Remnants 17 - The Writing Life: Thoughts

Uuuuuuh...

So as is probably expected of me given my current views on writing, I found Chapter 1 of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life to be somewhat...tedious.

However, the keyword in that sentence is "somewhat". Like a couple people have already said in their last-minute blog posts, this chapter was kinda completely overdone in terms of all those metaphors. I mean, I didn't even get that last one about flying past Jupiter because at that point my brain was just like, "Wait, starfishes. What." It's almost like she was trying to find as many ways as possible to talk about how it's so impossible to find many ways to write things (no, not really - but it'd be funny if she was, at least until you realize she's right).

For the most part, the rest of her book was less "tedious," and I definitely agreed with some of Dillard's main points. The writing process is one that (generally) requires lots of time and careful consideration. As Dillard said, each line of words is like a probe that checks to see whether your writing is headed the right direction, and more often than not, you'll find that it's actually headed away from you and your original ideas. Sometimes you'll be writing something you really love and you flesh out the most perfect idea and you...look back and realize that it doesn't fit well anywhere in the rest of the stuff you've been writing. Sometimes your typewriter starts erupting (but not collapsing), and yeah I actually have no idea what Chapter 4 was about.

Overall, The Writing Life was a pretty good read conceptually - it was kinda cool to see that someone went through the trouble of writing down the struggles of writing stuff down so that other writers could see that they're not alone in facing the struggles of writing stuff down. I should stop doing that.