I myself had at that time no access to such a word. He could write a sentence, and I could not. I grabbed that Life Saver and rode it to the surface. And I had to laugh. I had been dumbstruck on the Euphrates River, I had been dead and gone and grieving, all over the sight of something that, if you could claw your way up to that level, you would grant looked very much like a Life Saver. It was good to be back among people so clever; it was good to have all the world’s words at the mind’s disposal, so the mind could begin its task. All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.

There are a few more things to tell from this level, the level of the restaurant. One is the old joke about breakfast. “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Wallace Stevens wrote that, and in the long run he was right. The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

Further: While the mind reels in deep space, while the mind grieves or fears or exults, the workaday senses, in ignorance or idiocy, like so many computer terminals printing out market prices while the world blows up, still transcribe their little data and transmit them to the warehouse in the skull. Later, under the tranquilizing influence of fried eggs, the mind can sort through the data. The restaurant was a halfway house, a decompression chamber. There I remembered a few things more.

The deepest, and most terrifying, was this: I have said that I heard screams. (I have since read that screaming, with hysteria, is a common reaction even to expected total eclipses.) People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, that made us scream.

The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves at 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.

This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?

Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow cone sped away. It coursed down our hill and raced eastward over the plain, faster than the eye could believe; it swept over the plain and dropped over the planet’s rim in a twinkling. It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth’s face.

Something else, something more ordinary, came back to me along about the third cup of coffee. During the moments of totality, it was so dark that drivers on the highway below turned on their cars’ headlights. We could see the highway’s route as a strand of lights. It was bumper-to-bumper down there. It was 8:15 in the morning, Monday morning, and people were driving into Yakima to work. That it was as dark as night, and eerie as hell, an hour after dawn apparently meant that in order to see to drive to work, people had to use their headlights. Four or five cars pulled off the road. The rest, in a line at least five miles long, drove to town. The highway ran between hills; the people could not have seen any of the eclipsed sun at all. Yakima will have another total eclipse in 2086. Perhaps, in 2086, businesses will give their employees an hour off.

From the restaurant we drove back to the coast. The highway crossing the Cascades range was open. We drove over the mountain like old pros. We joined our places on the planet’s thin crust; it held. For the time being, we were home free.

Early that morning at six, when we had checked out, the six bald men were sitting on folding chairs in the dim hotel lobby. The television was on. Most of them were awake. You might drown in your own spittle, God knows, at any time; you might wake up dead in a small hotel, a cabbage head watching TV while snows pile up in the passes, watching TV while the chili peppers smile and the moon passes over the sun and nothing changes and nothing is learned because you have lost your bucket and shovel and no longer care. What if you regain the surface and open your sack and find, instead of treasure, a beast that jumps at you? Or you may not come back at all. The winches may jam, the scaffolding buckle, the air-conditioning collapse. You may glance up one day and see by your headlamp the canary keeled over in its cage. You may reach into a cranny for pearls and touch a moray eel. You yank on your rope; it is too late.

Apparently people share a sense of these hazards, for when the total eclipse ended, an odd thing happened.

When the sun appeared as a blinding bead on the ring’s side, the eclipse was over. The black lens cover appeared again, backlit, and slid away. At once the yellow light made the sky blue again; the black lid dissolved and vanished. The real world began there. I remember now: We all hurried away. We were born and bored at a stroke. We rushed down the hill. We found our car; we saw the other people streaming down the hillsides; we joined the highway traffic and drove away.

We never looked back. It was a general vamoose, and an odd one, for when we left the hill, the sun was still partially eclipsed—a sight rare enough, and one which, in itself, we would probably have driven five hours to see. But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

This post is excerpted from Dillard’s book The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New . Copyright © 2016 by Annie Dillard. Published by arrangement with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Author interview: annie dillard, author of 'the abundance'.

NPR's Melissa Block asks Annie Dillard about the celebrated author's "masculine mind," her decision to write less, and her baseball skills. Dillard's new collection of essays is called The Abundance.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945, Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , U.S.) is an American writer best known for her meditative essays on the natural world.

Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia (B.A., 1967; M.A., 1968). She was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham from 1975 to 1978 and on the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown , Connecticut, from 1980 to 2002, when she retired as professor emerita.

Dillard’s first published book was a collection of poetry , Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974). It was as an essayist, however, that she earned critical as well as popular acclaim. In her Pulitzer Prize -winning collection Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), she distilled from keen observations of her own habitat the essential enigmas of religious mysticism. Critics hailed the work as an American original in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau ’s Walden . Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) explore similar themes. Living by Fiction (1982), Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984), and The Writing Life (1989) present her views of literary craftsmanship and the writer’s role in society.

