The Writing Life....Chapter 2

I haven't posted in a long time. Writing a blog post again seems weird to me. BUT i need to talk about Dillard and her Writing Life, so here we go:

Eh.
I liked this chapter more than the first one. First off, she didn't use the second person, so I had no issues with absolutely everything she said...

it still irks me when she's being sooooo completely detailed, because i like to leave a few things for imagination and it seems unnecessary, but i really did like some parts about the library that she described, and the June bug she imagined knocking on her window. A lot of the stories in this chapter were interesting, my favorites being the one about the Fourth of July and the chess-baby :)

It's nice that a lot of this sort of writing (not the longggggggggg scenery passages of ch 1) can draw a lot of subtle points and aspects of having a writing life. As she writes away on the Fourth of July, it's interesting to imagine how absorbed she must have been, how lost in her writing, to have heard fireworks and thought it was actually a fat beetle.

I had to mull the chess-baby story more in my head. I really wasn't sure what that story was supposed to be about, but....it felt literary, so it's like it had a indescribable tie to writing that wasn't specific, but there nonetheless. after thinking about it, i think i decided that these are the types of things that get interpreted by everyone differently, with no particular answer. So my interpretation is that the story parallels Dillard's writing in that the writing process really does feel like a struggle against some ridiculous, confusing, invisible force. It's something I can relate to. I definitely felt like i was in the losing end of a chess-wit-battle while i was writing my story, and I certainly wanted to beat up whatever "lunatic opponent" was scrambling the board of my story to pieces.