Dillard on Writing and Revising: "It's Not Holy Writ!"

We began this semester in English 50 by reading two pieces by Annie Dillard, the first, an excerpt from her book, Holy the Firm, about a moth that flies into a candle's flame; the second, an essay called "How I Wrote the Moth Essay--and Why."

There's a lot to love about Dillard's approach to writing. I especially love that she has amassed and indexed over 30 of her own journals which she relies on for her writings, her personal Google database, if you will. I also love her remarks on writing and revising:

On getting started:

How do you go from nothing to something? How do you face the blank page without fainting dead away? To start a narrative, you need a batch of things. Not feelings, not opinions, not sentiments, not judgments, not arguments, but specific objects and events: a cat, a spider web, a mess of insect skeletons, a candle, a book about Rimbaud, a burning moth.

What do you do with these things? You juggle them. You toss them around  . . . you need bits of the world to toss around. You start anywhere, and join the bits into a pattern by your writing about them. Later you can throw out the ones that don't fit.

On revising: 

[Revising] requires . . . nerves of steel and lots of coffee.

It doesn't hurt much to babble in a first draft, so long as you have the sense to cut out irrelevancies later.

The most inept writing has an inadvertent element of suspense: the reader constantly asks himself, where on earth is this going?

Usually I end up throwing away the beginning: the first part of a poem, the first few pages of an essay, the first scene of a story, even the first few chapters of a book. It's not holy writ.

Revising is a breeze if you know what you're doing--if you can look at your text coldly, analytically, manipulatively.

On engaging her readers:

I try to give the reader a story, or at least a scene (the flimsiest narrative occasion will serve), and something to look at.

I try not to hang on to the reader's arm and bore him with my life story, my fancy self-indulgent writing, or my opinions. He is my guest; I try to entertain him. Or he'll throw my pages across the room and turn on the television.

My favorite: "It's not holy writ."

More important to me, working with students in a beginning composition class, is growth. Show me where you started, I tell them, show me the messy trail that began with those first scribbles in your writing journal culminating in that nicely formatted (MLA!) final draft. I'll read the final draft and give it a grade, yes. But if I don't see a finished product that's much different from the early drafts, the final grade suffers.

I tell my students this, but I'm not sure they hear, not sure they care.

First draft, narrative paragraph.

Some do, though. I was pleased to see a few students getting the idea in a fairly inconsequential early writing assignment, a narrative paragraph, describing a place they'd visited. They brought their paragraphs to class, but I didn't collect them. We talked about Dillard, on hands and knees in her bathroom, peering at the discarded remains of sow bugs ("those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses, and die round"), earwigs, moths ("wingless and huge and empty"), that have collected behind her toilet, beneath a spider's web, and marvel (I did, anyway) at the writer's interest in things most of us would sweep up or vacuum away. There, in the detritus, a story, a narrative, a life lesson.

What do you see? What does it feel like? Smell like? Look like? Show me!

I allocated class time to experiment on their drafts, then sent them home to revise ("It's not holy writ!"). The next class session, I collected both drafts, and read them yesterday.

Revised draft, narrative paragraph.

Some got the idea. I saw scribbles and notes on the first drafts, incorporated into the second, and gave them 10 points for trying. A few students turned in two drafts, virtually identical. I deducted 5 points for not trying. The occasional student rose to the challenge and wowed me. Carina's, I show here. Students like this make it all pretty much worthwhile.