Dillard published an autobiographical narrative, An American Childhood, in 1987. When her first novel , The Living, appeared in 1992, reviewers found in its depictions of the logging culture of the turn-of-the-20th-century Pacific Northwest the same visionary realism that distinguished the author’s nonfiction. The Annie Dillard Reader was published in 1994 and Mornings Like This: Found Poems arrived in 1995. For the Time Being (1999) presents Dillard’s wide-ranging reflections on, among other subjects, the meaning of suffering and death and the nature of God. The novel The Maytrees (2007) takes as its subjects Lou and Toby Maytree, a married couple living on Cape Cod . The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New was released in 2016.

Dillard received the National Humanities Medal from U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015.

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Official website, scholarly work on annie dillard.

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Gaskins, Jacob C. "'Julie Norwich' and Julian of Norwich: Notes and a Query." Fourteenth Century English Mystics Newsletter, 1980.

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Ronda, Bruce A. "Annie Dillard and the Fire of God." Christian Century 100 (1983).

Ronda, Bruce A. "Annie Dillard's Fictions to Live By," Christian Century 101 (1984).

Lavery, David. [Review essay, Living by Fiction, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Encounters with Chinese Writers .]? Religion and Literature 17 (Summer, 1985): 61-68.

McConahay, Mary Davidson. "Into the Bladelike Arms of God: The Quest for Meaning Through Symbolic Language in Thoreau and Annie Dillard." Denver Quarterly 20 (Fall, 1985), 103-116.

Peterson, Eugene H. "Annie Dillard: Praying With Her Eyes Open." TSF Bulletin January/February 1985: 7-11.

Peterson, Eugene H. "Annie Dillard: With Her Eyes Open." Theology Today (July, 1986): 178-191.

Zeiger, William. "The Exploratory Essay: Enfranchising the Spirit of Inquiry in College Composition." College English 47 (September, 1985): 454-466.

Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature . Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Chapter 7: "Structures of Evolving Consciousness" (Peter Matthiessen and Annie Dillard), 161-184.

Werge, Thomas. "Mixed Metaphors in a Brave New World: American Writers and Nature." Notre Dame Magazine , Spring, 1986.

McIlroy, Gary. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Social Legacy of Walden." South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 85, No. 2 (Spring, 1986).

McIlroy, Gary. "The Sparer Climate for Which I Longed: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Spiritual Imperatives of Fall." The Thoreau Quarterly , Vol. 16, Nos. 3 & 4 (Summer, Fall, 1986).

Robbins, Lois B. "Annie Dillard: Twentieth Century Anchorite." Unpublished Master's thesis, Mundelein College.

Premer, Julie Parmenter. "A Bibliography of Writings By and About Annie Dillard for the Years 1968-1985." Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Missouri, 1986.

Aton, James. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.

Hamer, Mike. Unpublished master's thesis.

Chenetier, Marc. "Intertext Intersects Intersex: 'Tinkering Extravagance': Herman Melville, Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard." English Department Lecture Series, University of Virginia, April 2, 1987.

McIlroy, Gary. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Burden of Science," American Literature Vol. 59, No. 1 (March 1987)

John E. Becker, "Science and the Sacred, from Walden to Tinker Creek," Thought Vol. 62, (December, 1987).

Marc Chenetier, Au-dela du soupcon: La Nouvelle Fiction Americaine de 1960 a nos jours . Seuil: Paris, 1989 (eleven citations).

Detweiler, Robert. Breaking the Fall: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction (Harper & Row, 1989)

Helmut Schreier, "Sternstunden der Sach-Ehfahrung: Adolph Portmann, Annie Dillard, and Elias Canetti," Grundschule , Marz, 1990. (Frankfurt)

Johnson, Sandra Humble. "An American Childhood" (long review essay), Mid-American Review Vol. VIII, No. 2.

Ryan, Kay. "Flying," (long review essay), Threepenny Review (Summer, 1988).

Robert Paul Dunn. "The Artist as Nun: Theme, Tone and Vision in The Writings of Annie Dillard," (printed somewhere, as I have an offprint, but it doesn't say where).

Chenetier, Marc. "Les Femmes Ecrivains aux Etas-Unis," Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines , November, 1986.

Carrol, Jill. "An Invitation from Silence: Annie Dillard's use of the Mystical Concepts of Via Positiva and Via Negativa." Delivered at Midwest Conference on Christianity and Literature, Concordia College, 1988.

Hawkins, Peter, Yale Divinity School. "Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Midstream," The Christian Century ?Vol. 106, No. 19 (June 7-14, 1989).

