You don't have to be a writer to get something out of this book, but it might help you understand what's she's getting at. For Annie, writing is labor, hard slogging labor. She bleeds over every word. Sometimes following her point can be like pursuing a phantom through a dark wood. You can see it up ahead, but you never quite catch up. But at other times, she writes sentences and paragraphs that shout and resonate. Here are three random examples:

"There are no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage is sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?"

"Jack London claimed to write twenty hours a day ... once he had a book of his own under way, he set his alarm to wake him after four hour's sleep. Often he slept through the alarm, so, by his own account, he rigged it to drop a weight on his head. I cannot say I believe this, though a novel like THE SEA WOLF is strong evidence that some sort of weight fell on his head with some sort of frequency — but you wouldn't think a man would claim credit for it."

"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 later, something better."