Have you read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard?  You should, you should, if you’re a writer (or any sort of artist).  Aren’t we all, in a way?

I’m in the throes of writing again, so these quotes mean something to me.  Perhaps you’d like to listen in…

“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.’”  [So true, so true.]

“Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment.  Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good.  Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack.  At length he turned to the young man: ‘You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack.  Why do you like it so much?’  The young photographer said, ‘Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.’  A cabdriver sang his songs to me, in New York.  Some we sang together.  He had turned the meter off; he drove around midtown, singing.  One long song he sang twice; it was the only dull one.  I said, ‘You already sang that one; let’s sing something else.’  And he said, ‘You don’t know how long it took me to get that one together.’  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?”  [Knife in the gut, with a slight twist.]

“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.”

And this next one is especially for me.

“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders.  I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.  He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.”

And finally, as a seeming contradiction to the last statement…but true, nonetheless…

“‘Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe,’ Teilhard de Chardin wrote.”

Be brave when you write.  Be honest.  Be true.

Be ruthless with your own words.

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Will I see any of you lovely people at the MinnPost Book Club Blast in Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon?  It’s a great opportunity to meet & mingle with lots of authors and other book club members.  I would love to meet you (or gaze upon your face once again).  More information on my News & Events page.

Have a great weekend, whatever you’re up to!