Fritzell, Peter A. "Composition and Decomposition at Tinker Creek," one of three parts of Nature Writing and America: Essays on a Cultural Type . Iowa State University Press, 1990.

Chenetier, Marc. "The Beagle sails again: Darwinism revisited in contemporary American fiction," a paper presented at the bi-annual conference of the European Association for American Studies in London, 1990. (Pages 19-25, the last six pages, are on "An Expedition to the Pole," an essay.)

Felch, Susan M. "Annie Dillard: Modern Physics in a Contemporary Mystic." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature Spring, 1989; 22 (2): 1-14.

Messer, Richard. "The Spiritual Quest in Two Works by Annie Dillard," in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 9.3,4 (1988): 321-330.

Eugene H. Pattison, "The Great Lakes Childhood: The Experience of William Dean Howells and Annie Dillard," The Old Northwest (Miami Univ., Ohio) Vol 14, No. 4 (Winter 89- 90). pp 311-329.

Ihab Hassan, Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), chapter 5, "Faces of Quest: Fact."

Barbara Currier Bell, "Entering Nature," a series of 4 talks in Connecticut libraries--D., Edward Abbey, Lewis Thomas, Barry Lopez

Pascale-Laurence Poulain, Memoire de Maitrise: Figures of Repetition in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. University of Tours, unpublished master's thesis, 1991, 130pp.

Clark, Suzanne, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word . Bloomington, 1991.

Clark, Suzanne, "The Woman in Nature and the Subject of Nonfiction," chapter 6, pp. 107-124 of Chris Anderson, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy . Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Goldman, Stan, "Sacrifices to the Hidden God: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Leviticus," Soundings , (Spring/Summer 1991).

Ross-Bryant, Lynn. "The Silence of Nature." Religion and Literature , 1990.

Chenetier, Marc. "Tinkering, Extravagance: Thoreau, Melville, and Annie Dillard." Critique , 1990.

Slanger, George. "Going at your Life with a Broadax: An Open Letter to Annie Dillard," Maryland English Journal , 1989.

Cheney, Jim. "The Waters of Separation: Myth and Ritual in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Spring, 1990)

Davis, William Paul. "The 'Lords' and 'Witnesses' of Creation: Mythologizing and Demythologizing Nature in American Literature." Dissertation, 1990.

Anderson, Br. Jude, O.S.B. "The Artistic Insight as an Experience with the God in the Writings of Annie Dillard." Unpublished master's thesis.

Chenetier, Marc. "The Beagle Sails Again: Darwinism Revisited in Contemporary American Fiction" Victorianism in the United States, Amsterdam , 1992. Also presented as a paper at the Association for American Studies in London, 1990. (The last 6 pages are on "An Expedition to the Pole," an essay.)

Terri Brown-Davidson, "Choosing the Given with a Fierce and Pointed Will": Annie Dillard and Risk-Taking in Contemporary Literature." The Hollins Critic , April, 1993

Anhorn, Judy Schaaf. "Lines of Sight: Annie Dillard's Purified Nonfiction Narration." Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian, and European Literature : 1945-1985. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988. (Yugoslavia)

Hesse, Douglas, "A Boundary-Zone: First-Person Short Stories and Narrative Essays." Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Short Story Theory ?at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. 1989. 85-105.

Matiko, Beverly. Fictionalizing the Audience in Literary Nonfiction: A Study of the Essays of Annie Dillard and Lewis Thomas . Diss. Edmonton, University of Alberta. Fall, 1991.

Balzer, Cam (Mr.). "Annie Dillard's Aesthetic of Sojourning." Master's thesis (unusually good), University of Alberta, 1993.

Masten, Laurie Senteney, unpublished master's thesis on Holy the Firm, Yale Divinity School.

Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez . Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1992.

O'Neill, Samuel, "The Mystic Way in Two Works by Annie Dillard." Master's thesis, Georgetown University, 1993

Bischoff, Joan. "Fellow Rebels: Annie Dillard and Maxine Hong Kingston." The English Journal ? (Urbana, IL). 1989 Dec; 78 (8):62-67.

Albin, C.D. "A Ray of Relation: Transcendental Echoes in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas . Oct, 1992; 23:17- 31.

Albin, C.D., "What the Living Know in Bellingham Bay," Christian Century , Oct 7, 1992

McClintock, Nature's Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder . University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Werkenthin, Karen. "Following the Paths of Thoreau and Dillard."? English Journal , October, 1992.

Barlow, Connie. Evolution Extended: Biological Debates on the Meaning of Life . Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994. (2 poems.)

