The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

In The Writing Life, Dillard writes beautifully and presents the writing experience so clearly, she brought back all the angst I’ve felt over my own writing.

Regarding revision, she is merciless. In her own work, she removes the early writings of a work, where “leaps to nowhere, dropped themes, abandoned tones, blind alleys, and false settings,” all get abandoned later by the work. She describes writing like laying down bricks, writing one careful word after another. If she keeps a sentence, she says she’s changed it seven or eight times.

Dillard also lays bare a frustrating conundrum of writing: writers are free to develop themes that interest them using their time as they see fit, but writing is ultimately trivial: no one cares whether its done. She says, “writing is mere writing,” and points out that people need shoes.

Writing one-fifth a page a day, words laid down one-by-one in a chain that leads to carefully crafted sentences, seems to be what Dillard expects at her best. She talks about waiting for the writing ‘sense’ to inspire her, distracting herself with walks and chopping wood, until she has something to write on paper. She describes vividly a sphinx moth, which supercharges its muscles with oxygen in order to fly. Once she startled one of these moths and it took off over the ocean. It kept gaining altitude and then losing altitude, losing more than it was gaining, until it drowned in the ocean. It’s clear how the writing experience can ‘drown’ if one doesn’t start off supercharged.

Dillard also shares advice about what to write about: give voice to your own astonishment, write about what you like best, write like you’re writing for terminal patients, what could one say that would not “enrage them by its triviality.” She quotes Anne Truitt that writing is “forcing oneself to walk along the nerves of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”

She points out that, from the reader’s perspective, there are many good reasons to read, to demand good writing: the hope of beauty laid bare, the experience of life heightened, and the deepest mysteries probed. Writing, Dillard shares, has the ability to isolate and vivify an experience by deeply engaging our hearts and intellects, to magnify and dramatize our days, to reveal us startlingly to ourselves as creatures “set down here bewildered.” These are amazingly poignant reasons to write, and beautifully described and precisely described.

After reading Dillard I was almost thrown into permanent writer’s block. Her descriptions of the writing experience made me feel empty and drawn out, as I’d feel, sometimes, when struggling to get good copy down on the page. However, she offered so many good reasons to write, reasons that strike at the core of what it means to be human, reasons I felt would enlarge my experience of humanity, that I am more excited, than fearful, to be revealed to myself startlingly as a creature set down here bewildered.