annie dillard and 'the writing life.'

Writing is a funny thing, like an addiction the way it haunts you until you have your fix. Sometimes when an idea flies into my brain I can't stop thinking on and around and through it until I quit the thing I am doing, sit down, and write it out. Sometimes it has to be typed. Sometimes I have to turn several pages back in my writing notebook to be sure the page is completely white and free of text, and write it there. I have to use a Pentel R.S.V.P. fine point black ink pen...I will run around the house scouring for one until I find it. And it's a race, you know, to get the thought down on paper or Dora (the name of my Macbook) before it flies right on out my ear. I literally forsee the winged thought on its way out. All the while the muse, strangely a diminutive Scottish man with reddish sideburns, sits up on the edge of the laptop, kicking his little shoed feet and smiling. Sometimes his smile is reassuring and comforting. Other times he mocks me. In my head, in my world unspoken imagination, this all seems quite normal. But when I think about it, really, it seems lunatic.


Annie Dillard wrote this brilliant book called "The Writing Life" wherein she discusses this state of being--the mental and actual lifestyle of the writer and the way writers think and operate. She talked about how she would lock herself away in a cold cabin overlooking the ocean to write, how she would subsist on Coca Cola and chocolate and how when she wrote in a small room in the library she would close the blinds so she wouldn't be tempted to distractions of the outside world. She says, among so many other things, "the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would."


I have a friend who always asks me how my writing is going and I appreciate her for this because she forces me to believe and own the fact that I write. I am a writer. We were discussing Annie Dillard's philosophies and how I could never do what she does--commit myself to isolation for the sake of writing. Because I view her from an apprentice standpoint this made me feel hopeless at first, as if I don't sell my soul to the muse I won't be opening myself up for true success and brilliance. Allison talked me down, assured me that people with very busy and integrated lives cannot become an island.


That being stated, if I could meet Annie Dillard I would thank her for writing her book because of the great comfort, wisdom and humor ("why people want to become writers I will never know"...AMEN SISTER. Pure torture 85% of the time but the 15% of near heavenliness...maybe that's why). I would tell her that every time I read a paragraph in her book it gave me fuel to gun across another two-hundred miles of story.


Toward the end of the book she tells of how Michelangelo, at his death, left a note to his apprentice that simply said, "Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw Antonio and do not waste time." And this has made all the difference to me... Write, Ginny, write, Ginny, write and do not waste time.