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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What sport did Dillard play with a boys' music camp?
(a) Basketball.
(b) Soccer.
(c) Flag Football.
(d) Softball.

2. Who once said, "Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept"?
(a) William Faulkner.
(b) Annie Dillard.
(c) Henry James.
(d) William Shakespeare.

3. Whose wife posed for the Liberty dime?
(a) Wilhelm Dinesen.
(b) Osip Mandelstam.
(c) Wallace Stevens.
(d) Thomas Mann.

4. What do television and films do to the body's senses, according to Dillard?
(a) They make the writer sense the need to write.
(b) Make connections.
(c) Numb them.
(d) Stimulate them.

5. What animal, according to Dillard, is an analogy for characters in a writer's book "taking over"?
(a) The lion.
(b) The sea star.
(c) A shark.
(d) The caterpillar.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Dillard's "line of words" do with random pictures in the writer's mind?

2. What happened in Bridgeport, Connecticut one morning in April, 1987?

3. How many hours of sleep would Jack London usually get?

4. Dillard refers to writing as changing "..from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool." What does epistemological mean?

5. What ended the chess game for Dillard in Chapter 2?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why does Dillard feel that an appealing workplace for a writer should be avoided?

2. How does Dillard say that she defines the meaning of schedules, in Chapter 2?

3. What, outside Dillard's library window, proved to cause the most distraction to her work?

4. What is the most appealing schedule that Dillard says she knows?

5. How does Dillard describe the line of words as being one's own heart?

6. When the cab driver in New York sang songs with Dillard, why did he sing one dull song twice?

7. Why does Dillard say that she made a pen drawing of the scenes outside her library window?

8. Why did the inchworm in Dillard's story keep asking itself, "What! No further"?

9. Why is 'the path' of the line of writing, as described in Chapter 1 by Dillard, not to be considered the actual work?

10. What is the meaning of Thoreau's note that "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them"?

(see the answer keys)

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