The Writing Life

A central piece of advice that Dillard gives to her readers is the importance of allowing ideas to develop organically instead of trying to restrict ideas to an original vision or plan. Dillard employs several images—the line of words, the self-amputating sea star, and the honey-bee navigation—to illustrate the meandering quality a work should have in its initial stages of development. These images do not indicate that the author doesn’t have control over their work, but Dillard does give the writing a certain degree of autonomy to explain how a writer shouldn’t suppress the development of ideas. In the first draft, a writer is still learning about the subject as they write, so the work will have “bold leaps to nowhere, […] brave beginnings of dropped themes, [and] tone[s] since abandoned” (6). By allowing their writing to wander where it will, the writer becomes exposed to subjects or themes that hadn’t occurred to them in the original vision, but which the writing itself has deemed necessary.

Though following a work can reveal exciting new ideas, Dillard notes that a writer feels fear about abandoning early passages that usually no longer fit with the developed work because they are the passages that got the project underway.