Writers and bloggers of this world, will you hear the words of Annie Dillard? For those who have ears to hear, this is the life.
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. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a 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. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”
Living thus – with your lion tamer’s chair, your ax, your conference table, and your clothespin – you may excite in your fellow man not curiosity but profound indifference. It is not my experience that society hates and fears the writer, or that society adulates the writer. Instead my experience is the common one, that society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.1
As Dante wrote and Rodin inscribed, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.”
Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
1 (Dillard 1990, 52, 53)