Barlow, Connie. "Songs That Science Gives Us." Anima , Vol 20, No. 2 (Spring, 1994). (2 poems.)

Krasner, James. The Entangled Eye: Visual perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative . Oxford UP, 1992.

Tracy, Sharon. "Narrative Collage in Three Works by Annie Dillard." Master's thesis, Univ. of Minnesota

Webb, Stephen H. "Nature's Spendthrift Economy: The Extravagance of God in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." Soundings , vol LXXVII, #3-4, (Fall/Winter, 1994

Jones, Nancy Badgley. "Annie Dillard''s Childhood Reading," unpublished master's thesis, 1994, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Poulain, Pascale. "Between Style and Voice: Annie Dillard's Hermeneutic Oscillations." G.R.A.A.T No. 12, University of Tours, 1994

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination . Harvard, 1995. 30 citations and a separate treatment.

Mendelson, Donna. "Tinker Creek and the Waters of Walden: Thoreauvian Currents in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim." The Concord Saunterer , Fall, 1995.

Smith, Pamela A., "The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard: A Study in Ambivalence". Crosscurrents , Fall 1995.

Balzer, Cam (Mr.). "Dispatches from the Ontological Frontiers Annie Dillard's Magic Realist Essay." Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin College, 1996

Carroll, B. Jill. "The Savage Side: Reclaiming Violent Models of God," unpublished dissertation, Rice University.

Scheper, Dianne Ganz. "Dillard's Wild Wonder: a 'Gift from the Hasidim." Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin College, 1996

Ralston, Patricia. "Annie Dillard: Praise in Paradox." Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin College, 1996

Pattison, Eugene. "Strangers and Sojourners Toward Home: Terror and Hope in Life and Death." Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin College, 1996

Stephenson, Will and Mimosa. "Annie Dillard's 'Aces and Eights': Variations on a Theme by E.B. White." Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin College, 1996

Stephenson, Will. "God, Annie Dillard, and Environmental Writing." Faith and Writing, Calvin College, 1996

Pattison, Eugene H. "God and Humanity at Continent's Western Edge: Robinson Jeffers and Annie Dillard." Alma College, Alma, Michigan, 1995

Wagge, Frederick G. "Alter and Dillard: The Appalachian Universe" (source unknown.)

The New Religious Humanists: A Reader, by Gregory Wolfe, The Free Press , Simon & Schuster, 1997. (first chapter from Holy the Firm)

Schlosser, Stephen, S.J., "Faces Burning in Annie Dillard and Georges Rouault: Irony, Hope, and 20th-century Catholic Imagination" (dept of History, Stanford); paper given at Chreighton University Nov 10, 97 annual public lecture

Elliott, Sandra Stahlman, "The Mysticism of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" http://www.well.com/user/elliott/smse_dillard.html

Park von Wust, Sommerschule Wust, Landkreis Sendal, Germany. July 23, "Annie Dillard als Beobachterin der Natur." Vortrag mit einer Lesung aus Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Barbara Gordon of Arizona State Univ, paper delivered summer 98

Bayerische Akademie der Schonen Kunste, Barbara von Wulfen and Richard Exner, "Excurse zur Aufmerkamseit Annie Dillard: American Naturalist." 2 April, 98

Smith, Pamela A., "The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard: A Study in Ambivalence". Crosscurrents , Fall 1995. (Forget eco-anything)

Albanese, Catherine, Nature Religion in America 1998

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (Dutch, publishes in English), Reflections on New Age and the Secularisation of Nature , Edinburgh Univ Press and SUNY Press 1998

Wulffen, Barbara, "Erhohte Aufmerksamkeit: Uber die Gesichten und Ansichten der Annie Dillard," in Scheidewege: Jahres- schrift fur skeptisches Denken , Sonderdruck, Jahrgang 28, 1998/99

Haas, David, "A Synthesis of Experience: Elements of Irenaean Theodicy in Two Works by Annie Dillard." M.A. thesis, Georgetown University, 1998. This is really good.

Gordon, Barbara, a paper delivered somewhere and printed

Kesegich, Amy, "Pilgrim in Progress: The Works of Annie Dillard as Spiritual Autobiography," dissertation, Case Western Reserve

Papa, James A., Jr., "Water-Signs: Place and Metaphor in Dillard and Thoreau" in Thoreau's Sense of Place , ed. Richard J. Schneider, Univ. of Iowa Press, 2000

Chirban, Sharon. "Expanding the Psychoanalytic Air We Breathe: A Study of Oneness through the Eyes of Rilke and Dillard," (Unknown) American Psychoanalytic Conference 2001

Code, Murray, "Interpreting `The Raw Universe': Meaning and Metaphysical Imaginaries," Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society , Fall, 1999, Vol XXXV, No.4

Feldman, Susan, "If I Could Tell You," review essay, Northwest Review , Vol 39, No. 1, January, 2001.

