Process is nothing; erase your tracks

"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 is 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.

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 bare 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 how excellent in themselves or hard-won.  You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now.  (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)"

from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.

A bracing antidote to The Artist's Way!  And, yes, I am still writing Morning Pages.

Comments

[Diana]

The other day I was vacuuming and found myself suddenly, from out of nowhere, thinking, "I wonder if Sandra over at Book World is still doing Morning Pages?" This internet/blogging thing has made the world a very odd place, hasn't it?

[Ellie Robins]

Thanks for this, Sandra -- I'm about to link to it on the Hesperus Press blog as we're publishing the UK edition of Dillard's new novel, 'The Maytrees', at the end of this month.

Incidentally, I tried Morning Pages for a while (don't have the willpower for the rest of The Artist's Way). It seems that an extra twenty minutes in bed are worth more to me than artistry; I'm very jealous of your stamina.

Ellie, Hesperus Press

[Jenn]

I've tried the morning pages too - night pages work better for me though, and I am sort of addicted to them now.

[Toni Werbell]

I'm a NY-based book publicist. Could you please send me your mailing address so that I can submit two works of literary fiction for possible reivew?

thank you,
Toni Werbell