The Writing Life

Dillard defends the “life of the spirit” (33) as a valid and important pursuit. The epigraph for the chapter comes from Plato, which discusses how a man’s quest for unpolluted beauty, like a writer’s undertaking, is not “a life to disregard” (23). A writer’s life is in opposition to a “life of sensation” (32) because its activities are mostly mental rather than physical. However, Dillard argues that over time, days spent on pursuits like reading and writing add up to a better life than one spent in pursuit of sensory pleasure. The daily schedule of someone like the Danish aristocrat—who drinks with friends on riverbanks, who smokes and eats relentlessly, and who hunts sporadically throughout the day—appears more gratifying day-to-day, but in the long run, Dillard explains, the senses will “[require] more and more” (33) to be satisfied. In comparison, the writing life—the life in pursuit of beauty and knowledge—accumulates repetitive days into a worthy, “good life” (33) that demands “less and less” (33) as time goes on.

Dillard explores the routines and habits of famous male authors and also shares details of her own writing schedule from when she was younger. The routines are diverse: Wallace Stevens walked for miles each day, read for hours, and hardly saw his wife (33); A.E. Housman only wrote poetry when he was “rather out of health” (34); and Jack London wrote for 20 hours per day after reading everything on the syllabi from various University of California courses (34). Her own routine creates a similar vision of passionate dedication that shocks her in retrospect:

I slept until noon […] I wrote once in the afternoon, and once again after our early dinner and walk. During those months I subsisted on that dinner, coffee, Coke, chocolate milk, and Vantage cigarettes. I worked until midnight, one, or two. When I came home in the middle of the night, I was tired (27).

After placing herself among these noted authors, Dillard makes a point to mention the authors’ wives, whose labor allowed the men to have such open schedules. These women, behind the scenes, took care of the children and the house while their husbands were off writing. Dillard encounters a man at a luncheon who evidently sees her as belonging more in the category of wife rather than in the company of the writers. The man cannot understand how Dillard has time to write if she has all the traditional wifely duties to perform. The single interjection of “Sir?” (37) shows that despite her own personal shock at her writing habits, Dillard’s gender is inconsequential to “what you must do” (37) when you have the passion to write.

Dillard’s alarm at her own history with writing shows that she is speaking from a perspective of experience and growth. Her youthful stories offer examples both of what to do and what not to do. Like the reader, she too did not always know the proper or most productive ways to work. Two of the main anecdotes in this chapter deal with extreme isolation and what happened when Dillard stayed too long in the internal realm. Both her story about the Fourth of July and playing chess with a mysterious entity in the rare book room involve a heightened state of imagination that made her forget “all of wide space and historical time” (31). Without a firm grounding in the real world, Dillard became forgetful and confused. The stories are humorous and poke fun at her intensity, but they also teach the reader to continually return to reality before becoming too lost within the fancies of the mind.

Dillard illustrates the importance of the writing space, especially one that is unappealing so that the writer’s imagination can work harder. A writer’s work involves imagination “meet[ing] memory in the dark” (26), so Dillard keeps her writing spaces bare except for the essential tools. The two workspaces in this chapter are her one-room cabin on Cape Cod and her “cinder-block cell overlooking a parking lot” (26) at the Hollins College library. Dillard founds the view out of the window from her library study too interesting, so the line drawing on the closed curtains reminds her of the outside world without providing the same level of distraction. In her Cape Cod cabin, Dillard stresses the difference between the “unfinished” pinewood interior and the “finished trees” (25) that surround the shed. Along with depicting the bareness of the workspace, this juxtaposition also exemplifies the writer’s task: recalling images of the real world and creating them again from nothing through words.

During her work in the library study, Dillard wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book is a nonfiction work inspired by her personal journals and observations while living near Tinker Creek in Roanoke, Virginia. The book contemplates nature, solitude, religion, personal spirituality, and writing. Much like The Writing Life, Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a series of vignettes. Critics compare the book to Transcendentalist works like those from Henry David Thoreau, who Dillard references frequently in The Writing Life. Transcendentalism stresses the importance of individual experience, personal spirituality, and unadulterated nature—all tenets that Dillard alludes to and explores in this book as well as Pilgrim. Dillard’s physical writing experience also mimics that of Thoreau, who famously isolated himself in a cabin while writing Walden.