Wolfe, Gregory, Stalking the Spirit, (about Dillard and Hopkins), commencement address Seattle Pacific University MFA, Aug 7, 2010 and adapted and reprinted?as editorial statement in Image, No. 67 , p. 3 ff, Fall, 2010

Spring, 2016 - The Atlantic, Harper's, Poets & Writers, Image, and other places ran long review essays of much of the work.

Dedicated Books

Smith, Linda L. Annie Dillard (Twayne U.S. Authors Series), N.Y., 1991.

Johnson, Sandra Humble. The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard . Kent State University Press, 1992. (Book, formerly dissertation.)

Parrish, Nancy. Lee Smith, Annie Dillard and the Hollins Group, LSU Press, spring 98

There are many more, and more recent, books and papers and theses; I lost track. See the list that Yale's Beinecke Library has under my name.

The Writing Life

43 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard is a work of creative nonfiction and memoir originally published in 1989 by Harper & Row. As a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Dillard explores the triumphs and struggles of her early writing years while also offering advice and guidance to aspiring writers through imaginative anecdotes. Dillard has called the work “an embarrassing nonfiction narrative ,” and she distances herself from all but the final chapter about the pilot, Dave Rahm . This guide follows the first edition Harper Perennial paperback, published in 1990.

Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . She has written works of nonfiction, fiction, and collections of poetry, some of which have been translated into 10 languages. Other works by Dillard include Total Eclipse , An American Childhood , and Holy the Firm .

Dillard begins The Writing Life with general observations about writing through the lens of “you,” the reader and aspiring writer. Through this perspective , she explains the momentum of a first draft and the necessity of courage during the editing process. She quotes some notable authors, like Henry David Thoreau and Henry James, and analyzes others, like Gustave Flaubert, for their writing speed. Dillard mathematically breaks down how long it takes Flaubert to write a full-length book to comfort those who worry about their lack of progress. Throughout these analyses, she implores novice writers to not limit which ideas they pursue and to follow their ideas to the absolute limits.

Dillard moves into several descriptions of her different workspaces and discusses the importance of isolation for the writing task. Dillard explores the internal world of the writer, illustrating how quickly a writer can become lost in their imagination through humorous anecdotes about her long nights of writing. She catalogues a variety of writing schedules, but she does not promote one over the other; any routine, she argues, diminishes the chaos of a self-directed day. Dillard then examines how much energy a writer expends on simply finding the drive to write each day. She illustrates the dejection a writer might feel when the finished product doesn’t live up to the mental vision. She depicts her own exhaustion and antagonistic relationship with writing through a vision of her typewriter exploding.

Next, Dillard investigates where and how writers find inspiration for subject matter. Stories are always particular to a writer’s own passions and observations, but they can also be inspired by the work of others. Dillard uses notable authors to exemplify the need for continual learning in the field of literature, and she advises writers to unabashedly imitate and expand upon their idols’ works. Dillard suggests writers should aim for book-length projects and should avoid inclusions of commercial brands purely for societal representation. Dillard reminisces on interactions with neighbors that made her examine why she writes when it is so agonizing. She ultimately declares that because she can endure the writing life, she cannot imagine another way to live.

Near the end of the book, Dillard delves deeper into her feelings about Lummi Island, where she spent many summers writing. The vastness and harshness of the island forever alter Dillard’s outlook on the world. This perspective always seeps into her work, despite her best efforts to keep it out. Dillard ends The Writing Life with a chapter dedicated to the late stunt pilot, Dave Rahm. In detail, she expresses her awe of his aviation performances. She once flew above the Cascades Range with Rahm, and she praises his skill, dedication, and fearlessness in such a dangerous profession. Dillard ends the book by honoring Dave Rahm and venerating him as an artist who followed his work to the absolute limits.

Related Titles

By Annie Dillard

An American Childhood

For the Time Being

Holy the Firm

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Teaching a Stone to Talk

Total Eclipse

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The Writing Life Paperback – November 12, 2013

"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.

• Print length 111 pages
• Language English
• Publication date November 12, 2013
• Dimensions 5.31 x 0.29 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0060919884
• ISBN-13 978-0060919887
• Lexile measure 880L
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

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

From Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The writing life.

