The Writing Life

“Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared—relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork. But no.”

Dillard describes one of the delusions that can lead a writer to keeping their earliest passages even though the writing is poor and no longer serves the work as a whole. She warns against becoming too attached to these early passages because of a sense of gratitude as the readers will not see the weak work in the same light. The quotation explores the nostalgia for the feelings of those initial moments of writing, with an emphasis on relief that words of any sort are on the physical page and out of the writer’s head.

“Bee after bee will lead toward the honey tree, until you see the final bee enter the tree. Thoreau describes this process in his journals. So a book leads its writer. You may wonder how you start, how you catch the first one. What do you use for bait?”

Dillard shares an anecdote from Henry David Thoreau’s journals about finding a honey tree by capturing and following honeybees. She compares the process to how a “book leads its writer” by flying off on its own—occasionally out of sight—so the writer must find new subjects to follow until they reach the destination of a finished project. Dillard acknowledges that the first bee, the “bait” or a story, may be hard to find, but she goes on to discuss how writers look into themselves to find hidden passions and questions worth exploring.

“The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen.”

The two methods of writing that Dillard observes are messy momentum and slow, careful precision. Although the writer may feel that perfecting each sentence as they go will lead to more thoroughly constructed ideas, Dillard notes that the opposite is actually true: A subject can only be explored in totality through movement, however awkward or clumsy the passages may feel. The “true shape” of an idea will only arrive at the end, making any work at the beginning irrelevant and thus not worth the effort to perfect. 

“Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing—and the moral sense, and the intellect.”

Dillard emphasizes the internal world for both readers and writers. Writers spend time in their imaginations dreaming up new ways to represent and question the world, while readers seek out writing to expand their morality or examine their beliefs and perceptions. Dillard will go on to discuss how writers should keep these subtle senses in mind while writing; they should not try to appeal to the loud senses of life, like a movie can, because the written word will fall short in comparison.

“You climb steadily, doing your job in the dark. When you reach the end, there is nothing more to climb. The sun hits you. The bright wideness surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end. You look back at the ladder’s two feet on the distant grass, astonished.”

This passage is an excerpt from a magical vision of the writer climbing a ladder into the sky—a comparison to writing a book. The writer feels like they are on an endless journey forward, but eventually the ladder does end, and the writer can bask in their accomplishment. This passage incorporates imagery of danger, darkness, and uncertainty that Dillard utilizes in other anecdotes about the anxiety of writing.

“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot.”

Throughout the book, Dillard describes her various workspaces and the relatively empty state she tries to leave them in. She tries to only equip them with the bare necessities to avoid distractions. As the writer’s task involves extensive use of “imagination” and “memory,” pleasing or interesting views can divert the writer’s attention or skew the imagination.

“If I wanted a sense of the world, I could look at the stylized outline drawing. If I had possessed the skill, I would have painted, directly on the slats of the lowered blind, in meticulous colors, a trompe l’oeil mural view of all that the blinds hid. Instead, I wrote it.”

The view from Dillard’s study in Hollins College was so interesting that she had to close the blinds forever. Instead of seeing the ever-changing view out of the window, Dillard pastes a line drawing of its main features on the blinds for when she ever gets the urge to turn away from her work. In the short sentence, “Instead, I wrote it,” Dillard summarizes the writer’s task: In the written word, a writer creates a dynamic, thorough image of the real world as they remember it.

“Even when passages seemed to come easily, as though I were copying from a folio held open by smiling angels, the manuscript revealed the usual signs of struggle-bloodstains, teethmarks, gashes, and burns.”

In this passage, Dillard illustrates the duality of the writing process. At once it can feel as if every word is falling into place perfectly, and simultaneously it can feel as if you are physically fighting with the words until you are injured. Even though a writer is not in actual physical danger when they write, mental strain can be hard to articulate. Therefore, like here, Dillard uses imagery of the battered body as representative of the turmoil a writer may feel on the inside.

“A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order-willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

Dillard accentuates the usefulness of a schedule in the self-directed life of a writer. Writing is an individual, self-paced endeavor, so a schedule can create a sense of order that a writer can fall back on whenever they feel lost or unsure of what to do next. Although Dillard recognizes that a schedule can make days feel indistinct, the long-term stability makes up for any monotony in the moment.

“It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

Dillard does not minimize the potential drawbacks of writing, like the extreme physical and sensory isolation a writer lives and works in. The writer’s workspace is in direct juxtaposition to the excitement of the “real world” and is relatively “colorless.” This passage introduces some of the anecdotes about Dillard’s early days of writing when she forgets about reality, sometimes to humorous results.

“Remarkably material also is the writer’s attempt to control his own energies so he can work. He must be sufficiently excited to rouse himself to the task at hand, and not so excited he cannot sit down to it. He must have faith sufficient to impel and renew the work, yet not so much faith he fancies he is writing well when he is not.”

A writer’s work deals primarily with the internal world, but Dillard notes that there is a certain degree of materiality. The materiality comes through in the writer’s physical interactions with the work: sitting down to write and returning to work each day. Dillard suggests that the writer must be in control of their feelings so that these material elements can occur, otherwise the writer can find themselves not wanting to work or stuck in a world of delusional fancy.

“If only I could concentrate. I must quit. I was too young to be living at a desk. Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever.”

