I’m just now dipping my toes into the world of Annie Dillard and the dozen books she’s written over the course of her long career.

Naturally, I began with the book she did on writing called The Writing Life.

It won a Pulitzer Prize and I’d easily put it up there with Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

The gems she shares in the form of tiny essays and musings inspired me to write a series of three articles. This, obviously, is the first (you can read the second and the third at those pretty red glowing links).

Annie Dillard’s candid advice on saving nothing for tomorrow.

I’ve always found it wildly fascinating when great writers disagree. On two very separate occasions, both Ernest Hemingway and Annie Dillard shared differing thoughts on the subject of writing and how much ink you should squeeze out of the well each day.

Hemingway, gave the following advice…

“It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

Dillard, argued something very different:

*Annie Dillard is typing now*

“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.

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give now.

The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

Why her advice matters.

Writers are notorious for being wildly insecure (writers the likes of even Neil Gaiman).

For some perplexing reason, a fear the comes up again and again is… will I eventually run out of words?

It’s a real fear, a genuine fear. Some believe the reason Ernest Hemingway placed a sawed-off shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger was because words stopped flowing.

I can’t speak to whether this is true because I obviously did not know the man, but when you make your living writing, possessing the fear that the very thing that allows you to put bread on the table will stop flowing happens to even the best of us.

However, fighting this fear by writing less isn’t necessarily “logical”. It’s the equivalent of saying…

However, it’s not necessarily “logical”. It’s the equivalent of choosing love someone at 50% capacity today so you don’t run out of room to love them tomorrow.

It’s preposterous.

It’s preposterous because there are things like buses and there are moments where we find ourselves painted on the pavement having been hit by these buses.

If there is anything worse than running out of words, it’s dying having so many beautiful words left unwritten.

So, write. Spend it all.

But, I digress,

By Cole Schafer (but mostly Annie Dillard).