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 toss it all and not look back. The line of words is a hammer: You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years' attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck. Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bake reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start, over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter hogi excellent in themselves 'or hard-won. You can waste a' year worrying about it; or you can get it over with now. (Are you awoman, or a mouse?) The part you must jettison is riot only the bestwritten part; it is also; oddly, that part'which was to have been the very' point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang; and from which you'yourself drew the courage to begin. Henry James knew it well, and said it best. In his preface to The Spoilt of Poynton, he pities the writer, in a comical pair of sentences that rises to a howl: "Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done, doesn't he ask himself what has become of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to proceed to that ektremity?"  So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. '"The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon," Thoreau noted mournfully, "or perchance a palace or temple on the earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them." The writer returns to these materials, these passionate subjects, as to unfinished business, for they are his life's work.

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere, in the work's middle, and hardens toward the end. The earlier version remains lumpishly on the left; the work's beginning greets the reader with the wrong hand.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (November 12, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 111 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060919884
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060919887
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 880L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.52 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.29 x 8 inches
• #179 in Essays (Books)
• #179 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)
• #195 in Author Biographies

About the author

Annie dillard.

Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. 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. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.

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Customers find the book inspirational for any creative endeavor. They say it's full of striking metaphors and sharp images. Readers also mention it stirs deep thoughts and is a fascinating autobiography that reveals the inner life of a writer. Additionally, they say the observations are profound and the wisdom is applicable.

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Annie Dillard on How Writers Learn to Trust Instinct

“original writing fashions a form.”.

The following is excerpted from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here .

To comfort friends discouraged by their writing pace, you could offer them this:

It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books?

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. 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.

Graham Greene noticed that since a novel “takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man at the end of the book as he was at the beginning… as though [the novel] were something he had begun in childhood and was finishing now in old age.” The long poem, John Berryman said, takes between five and ten years. Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year, for he did write every day—a good-sized book a year. At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific literary writers who ever lived. Flaubert wrote steadily, with only the usual, appalling, strains. For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years. If a full-time writer averages a book every five years, that makes seventy-three usable pages a year, or a usable fifth of a page a day. The years that biographers and other nonfiction writers spend amassing and mastering materials match the years novelists and short story writers spend fabricating solid worlds that answer to immaterial truths. 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. 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.

Octavio Paz cites the example of Saint-Pol Roux, who used to hang the inscription ‘The poet is working’ from his door while he slept.”

The notion that one can write better during one season of the year than another Samuel Johnson labeled, “Imagination operating upon luxury.” Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

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. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; 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. The strain, like Giacometti’s penciled search for precision and honesty, enlivens the work and impels it toward its truest end. A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope, too; his pride emboldens and impels him. One Washington writer—Charlie Butts—so prizes momentum, and so fears self-consciousness, that he writes fiction in a rush of his own devising. He leaves his house on distracting errands, hurries in the door, and without taking off his coat, sits at a typewriter and retypes in a blur of speed all of the story he has written to date. Impetus propels him to add another sentence or two before he notices he is writing and seizes up. Then he leaves the house and repeats the process; he runs in the door and retypes the entire story, hoping to squeeze out another sentence the way some car engines turn over after the ignition is off, or the way Warner Bros.’ Wile E. Coyote continues running for several yards beyond the edge of a cliff, until he notices.

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. 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.

Fiction writers who toss up their arms helplessly because their characters “take over”—powerful rascals, what is a god to do?—refer, I think, to these structural mysteries that seize any serious work, whether or not it possesses fifth-column characters who wreak havoc from within. Sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away. The writer cannot force it back into place. It wanders off to die.

The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament.

The line of words is heading out past Jupiter this morning. Traveling 150 kilometers a second, it makes no sound. The big yellow planet and its white moons spin. The line of words speeds past Jupiter and its cumbrous, dizzying orbit; it looks neither to the right nor to the left. It will be leaving the solar system soon, single-minded, rapt, rushing heaven like a soul. You are in Houston, Texas, watching the monitor. You saw a simulation: the line of words waited still, hushed, pointed with longing. The big yellow planet spun toward it like a pitched ball and passed beside it, low and outside. Jupiter was so large, the arc of its edge at the screen’s bottom looked flat. The probe twined on; its wild path passed between white suns small as dots; these stars fell away on either side, like the lights on a tunnel’s walls.

Now you watch symbols move on your monitor; you stare at the signals the probe sends back, transmits in your own tongue, numbers. Maybe later you can guess at what they mean—what they might mean about space at the edge of the solar system, or about your instruments. Right now, you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.

__________________________________

From THE WRITING LIFE . Copyright © 1989 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted here with permission from Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Annie Dillard on Writing

By maria popova.

