Annie Dillard and the Writing Life

Count the verbs in Alexander Chee’s essay, note the absence of emotional language, and then thank Annie Dillard for her part. Chee, an essayist and fiction writer, revisits his undergraduate writing workshop with Dillard, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer who died last week at 81. Chee’s account of their semester together is an affectionate portrait that doubles as a brisk craft talk; in it, he puts Dillard’s lessons through their paces, a fitting tribute to the teacher who borrowed cigarette drags from her students, chewed through caramel candies during class, and nurtured his own artistic evolution with her rules and exercises.

Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer’s experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical—no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of “the job.” If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.

. . .

One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in our pages, scissors and tape, and told to bring several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with over many versions.

Now cut out only the best sentences, she said. And tape them on a blank page. And then when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written thus far.