As prelude to teaching a new course with the same title, I am rereading Annie Dillard's The Writing Life this weekend. It has been at least fourteen years since I last read it, possibly twenty, and I had forgotten how this book bristles with metaphor. It can be overwhelming, at times. But the advice is priceless and abundant in these pages. Consider this:
(Blogger would not let me properly break the paragraphs therein. Sorry. Too lazy or busy to figure this one out, so I lumped them all together.)
I am also re-watching Jane Campion's brilliant film adaptation of Janet Frame's autobiographies, An Angel at My Table. I feel richer today than I felt on Friday, by far. My next big challenge will be to figure out how to manage my larger-than-usual course load this semester in a way that allows for time to write. No, that sounds too passive. My challenge will be to carve out time to write from my larger-than-usual course load. Nope. Still not quite right. Here: My challenge will be to carve out time for teaching three courses, instead of the normal two, from all the time I am going to devote to writing.
In the dark days of their careers, writers have to be their own cheerleaders.
To comfort friends discouraged by their writing pace, you could offer them this: It takes years to write a book--between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books? Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed to have knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion [as of 1989], perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.Full stop.
(Blogger would not let me properly break the paragraphs therein. Sorry. Too lazy or busy to figure this one out, so I lumped them all together.)
I am also re-watching Jane Campion's brilliant film adaptation of Janet Frame's autobiographies, An Angel at My Table. I feel richer today than I felt on Friday, by far. My next big challenge will be to figure out how to manage my larger-than-usual course load this semester in a way that allows for time to write. No, that sounds too passive. My challenge will be to carve out time to write from my larger-than-usual course load. Nope. Still not quite right. Here: My challenge will be to carve out time for teaching three courses, instead of the normal two, from all the time I am going to devote to writing.
In the dark days of their careers, writers have to be their own cheerleaders.
