One of These Days, I'll Write a Book

I still don't know whether I like Annie Dillard, whether I can't stand her, whether I am indifferent to her. From time to time, I pick up her books and commit myself to reading them. I am not the kind of writer Dillard is. I am (usually) not interested in poetic meanderings, even if I have been prone to it in my attempts to sound like a “real” writer as I mimic someone I happen to admire all the time, or just for a few weeks.

Some of times I understand Dillard. Her writing is elusive and maybe this is the quality and a gift which is uniquely her own. But I should also add, most of the time I really have no idea what she's talking about. Did she have too much wine? Did she perhaps smoke some kind of grass that she often describes in her writing about nature? And what would possess someone to write pages about a spider in a study? (Can you tell that I am not exactly a fan of Proustian expressions?). If she is having wine, I bet she's not even drinking reds but whites or pink. And really, why even waste your time with wine? Why not go straight to scotch!

But I digress, and I am not trying to make a plug for the Glenlivet. Really, it's the truth.

Regardless of my feelings about Dillard, I've been reading her book The Writing Life, which was published in 1989. The reading of the book came at an appropriate time, and maybe Dillard would appreciate the “perfect moment” for everything in life. One passage caught my eye, which dealt with the question of beginning a book – something, which I am sure, plagues every writer.

It is as follows:

You may wonder how you start, how you catch the first one. What do you use for bait?

You have no choice. One bad winter in the Arctic, and not too long ago, an Algonquin woman and her baby were left alone after everyone else in their winter camp had starved. Ernest Thompson Seaton tells it. The woman walked from the camp where everyone had died, and found at a lake a cache. The cache contained one small fishhook. It was simple to rig a line, but she had no bait, and no hope of bait. The baby cried. She took a knife and cut a strip from her own thigh. She fished with the worm of her own flesh and caught a jackfish; she fed the child and herself. Of course, she saved the fish gut for bait. She lived alone at the lake, on fish, until spring, when she walked out again and found people. Seton's informant had seen the scar on her thigh (The Writing Life, 12-13).

I am not sure whether I am supposed to take comfort in this. Probably not. And if I am, then I have missed the point. I won't be cutting my own flesh – I can tell you that much, but I do like this comparison.

I have not read it, but I wonder whether Dillard writes about how she feels about the act of writing. I don't like it all. It rarely gives me pleasure. I just try to get through it. My breaths are too uneven, the air is humid (even if it's freezing out there), and I move too slowly. Sure, sometimes moments of great freedom come along but those are usually in the middle of the night where you write feverishly and think this is the best freakin' piece of writing you have ever written and then you go to bed but not really wanting to and you're high because you were up when the rest of the (what you deem at the moment) unintelligent, trivial population is asleep and then in the morning or late afternoon you take a look at what your genius came up with and it's mostly crap.

And right about now, my breathing is getting shallower and I am getting impatient and I am picking at my fingers and adjusting my glasses. I think again about Dillard's book. Maybe she is too dramatic, too brooding, too inward. But these are not virtues or vices. They just are.

I don't know why but something takes a hold of me and I write. I don't enjoy it, just as I don't enjoy writing this either. In fact, I am standing, leaning against the desk. I don't even want to sit down. Pretty soon, my legs will begin to ache, and I would have reached (more or less) my 800 word count for the day and thank God I did!