In Annie Dillard's (born April 30, 1945) right hand, the pen, before her eyes, the computer, and around her shoulders, a dark cloak of uninterrupted, protected space. From this space, she confesses her writing peculiarities.

Once, in order to finish a book I was writing and yet not live in the same room with it, I begged a cabin to use as a study. I finished the book there, wrote some other things, and learned to split wood. All this was on a remote and sparsely populated island on Haro Strait, where I moved when I left Virginia. The island was across the water from Canadian islands in northern Puget Sound, Washington State.

The cabin was a single small room near the water. Its walls were shrunken planks, not insulated; in January, February, and March, it was cold. There were two small metal beds in the room, two cupboards, some shelves over a little counter, a wood stove, and a table under a window, where I wrote.

From the mesmerizing Pulitzer Prize novelist and nature writer, to the meandering and even whimsical The Writing Life. It launches a truism advised by many creatives: Sit down, stay there. Write.

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, and dispatch bulletins.

Working desk of Roald Dahl, Great Mittenden, UK. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

This "staying put" is about existing with and within your work. It is characteristic of Dillard. Her 1974 groundbreaking environmental writing, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, explored an existence within nature and changed nature writers from visitors to inhabitants.   In Charles Darwin's writings a century earlier, he is observant but writes like a visitor as compared to Henry David Thoreau who exists in nature but uses it as a catalyst for philosophical pursuits. Dillard falls in the middle.  
Poetry, on the other hand, had long been using nature as a place of being; both in imagination (Coleridge wrote "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from his an far-inland bedsit) and in reality (Wendell Berry's 20th century poetic observations as a farmer).

I'm on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked through next to the steers' pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish. In the summer's low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current... Today I sit on dry grass at the island's end by the creek's slower side. I am drawn to this spot. I come to it as an oracle.
From Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The steady accumulation of time “piece by piece” unrolls nothingness into nothingness and, suddenly, into being.

The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces.

The hand-written preface to a reprint of Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist in 1850. Between the drafts is Dicken's writer-self; I feel him when I look at this. Learn more. Courtesy of Mark Charles Dickens, © CC BY 4.0 

Writing needs a space to lay out words; a writer must exist within that space. Dillard advised four corners and four walls and an utter avoidance of comfort and intrigue.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under trees is not quite as good as the cinder-block study was, but it will do. "The beginning of wisdom," according to a West African proverb, "is to get you a roof."   The poet Rainer Maria Rilke write something in his beautiful advice to young creatives that seems similar: he was seeking a feeling of home in which to write, an idea of being nurtured and safe, read more in "What is the Feeling of Home?".

The winnowing down of necessity and reducing the fear of being interrupted holds the writer in a tiny space between the eyes and the monitor, the mind and the writing.   "The writer has to listen. The reader has to hear." wrote Ursula Le Guin in her open-hearted celebration of language and words. I love this.

Now you watch symbols move on your monitor; you stare at the signals the probe sends back, transmits in your own tongue, numbers. Maybe later you can guess at what they mean - what they mean — what they might mean about space at the edge of the solar system, or about your instruments. Right now, you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.

But the smoothness is momentary, the tangent meeting the circle. More often than not, the writer is suffering, hopeless and alone.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see emotion.

Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows with two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk's.   I love that Dillard mentioned a hawk, it is exactly how Helen Macdonald described her work as a goshawk keeper and trainer: “Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don't get to say when or how.”  
What a beautiful connection!

As you float and suffer and write in this protected "horizon of consciousness," Dillard is emphatic that not only must we leave the writing there (Jane Austen used to tuck manuscripts into drawers so she could exist apart), but we must also leave our writer-self there.

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked the courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent and courteous for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?

British gardener Gertrude Jekyll once sighed that she longed for a small shed in the garden where no one would bother her. My garden - sometimes writing - shed. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The consciousness of writing is unbearable.   Read Rollo May's absolutely timeless study of creative fear and paralysis  or Patti Smith's extremely personal narrative of finding courage to create in her love for artist Robert Mapplethorpe. I knew I was no fiction writer when I failed to let my plants die ("Let the houseplants die," urges Dillard). My pothos gleamed in the sun as my fiction withered in the shade.   I have found that my current method of writing here on The Examined Life melts miraculously with the caretaking of plants, so much so that I've actually written about it here and nurtured other gardeners-cum-writers like Penelope Lively and and Robin Lane Fox. All's well. Except... well, the pothos died, but from a broken heater not writers' neglect.

Writing demands an emotional space; the writing self demands an emotional space.

"Sky 6" by Finnish photographer Santeri Tuori. The subtly fantastic aspect of these photographs is the vantage point as if Tuori took them from within, not below, the clouds. If I emptied myself into the air, this is how it would appear. Learn more.

Reading also demands a space, so I'd like to invite you to enter these works in hopes you, too, are met with grace. Anna Deavere Smith's hearty advice for young creatives, my study of the emotional space created by tea and poetry, the symbiotic relationship between freedom and discipline, and an analysis of our need to empty ourselves to be filled.