Annie Dillard

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The Lonely Life

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SOURCE: "The Lonely Life," in Belles Lettres, Vol. 5, Spring, 1990, p. 6.

[In the review below, Berne argues that The Writing Life is at its best when Dillard is less strident and relentless.]

What happens when you've been writing seriously for years, devoting much of your life to your art, and suddenly you begin to doubt your purpose? You have two options. One is to quit writing; the other is to talk yourself out of your doubts. Reminding other writers of the value of writing is a way of reminding yourself. In The Writing Life, meditations on being a writer, Annie Dillard tells of the time she's spent in lonely cabins, tool sheds, and library, carrels, writing, writing, writing. "It takes years to write a book," she informs us solemnly, "between two and ten years." So why, we ask, does anyone choose to be a writer? Dillard once knew a painter, who when asked how he decided to be a painter replied, "I liked the smell of the paint," What draws a writer to writing? Sentences, she says. It is knowing and loving your own medium so much that you're intoxicated by it, lured away from other pursuits.

But how does a writer keep writing? Beyond loving sentences, from where does the motivation come? Day after day year after year, there is the writer in a small room staring into a blank page or screen, trying to make something from what appears, gloatingly, to be nothing. Writing is a drudge's life. Work all day and there is still more, always more, to do. The writer, according to Dillard, "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." Alone in that small room, you bore yourself, praise yourself, goad yourself. Not even the smell of paint and turpentine is there to wake you.

The Writing Life begins: "When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow." These sentences introduce Dillard's examination of the drive, the destination, even the madness, behind the solitary struggle with words. These sentences also reveal what she's really up to: She wants to snatch writing out of the realm of the ephemeral and plunge it back into the physical. She wants to make the work of writing familiar, part of the world—to feel less alone as a writer herself. She wonders at one point, "Why wasn't I running a ferryboat, like sane people?"

Why else search so hard for ways to make writing's labor visual but to seem like a sane person to everybody else? "One of the few things I know about writing is this," she announces toward the end of The Writing Life, "spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time." Unpredictability is an occupational hazard: one minute writing is honest labor—like a miner's or a woodcarver's work—the next it's gambling. Writing is a pocketful of change, a crap game, a poker hand. You win by risking everything you know in an attempt to discover more. "Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you," warns Dillard. "You open your safe and find ashes." In other words, writing doesn't last unless it's on paper. A writer keeps going because, finally, she wants to make something last.

For people looking for pointers about writing, this is no how-to handbook; it offers no hints for the beginner on developing characters, handling plot, or outlining an essay. Instead, Dillard offers exhortations to the entrenched writer. "Push it," she yells like a drill sergeant. "Examine all things intensely and relentlessly." Don't give up. Keep looking. Get it on paper.

There is no writing without an examination of the physical world. There is no sense to be made of the world without contemplation and interpretation. Yet the external world, necessary as it is, can be distracting. She tells us she once had to tape a drawing of the scene outside her window to the closed venetian blinds so she would stop looking out at life in her effort to see into it. To capture what she sees. Dillard believes she must turn toward an inward vision. "If I had possessed the skill, I would have painted directly on the blind, in meticulous colors, a trompe l'oeil mural view of all that the blinds hid, Instead, I wrote it."

Her attempts to inspire us are generous. There is something companionable in knowing that someone else is trying to make sense out of why we scratch words on paper. Yet there's a nagging little jeer of "so what?'" running through the musings and anecdotes in this book. Shut the blinds, tape a drawing to them and what do you have? A drawing and a dark room. Behind the stories of late-night vigils at the computer screen, coffee-primed revelations, relentless examinations, The Writing Life is about being alone and not liking it much. As Dillard notes, "The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it." The next moment she's off on another meditation, but the worry has slipped in.

Write and keep writing, she seems to be saying, because if you stop, if you take too deep a breath and look around at what other people are doing, you might realize that what you are doing is tinged by the ridiculous. In another moment of doubt, she admits that writers cling to "the ludicrous notion that a reasonable option for occupying yourself on the planet until your life span plays itself out is sitting in a small room for the duration, in the company of pieces of paper." At least painters have that smell of paint.

One of the pleasures of this book is its specificity. Dillard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a personal narrative about the mysteries of the natural world, is a collector of precise terms and proper names. We are treated to all the places she has gone to write: an island on Haro Strait in Northern Puget Sound, a library carrel in Roanoke, Virginia a pine shed on Cape Cod. We are presented with heroes, nonwriters who exhibit daring and skill and afford parallels between other jobs and writing. She gives us lots of quotations, good, inspiring quotations, the kind to print on index cards and tape above the word processor. But much of this book reads like a pep talk. The most convincing moments are when Dillard lowers her voice and something confidential creeps in. After describing yet another instance of her devotion to writing, she allows. "But the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would."

"It's all right," we want to say. It's part of writing to get sick of writing Still, perhaps if Dillard had admitted that to herself, we wouldn't have this book. She is always, no matter what her subject, a wonderful stylist. And what finally convinces us of the importance of the writing life are the wondrous sentences that she uses to describe it.

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