Annie Dillard chose her workspaces to be as plain as she could stand. A cell over a parking lot. A library carrel with the windows blocked. A pine shed where the desk faced a blank wall. The dullness was the whole point, and she said so plainly.
A Cell, a Carrel, and a Shed
The list of rooms is short and unglamorous. Dillard finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the book that won her the Pulitzer, in a study carrel at the Hollins College library in Virginia during the summer of 1973. Years earlier she had worked in what she called a cinder-block cell set over a parking lot, its only outlook a tar-and-gravel roof. When she came to write parts of The Writing Life, she was in a pine shed under trees on Cape Cod, and she pushed the long desk against a blank wall so neither window sat in front of her. She also kept a cabin on a remote island in Puget Sound. None of it was chosen for charm. Each room did one job, which was to get out of the way.
Why the View Had to Go
The bareness was the strategy. A good view, Dillard argued, quietly competes with the page, and the eye keeps drifting to the window instead of the work. So she removed the window from the equation. She blocked the glass, or turned her back to it, or picked a room with nothing worth looking at to begin with. Even a plate-glass window opening onto fields and sky counted as a distraction to be shut out. Her inversion of Virginia Woolf is deliberate. Woolf wanted a room of one's own. Dillard wanted a room with nothing in it to see.
One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
It reads as austere, and it was. The payoff, in her telling, is that boredom pushes a writer inward. With nothing to watch, imagination has to supply the scenery, and that is where the writing comes from. She didn't stumble into these rooms. She sought out the plainest one available and shut the door on the world outside it.
See the full Annie Dillard writing routine for how these spaces fit her wider habits.
What You Can Steal
- Face a blank wall. Put your desk where there is nothing to watch.
- Cover the window if you have to. Dillard blocked hers and kept working.
- Choose the dull room over the pretty one. The boredom sends you into the work.
- Judge a space by what it produces, not by the view.