In a stream of consciousness passage, the reader follows Dillard’s internal monologue as she struggles with a difficult portion of her project. We see her feel dejection, resignation, and frustration with her lack of ability to focus. This is one example of Dillard’s inability to understand why she torments herself with the writing process when she could be perfectly happy at any other profession. She is envious of those who do not know the pains of writing, but she continues her task regardless.

“But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual painting, you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page.”

This passage exemplifies the obstacles of translating images from the mental world into the physical written word. In connection to the words a writer places on the page, the vision only ever maintains a peripheral relationship to the final product. Dillard compares this fact to a painter’s similar inability to copy the image of the vision onto canvas, even within a visual medium, making the writer’s effort appear more challenging. 

“The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads because that is what he will write.”

For Dillard, reading is an important part of writing, and she believes writers should occupy their spare time studying the work of others. Although writing questions the world and tries to illustrate it, Dillard thinks one’s subject matter should not incorporate trivial aspects of life that anyone can experience. Instead, she posits that one’s writing should expand upon what one has learned from the field of literature, which others may not have had access to.

“They loved the range of materials they used. The work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure.”

The “they” in this quotation is Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Gaugin, who Dillard uses as notable examples of those who excelled at their work because they loved to learn about all aspects of their respective fields. In Dillard’s perspective, these artists were only as successful as they were because they allowed their learning to propel their own work. By making enthusiasm for exploration the basis of their routine, these great artists never worried about finding new subjects for examination.

“Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses. Much of those years’ reading will feed the work.”

Dillard advises writers to struggle for a long work rather that short ones because in the length of time it takes to write a full-length book, there is more room to grow. Here, Dillard explains that a book can take years to write, which she describes in detail in Chapter 1. The task of writing can help the writer to learn new things, but if they read in tandem, what they learn over from other authors can also inform positive changes in style and theme in the project.

“And if it can be done, then he can do it, and only he. For there is nothing in the material for this book that suggests to anyone but him alone its possibilities for meaning and feeling.”

This quotation explains the deeply personal nature of writing. The motivation to begin a project for most writers, Dillard states, stems from a desire to see their unique perspective put into words. Dillard asserts that no one else can see these subjects in the same way the individual writer can, and so only they can write the book, even if the task is daunting.

“Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.”

Dillard commands the reader directly, imploring them to explore each subject of their writing as if it had never been explored before. By treating each new idea, theme, or subject with deep curiosity, the writing may lead to new paths of understanding or new perspectives on the world. This passage connects to her first advice to follow the work wherever it leads because even topics a writer may think are unextraordinary can prove to have hidden dimensions.

“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.”

Dillard continues to directly address the reader, but here, she advises writers to not save their ideas for later. As soon as a new idea pops into the mind, the writer should explore the idea in depth rather than save it for another work—if something in this work prompted the new thought, there must be a connection now. Dillard trusts that new ideas will always occur down the line, so she urges writers put all their effort into writing everything they think of when they think of it.

“Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean or sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing.”

This sentence describes what Dillard calls the “brink of the infinite” (89). Lummi Island introduced her to his concept, but she sees connections to the project of writing. Writing offers infinite possibilities, infinite subjects to explore, and truths to be uncover, but the daunting and terrifying side of writing is that it can also offer nothingness. Despite this negative side, Dillard continues, the writer plunges into the vastness with the hope of finding something valuable.

“Rahm made beauty with his whole body; it was pure pattern, and you could watch it happen. The plane moved every way a line can move, and it controlled three dimensions, so the line carved massive and subtle slits in the air like sculptures.”

Dillard connects Dave Rahm’s body to his plane, harkening back to passages where she describes an artist and a writer fitting themselves to their materials. Like a writer following the line of words, Rahm’s plane follows a line in the air that can extend in any direction and create any pattern. The art is not only in the movement of the plane, but how the plane interacts with the air and changes it into art. For Dillard, Dave Rahm’s flying is pure artistry, and she uses his story as potential inspiration for her readers.

“I had seen the other stunt pilots straighten out after a trick or two; their blood could drop back and the planet simmer down. [...] Rahm endured much greater pressure on his faster spins using the plane’s power, and he could spin in three dimensions and keep twirling till he ran out of sky room or luck.”

Dillard compares Dave Rahm’s flying style to the other stunt pilots at the airshow. Where other pilots would pace themselves in between tricks, Rahm would relentlessly connect his tricks, much to his own personal discomfort and potential danger. The comparison highlights Dillard’s reverence for Rahm’s skill and endurance, and it places Rahm at the pinnacle of his field.

He unrolled the scroll of the air, extended it, and bent it into Mobius strips; he furled line in a thousand new ways, as if he were inventing a script and writing it in one infinitely recurving utterance until I thought the bounds of beauty must break.”

At the beginning of Chapter 7, Dillard relates how Dave Rahm’s performance made her question what beauty meant, and here she expands upon that thought when she sees him perform a second time. Her own redefinition of beauty stems from Rahm’s improvised discovery of new ways to move his plane in the air. As Rahm uncovers and creates new movements with his plane, the audience is introduced to new perspectives on beauty and art to the point that Dillard is sure the definition of beauty will need to break open entirely. Through this comparison, Dillard encourages the writer to try to exceed their writing limitations and forgo personal comfort for their craft.