From Annie Dillard’ s timelessly wonderful The Writing Life ( public library ) — which also gave us her vital reminder that presence rather than productivity is the key to living richly and her meditation on what a stunt pilot teaches us about creativity and the meaning of life — comes her infinitely resonant insight on the magic and materiality of writing, a fine addition to famous writers’ collected wisdom on the craft .

Dillard begins:

When you write, you lay out a line of words. 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 tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

Dillard examines the necessary casualties of the writing process and how it differs from other art:

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere in the work’s middle, and hardens toward the end. The earlier version remains lumpishly on the left; the work’s beginning greets the reader with the wrong hand. In those early pages and chapters anyone may find bold leaps to nowhere, read the brave beginnings of dropped themes, hear a tone since abandoned, discover blind alleys, track red herrings, and laboriously learn a setting now false.

She later considers both sides of whether or not to edit in stride:

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. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; 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. […] 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. 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.

“Be merciless on yourself. If a sentence does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way,” Kurt Vonnegut admonished in his eight keys to the power of the written word , “scratch it out.” Dillard puts it even more beautifully: In a testament to the notion that creativity is subtraction , she considers the enormous act of courage that self-editing requires:

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?

At the same time, writing a book requires enormous structural craftsmanship and logical stamina, a failure of either of which could produce what we often call creative block . But Dillard proposes a strategy for diverting disaster:

When you are stuck in a book; when you are well into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet cannot go on; when every morning for a week or a month you enter its room and turn your back on it; then the trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly split it up the middle — or you are approaching a fatal mistake. What you had planned will not do. If you pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite. […] What do you do? Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing. Lay out the structure you already have, x-ray it for a hairline fracture, find it, and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble problem. Or subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.

Like many celebrated writers, Dillard recognizes how vital a daily routine or daily ritual is in lubricating the machinery of this painstaking process:

Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee. Then, wincing, you step out again through the French doors and sit down on the chair and look over the desktop. You can see clear to the river from here in winter. You pour yourself a cup of coffee. Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples’ crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

But beneath this magic lies a subtle recognition of its necessary dark side:

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. . . . The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality.

In fact, echoing Tchaikovsky’s wisdom on work ethic , Dillard admonishes against this precious solipsism of the writer’s world:

The notion that one can write better during one season of the year than another Samuel Johnson labeled, “Imagination operating upon luxury.” Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Dillard offers another necessary antidote to the preciousness of the writing process by reminding us of the demandingly physical world it inhabits:

The materiality of the writer’s life cannot be exaggerated. If you like metaphysics, throw pots. How fondly I recall thinking, in the old days, that to write you needed paper, pen, and a lap. How appalled I was to discover that, in order to write so much as a sonnet, you need a warehouse. You can easily get so confused writing a thirty-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often “written” with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table’s edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with full hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet.

And yet writing necessitates a certain higher-level awareness of life and its opposite, something Christopher Hitchens would come to echo in asserting that “one should write as if posthumously” :

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. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? […] Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.

Dillard adds to other literary icons’ reflections on why writers write, including George Orwell , Joan Didion , David Foster Wallace , Mary Karr , Joy Williams , Isabel Allende , Charles Bukowski , and Susan Orlean :

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. […] At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you.

But Dillard’s most poignant and timeless insight is the reminder that this gift is one to share, not to keep:

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 in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

The Writing Life is absolutely indispensable in its entirety. Pair it with these 10 essential books on writing and literary icons’ collected advice .

— Published August 9, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/08/09/annie-dillard-on-writing/ —

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Annie Dillard: Essays Quotes

By annie dillard.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

We were brought up on the classics. Our parents told us all the great old American jokes, practically by number…They could vivify old New Yorker cartoons, source of many tag lines. The lines themselves—“Back to the old drawing board'' and ''I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it'' and ''A simple yes or no will be sufficient''—were no longer funny; they were instead something better, they were a fixture in the language. The tag lines of old jokes were the most powerful expressions we learned at our parents' knees. Narrator, "Jokes"

This quote can be found in an excerpt from a memoir about the author’s childhood and serves as a deceptively profound recollection of profound love and respect for how parents shape and influence their children for the reset of their lives. The excerpt was published as a self-contained essay titled “Jokes” in an expansive collection offering a broad overview of Dillard’s writing selected from all her previous essay collections to that point. When reading this quote one gets not just insight into the truly wonderful and affectionate environment in which her parents raised their children, but is also provided with an unasked question with an answer that should prove quite significant: had little Annie in particular not been brought up by parents who wanted their children to understand not just that something was funny, but why it was funny, would she have all that writing behind her to get to the point where this particular piece was chosen for republication? What makes a writer? It is a question that underscores much of the author’s work even when the topic itself is not about writing.

