The Writing Life

An epigraph precedes each chapter of The Writing Life, corresponding with the main subject of each section. Chapter 1 begins with a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Do not hurry; do not rest” (1). Dillard’s opening chapter explores the necessity of constant effort when writing a book, but also the importance of carefully working at your own pace. She refers to the epigraph’s two-pronged advice in the chapter’s two fantastical passages. The writing project, symbolized by a floating desk, is only kept afloat while the “engine of belief” (11) is active. To maintain the desk’s flight, Dillard commands the writer to “Get to work” (11). A ladder into the sky similarly symbolizes the duration of the writing process, and the requirement of “climb[ing] steadily” (20) to the top. However, the ladder is “steep” (19), representing writing’s challenging nature. Therefore, the writer must move slowly to stay balanced, but must move, nevertheless.

Dillard structures the chapters through a series of short vignettes. Her recollections, advice, and imaginative anecdotes do not follow a linear chronology, but rather jump between thematically linked images. For example, in the middle of Chapter 1, Dillard follows a three-sentence paragraph about the line of words as a fiber optic tool with a passage describing an inchworm. The images are strikingly different—one of mechanical tools, one of nature and insects—but they both explore the need for awareness to make progress. The fiber optic—wires that transmit light—represents the line of words guiding the writer; the inchworm, fearful of its surroundings, is the directionless writer who chooses to panic and proceeds only through luck. Each image in the chapter, like these two, builds upon and expands the symbolism of the previous image.

Like the structure of the book, the genre and narrative perspective is flexible. The Writing Life is a memoir of Dillard’s early writing days, a guidebook for novice writers, and an analytical exploration of the internal world of the writer. For each facet, Dillard employs a different narrative perspective that allows her to dynamically leap between topics. When recalling her own specific experiences, Dillard uses first-person perspective to show her connection to the events and the subjectiveness of her opinions. For descriptive, observational, and analytical passages, she blends her personal viewpoint with the third person, producing the quality of academic objectiveness. Dillard also uses the second person “you” to address the reader and place them within the narrative. She opens the book with such an address: “When you write, you lay out a line of words” (3). Rather than looking back and using her younger self as the representative writer, Dillard brings the narrative into the immediate present with the reader as the subject. This choice allows the reader to feel intimately connected to the processes that Dillard describes so they can at once empathize with Dillard’s own stories of struggle and not feel as alone in their difficulties.

Dillard introduces the line of words symbol in this chapter, which she returns to and expands upon in subsequent chapters. The line of words is the writer’s main tool, which she compares to the tools of other professions: “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe” (3). Dillard also compares the line of words to a hammer that can help find structural issues. These tools do not necessarily create a finished product; rather, they uncover and illuminate something hidden that a worker can handle, manipulate, or remove. The comparisons show that the line of words does not create the story for the writer. Instead, it leads the writer towards a story by revealing, demolishing, and building along the way. Dillard urges the writer to follow the line of words courageously wherever it leads, whether it is “heading out past Jupiter” or “enter[ing] the heart on a flood of breath” (20). Dillard continues to use corporeal imagery to explore the personal nature of stories in later chapters.

Using the line of words symbol alongside several other images and anecdotes, Dillard exposes writing’s changeability and the inevitable difference between the initial inspiration and the work’s final outcomes. As a writer follows the work, ideas and subjects move in new directions, and the writer must sacrifice “several urgent and vivid points […] as the book’s form harden[s]” (5). She utilizes a Henry James quotation as the “best” expression of this point:

Which is the work in which he hasn’t surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done, doesn’t he ask himself what has become of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to proceed to that extremity? (5).

This quotation, among others that Dillard shares, highlights feelings of surrender and of settling for something perhaps less thrilling that one’s original vision. Dillard warns aspiring writers to not hold any strong feelings towards one’s work because important or special passages will inevitably need to be removed as their subjects take on new forms.

Writing is a “sufficiently difficult and complex” (11) process, but Dillard asserts that a finished work should stand apart from the writer’s labor. Essentially, a work should not receive any extra praise for having been difficult to write. Two anecdotes illuminate this point by exploring Dillard’s aversion to holding the process in conversation with the final product. The novice photographer continually submits a poor-quality photo for judgement year after year because he “had to climb a mountain to get it” (6). The cabbie sings his worst song twice, despite it being “the only dull one” (7), because it took him a long time to complete. In both cases, the final product is still bad regardless of the effort put in to completing it. A writer can similarly become delusional, Dillard states, by imbuing their obstacles and their earliest passages with too much “virtue” or “necessary qualit[ies]” (6) that do not exist beyond the writer’s own feelings. Not only does it weaken the work to hold onto these difficulties, but Dillard feels it isn’t “courteous” (7) to show off these struggles to the reader.