“The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard: “a work in progress will turn on you”

"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…As the work grows, it gets harder to control…You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it…” (1, p. 52).

“…One January day, working alone in that freezing borrowed cabin I used for a study on Puget Sound…I wrote one of the final passages of a short, difficult book…Mostly I shut my eyes. I have never been in so trancelike a state, and in fact I dislike, as romantic, the suggestion that any writer works in a peculiar state…” (1, p. 76).

Comment: She personifies a book being written as being able to turn on her. And how could a book get a will of its own? From alternate personalities involved in the process. And what might bring out alternate personalities? A “trancelike state,” which is psychological, not “romantic.”

1. Annie Dillard. The Writing Life. New York, Harper Perennial, 1989.