The Writing Life: Aim For the Chopping Block

In just 111 pages, I leave with a huge crush on Annie Dillard and the urge to buy a one-room cabin in the PNW.

All right, I’ll admit it — this little book took me completely by surprise.

I’ve read passages of it in various writing labs. I know my independent study advisor in my final year of college printed out an entire chapter (the one about “rowing with the tide”) as one of my assigned readings for the semester.

But I didn’t take the plunge into this little book of magic until recently, and while I tried to stretch it out over a few bedtime routines, eventually I ended up eating it all up at once. I just couldn’t stop reading.

And I am unabashedly in love with Annie Dillard now.

General thoughts: You can teach without preaching, and paint without a brush

What a writer — it’s not just her poetic approach to the “meaning” of being a writer. It’s the realism, the humor, the side-by-side interactions between terrible feelings and gut-wrenching laughter.

I felt like I was reading an extension of myself in all 111 pages.

I’ve never rented a one-room cabin in Washington or clipped a clothespin to my pinky finger to keep from burning a (second) kettle of water, but the moments Dillard describes could be plucked from my memories of undergrad — or the memories of any other working writer, writing student, or career writer crazy enough to think, “You know what? I’m going to write a damn book.”

I went in expecting a book on craft: Stephen King’s rules of the road, Strunk and White’s “omit needless words.”

Instead, I got a love letter to the craft itself, at once a passionate seduction and a whispered, backhanded sniping from an elderly wife to her half-deaf husband.

I loved every second of The Writing Life, and I know it’ll stay on my shelf for years to come. What a joy.

It’s almost difficult to believe that this little book has been around longer than I’ve been alive and this is the first time I’ve read it in its entirety — I finished it yesterday and I’m still this giddy.

How often does a craft book do that to someone?!

Critical thoughts: I’m actually learning something while I’m fangirling

All right, I’ll stem the writer vomit for now and focus on my actual, y’know, craft vomit.

I loved Dillard’s approach to memoir and personal essay.

I’m not quite sure how to classify this book: Is it a memoir? A collection of essays? A how-to guide?

Somehow it manages to be all three at once without being overbearing or trite. I felt like I was hanging spellbound on Dillard’s every word (too much writer vomit, Maggie) but at the same time I still felt like I was learning something.

Even if Dillard never really laid out “this is how you write,” she was offering teaching moments — each one buried so cleverly in layers of narrative and observation that you don’t realize you’re listening to a lecture until you turn to the next page and discover you’ve already absorbed the lesson.

She’s so tricky about it!

Each chapter has some kind of central theme — Dillard’s cabin in Washington comes up a lot, as does the idea of being cold and trying to warm yourself up, and wasting your energy trying to chop wood rather than just chopping through the wood by aiming for the chopping block.

Yeah, we get it, Annie — that’s the writing life!

The 1990s called, and they’re just as obsessed with you as I am

My only real complaint is that every once in a while, Dillard leans too far into the metaphor or into flowery language and loses the flow. Part of this may be that the original book was published in 1989, so we’ve had 30+ years of evolving language to make hers seem more literary than conversational.

(I’m sure some 1990s-era literary critic just gasped in his sleep and dreamed up a bunch of middle fingers, but I said what I said.)

For me, The Writing Life was less a lesson on how to be a writer than it was validation of how it feels to give yourself over to what can often be a hopeless and unrewarding lifestyle — only at the last moment, when your plane pulls out of its nosedive at the edge of a mountain, you realize you’ve just had the adventure of a lifetime.

See what I mean about the writer vomit?

That was 111 pages that will be a joy to read again and again.

Til next time,
Maggie