What it's like to write a book

 Here’s Annie Dillard on what’s it like to write a book: 

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.

 

I’m not sure it would be a good idea to share that view with freshmen studying English Composition. It probably wouldn’t have helped me decide what to do with myself.

Still, I wish I’d had a better sense, early in life, of the many different things that writers have tried to do — or could try to do. I wish I’d had a better sense of the possibilities.

 • Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 52.