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The Writing Life
Fiction Writing HIGH

Spend It All

The Writing Life Annie Dillard
material hoarding impossibility subject-choice craft

Problem This Solves

Writers hoard their best material for a future project, choose safe subjects instead of idiosyncratic ones, and abandon books when they discover structural problems they can't solve.

Key Principle

Four imperatives for the working writer:

Write What You Alone Love

"A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all." The universally loved subjects are already covered. The writer's distinctive contribution comes from "strange seizures" — idiosyncratic fascinations no one else has articulated. Test of urgency: "Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients."

Submit to the Art

From Paul Klee: "You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox." The self is the servant of the art form, not its master. Study what other writers have done — "He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write" — and submit to the discipline of the tradition rather than forcing the medium to express a pre-existing self.

Accept Every Book's Intrinsic Impossibility

"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book." Write in spite of the defect — minimizing the difficulty, strengthening other virtues, cantilevering the narrative into thin air. The impossibility is not a reason to quit; it is a feature of every book ever written.

Spend It All

"Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time." The impulse to save a good idea for later is precisely the signal to use it now. Creative material "fills from behind, from beneath, like well water" — but only when drawn from. Hoarding does not preserve; it destroys: "Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

Good Examples

  • Deploying your single best image in the current chapter rather than saving it for a later book. The well refills only when drawn from.
  • Writing about your peculiar obsession that no one else shares — "Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum."
  • Discovering the structural impossibility of your book and compensating with other strengths rather than trying to solve the unsolvable.

Bad Examples

  • Saving your best material for a future project. "You open your safe and find ashes."
  • Writing about subjects everyone loves rather than subjects only you love. The result is interchangeable with anyone else's work.
  • Abandoning a book because you discovered an insoluble structural problem. Every book has one.
  • Treating the art form as a vehicle for self-expression rather than submitting to its discipline. The young poet who reads no one else's poetry has "not yet understood that poets like poetry."

Key Quotes

"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." — Annie Dillard, Chapter 5

"Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." — Annie Dillard, Chapter 5

"A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all." — Annie Dillard, Chapter 5

"You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox." — Annie Dillard, Chapter 5

Rules of Thumb

  • The impulse to save it is the signal to spend it.
  • Write about what only you find fascinating, not what everyone finds interesting.
  • Every book has an insoluble problem. Write through it, not around it.
  • Study what other writers have done. "He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
  • At its best, the result is "unmerited grace" — but only after you've broken your heart, back, and brain looking for it.

Related References