There were four of us North Americans in the jungle, in the Ecuadorian jungle on the banks of the Napo River in the Amazon watershed. The other three North Americans were big-city men. We stayed in tents in one riverside village, and visited others. At the village called Providencia we saw a sight which moved us, and which shocked the men. Narrator, “The Deer at Providencia”

This is the opening line of the essay and exemplifies to great extent her particular style of writing. Exotic places take on a commonplace familiarity while familiar settings can come to seem exotic. Her works are sometimes described as difficult to categorize because they combine observation non-fiction with the autobiographical aspects of a memoir presented with the constructive elements of fiction. This paragraph, for instance, could with absolutely no changing of a single word be transferred over to a short story. The moving and shocking sign alluded to turns out to be one unlikely to be so easily come across in most places in America, but by the end has come to remain equally moving, but not so shocking. And is that transformation which becomes the unexpected point of the entire essay.

The idea of infinity is that it is bigger, infinitely bigger, than our universe, which floats, held, upon it, as a leaf might float on a shoreless sea. The ieea of eternity is that it bears time in its side, like a hole. You believe it. Surely it an idea for minds deranged by solitude, people who run gibbering from caves, who rave on mountaintops, who forgot to sleep and starved. Narrator, “The Book of Luke”

Another problematic aspect of easily narrowing down Dillard’s writing so that it fits comfortably into a specific generic section suitable for facilitating the arrangement of rows in a bookstore or lists on a website is that almost no matter what the subject matter at hand, eventually there is going to be a digression. Or, more likely, digressions. The longer the essay, the more digressive it is likely to be. Unlike the digressions of Grampa Simpson, however, the Dillard digression is never pointless and ever strays too far off the topic. They can, on the other hand, often be nearly as funny as Abe’s meanderings into dementia. Generally, there is a tendency for the digressive aspects of a Dillard essay tend be philosophical in nature, acting as connotative commentary upon the larger social aspects or broader historical context. This example, for instance, leads into a quite specific topic: deconstructing a Biblical gospel.

Liu Binyan : “Mickey Mouse? Ginsberg: “You know. Mickey Mouse. With the ears? A little mouse?” Liu Binyan : “Yes. I know Mickey Mouse. Yes, But the film?” Ginsberg : “That was a Mickey Mouse film.” Liu Binyan: “The film we just saw was a Mickey Mouse film?” Ginsberg: “You know. Hallucinatory. Delusional.” Liu Binyan/Allen Ginsberg, “Disneyland”

This is an actual conversation which took place in Disneyland when Dillard and Ginsberg accompanied a group from the UCLA Chinese-American writer’s conference on trip to Disneyland, including muckraking Chinese journalist Liu Binyan. At this point, they all just come from a viewing of a typical Disneyland propaganda movie titled America the Beautiful which featured, for Beat poet Ginsberg, just a little too much imagery of American military might. As they are strolling through the park immediately afterwards, Ginsberg is clearly trouble—the author describes his mood as “gloomy”—and in reference to that abundance of imagery emphasizing the beauty of America’s military power, muses out loud that it was a Mickey Mouse movie.

Consider what a trip Disneyland is like. Even if equipped with VIP fast-track passages, this is still an event going to take up most of the day. As such, the conversations which took place must have been broad in subject matter and have featured tonal changes from the very serious to utterly superficial. And, indeed, as the account moves on, it does feature some additional scenes of dialogue. But this is the one that opens the tale; this is the conversation that Dillard’s attentive writer’s ear focused on as potentially the single most memorable. The transcription above features just the dialogue, leaving out Dillard’s description of such elements as Ginsberg’s putting his hands above his head to represent Mickey’s ears and Liu Binyan’s dignified response in perfect English that he is aware of whom Mickey Mouse is. Dillard’s talent as a writer is on fully display in the complete version as it appears in the published work: her recognition of the power of conversation, her ability to enhance the inherent humor with just enough descriptive explanation and the worthiness of its placement right up front. It is also a worthy display of how she seamlessly fits elements of fiction-writing into her non-fiction.

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Annie Dillard: Essays Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Annie Dillard: Essays

Annie Dillard: Essays study guide contains a biography of Annie Dillard, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Essays for Annie Dillard: Essays

Annie Dillard: Essays essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Annie Dillard: Essays by Annie Dillard.

• Identity Theme in “Living Like Weasels”