Annie Dillard

I do not so much write a book as sit 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.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'

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 it 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. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give away freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life