The Writing Life

Picture a dusty region of Africa. The sun is beating down on the grasslands near the water hole. A rhino stands nearly motionless, soaking in the heat. Birds land on his back and talk to each other, walking around as though he is a carpet. Only the gleam of his beady eye shows the rhino's irritation. Finally he can stand it no longer and flicks them away with his tail. That's it; that's the picture of me as a writer. Make of it what you will. I'm not nearly as good at this as Annie Dillard.

The Writer's Life is filled with poetic metaphors of what it means to be a writer, from a bee catcher to Wile E. Coyote to a Zulu warrior to a lion tamer to a dog chewing on a bone to a stunt pilot. Each metaphor illuminates in some way both the wonder that drives a writer and the impossibility of fulfilling his task. The book is a paradox. The harder Dillard makes it sound, the more she inspires you to write. One of the most inspiring passages describes the impossibility of transferring a poetic vision onto the page: "The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work." Why does that make me want to write? First of all, she's saying that the writer's vision might truly be something transcendent, something greater than myself that is worth giving myself over to, even if I can't control it. It's like Kubla Khan's pleasure dome that Coleridge can't get onto the page however wildly his eyes flash and his hair flies around. The vision becomes something else, but there's discovery in that too.

It's all so terrible, like Jesus saying, "Are you willing to drink the cup that I drink?" To follow your calling, you move to a desolate, wind-swept island in the Northwest, pace back and forth in a cold cabin with no insulation, chop wood while people laugh at you, plug in a coffee kettle that's rigged with a clothespin, and (probably most important of all) "throw pots." "The materiality of the writer's life cannot be exaggerated." Annie Dillard is Thoreau all over again, but she seems more like the real deal, maybe because she smokes cigarettes and admits that she would rather play chess with librarians than write. At one point she describes fighting through writer's block until she has written a few sentences: "At once I noticed that I was writing--which, as the novelist Frederick Buechner noted, called for a break, if not a full-scale celebration." Having written this post in no fewer than four sittings, I say, "Amen!" I think one of my kids has some Christmas cookies I should try to celebrate finishing this paragraph.

Annie Dillard is more of a poet than a story-teller, and this bias does emerge in spots. She quotes a well-known writer asking a novice, "Do you like sentences?" One imagines the novice hanging his head and walking away like the rich young ruler. I don't think that J. R. R. Tolkien or Tom Wolfe liked sentences at age twenty though. I think the former was drawn in to writing through his fascination with story and the latter through his fascination with the world. There are different portals. When Dillard starts talking about structuring stories, I take it with a grain of salt. I love to hear her ramble, and The Writing Life is one of her best rambles.

Well, I've flicked another bird off. Now I can go back to basking in the sun for a little while without that nagging feeling that there's something I have to do.