Annie Dillard's Craft | Research

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.

Write as If Dying

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?

Seeing

There are two ways of seeing. The first is hunting: you look for something specific. You walk the banks of Tinker Creek looking for muskrat, for water striders, for monarch butterflies laying eggs on milkweed. You must first learn the names of things. You must know what you seek.

The second is receiving: you empty yourself and wait. You let go of what you expect to see. At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

I cannot cause light. The most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

The Tree with Lights in It

Once I saw a tree. I was walking near my house. The sun had just set. The tree caught fire. It was cedar, and the sun lit every cell of every twig from within. It was wholly fire, a burning bush, flames licking from every surface. It lasted less than a minute. Then it was an ordinary tree again.

I have spent the years since trying to see that way again. The tree was not unusual. The light was not unusual. I was unusual, briefly. That one time, I saw.

This is what attention gives you. Presence. Transfiguration. The ordinary revealed as holy.

Surface Over Feeling

Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead: stick to surface appearances. Hit the five senses. Give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. Stick everything in a place and a time.

Don’t describe feelings. The way to a reader’s emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses. Don’t say she was angry. Show her throwing his clothes out the window.

You can invent the details that don’t matter. A plausible date, a plausible name, a plausible background. You cannot invent the details that matter. Those must be true.

Verbs

Count the verbs on a page. Try to increase the average.

You want vivid writing. How do you get vivid writing? Verbs. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. Verbs are where the blood flows.

Nouns name. Adjectives modify. But verbs do. A page of nouns and adjectives is a still life. A page of verbs is alive.

Throw Away the Beginning

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.

Usually you will have to rewrite the beginning—the first quarter or third of whatever it is. Don’t waste much time polishing this. You’ll just have to take a deep breath and throw it away anyway.

The real beginning is usually around page four. The first three pages were throat-clearing. They served to get you started. They served their purpose. Now cut them.

Rebuild from the Best

Take your draft. Find the best sentences. Cut them out. Tape them on a blank page.

Now write around them. Fill in what’s missing. Make the new writing reach for the best of what you’ve written.

This is surgery. This is building with the good timber and burning the rest.

The Schedule

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

The Work Becomes Feral

If you skip a visit or two, the work in progress will turn on you. A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch.

Show up.

What You Alone Notice

A writer looking for subjects asks not after what he loves best, but what he alone loves at all.

There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page. There you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Writing as Discovery

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.

Unity

The work’s unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go. All those sparkling asides and clever observations, those flights of fancy and happy accidents—if they don’t serve the whole, cut them.

Erase your tracks. Process is nothing. The path is not the work.

The reader should see only the result.

The Question

Do you like sentences?

If you don’t love the sentence itself—the unit of the sentence, the way words combine into rhythms and meanings—if you don’t find joy in making sentences, in reading them, in playing with them like blocks—then perhaps reconsider.

A writer is a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words.

Talent Is Not Enough

Talent isn’t enough. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work.

I started with people much more talented than me. They’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I’m writing.