What actually makes Annie Dillard's prose recognizable?

The change of register inside a paragraph. She reports in flat, checkable sentences and then raises one line into the syntax and vocabulary of the King James Bible, with no transition to soften the jump. Plenty of writers can be taught to look at a frog carefully. Far fewer will set a psalm down next to the frog and then refuse to explain why the two are adjacent. Read the water bug passage in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and mark the exact word where the pitch moves. The mark falls between two full stops.

Why do her essays stop without a conclusion?

Because the withholding is the argument. If she told you what the burning moth in Holy the Firm meant, the meaning would be hers, and you would be reading a report of somebody else's experience instead of having one. Left open, it stays a live question you have to hold yourself. This is not the reporter's question that gets answered in chapter eight, and it is not ambiguity used as a mood. Her sentences resolve completely. What she declines to resolve is the relation between the sentence and the world.

How does she write about religion without preaching?

She uses the sound of belief and stays off its content. The cadence, the parallel clauses and the old plain nouns all come out of liturgy and carry the weight of liturgy, and then she stops one step before the assertion that liturgy exists to make. Holy the Firm sets a moth burning in a candle beside a girl badly burned when a plane came down, and holds those two facts next to each other with no theology offered to reconcile them. Whether she believes any particular thing stays undecided on the page. That is a compositional decision and it can be repeated by a writer who believes something else, or nothing.

What does The Writing Life say about cutting?

Its central instruction is uncomfortable and short. Do not save your best material for a better place later, and be suspicious of the passage you love most, because your affection for it is not evidence that the book needs it. Then she goes further. The beloved passage may turn out to be structural, so pulling it can bring down whatever was standing on it, and she tells you to pull it anyway. Treat the sentence you are proudest of as the first suspect whenever a draft will not work, and find out what the rest of the piece was leaning on it to say.

Is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek nature writing?

Only in the sense that a creek is where she happened to be standing. The subject is attention, and the creek supplies the material attention needs in order to work on anything. The tell is what she does with a natural fact once she has it. Nature writing builds toward a verdict about the natural world, usually a warning or a defense of it. Dillard builds toward a question about the person doing the looking, which is why the frog and the moth and the eclipse turn out to be interchangeable in her hands, while the looking itself is the one element she will not substitute, or hurry, or hand off to a source she read somewhere.

Can her style be practiced, or is it temperament?

Three parts of it are mechanical and can be drilled tonight. Write a plain paragraph and raise exactly one sentence in it. Cut the final line of every paragraph in an old draft. Rewrite one passage in the second person with a physical order in its first sentence. What resists drilling is the noticing that supplies the material, and that is less a talent than a practice carried out away from the desk, which Klinkenborg describes as an exercise in not writing. It has to happen before the sentences do, at whatever creek you have.

Non fiction

Annie DillardWriting Style

Born 4/30/1945

Report the thing plainly, raise exactly one sentence into a preacher's cadence, then stop before you say what it meant.

Write like Annie Dillard

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Annie Dillard: voice, themes, and technique.

A giant water bug has hold of a frog at the edge of Tinker Creek. Dillard stands there and keeps looking. The frog's shoulders slump, the head tips forward, the body goes slack and folds in on itself while the bug drains it from underneath, and she gives all of that to you in flat declaratives with no adjective doing any lifting. Then the pitch comes up off the ground. Within a few lines the prose has the parallel clauses and the short old nouns of the Authorized Version, and you have been carried from a creek bank into a much older kind of sentence without being told the move was happening.

That change of register is the engine of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it is the part of her that transfers to other subjects. Plain report is a floor she builds so one raised sentence has somewhere to rise from. Melville does a long version of it in Moby-Dick, where chapters of whale taxonomy hand off to a chapter that sounds like a psalm about the color white. Dillard runs the same switch inside a single paragraph, sometimes inside a single sentence, and she cuts out the connective clause that would have prepared you.

Then she stops. The moth in Holy the Firm flies into her candle, catches, and goes on burning for hours as a wick while she goes on reading her book by the light coming off it, and she will not tell you at any point in the book what the burning is for. Living Like Weasels turns the animal into an instruction for the reader and leaves the instruction standing. Klinkenborg tells writers that what they notice has no meaning and to assign it none, which is the discipline of a man protecting his sentences from his own interpretations. Dillard is stranger. She lets a raised line make an enormous claim about death or grace or God, holds it in the air, and declines to come back and settle it, and that refusal is why the essays can sound devout without ever hardening into doctrine.

The Writing Life carries her hardest argument about craft. Spend the good line now. Do not hoard it for a better place later in the book, and treat your pride in a passage as a warning rather than a verdict, because the piece you love most may turn out to be holding up a wall, and pulling it may bring the wall down anyway. Le Guin wanted the dazzling sentence cut because it halts the reader mid-story. Dillard's reason is structural, and worse, because the sentence she wants gone is the one you wrote the whole essay to reach.

How to Write Like Annie Dillard

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Annie Dillard.

1
Write the boring floor first
Take a scene you actually stood in and report it in one flat register, with no lift and no comparison anywhere in it. Give it five to ten sentences of what was there, in the plainest words you own, and include one detail that is unpleasant and one that is merely dull. Read it back. Confirm that it is a little boring, because that is the requirement rather than a failure, and a page that opens at altitude has nowhere left to climb.
2
Raise one sentence and cut the ramp
Find the single place where the scene wants to mean something, and write that one sentence at full height, in short old words, with the parallel clauses of a psalm if that is what comes to you. Now go back and find the clause you wrote to prepare the reader for it. The however, the in that moment, the which is why. Delete it. The lift should happen between two full stops with nothing in between, and if the paragraph now feels like it skips a step, you have done the exercise correctly.
3
Delete the last line of every paragraph
Open an old draft, cut the closing sentence of every paragraph without exception, including the ones you are sure are load-bearing, and read the whole piece straight through in one sitting. Most of those sentences were telling the reader what the paragraph had already shown. Put back only the ones whose absence breaks the sense, and expect that to be about one in four. This is the exercise that produces the abruptness people notice in her paragraphing, and it is the quickest way to find out how much of your essay was gloss.
4
Hand the looking to the reader
Rewrite one paragraph in the second person and put a physical imperative in its first sentence. Go down to the water. Wait until your feet are cold. Then test it: could a person obey that order today, someone who does not yet agree with a word you have written? An imperative that requires belief before it can be carried out is a sermon wearing work clothes, so shrink it until it is physical again, or drop it and keep the belief for later.
5
Spend your best line and see what falls
Take the sentence you are saving for the strong ending and move it into the paragraph you are writing today. Then take the passage you are proudest of out of the draft entirely, and read what remains. Sometimes the piece collapses, and that tells you the passage was carrying an argument you had stated nowhere else, so now you have to state it plainly in a sentence you do not love. Sometimes nothing happens at all, which is the more common answer and the more useful one.

Annie Dillard's Writing Style

Breakdown of Annie Dillard's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Her long sentences do not subordinate. They coordinate. She hooks clause to clause with "and" until a stretch of prose has the flat additive grammar of the Bible verses she grew up hearing, and the effect is that no clause outranks another, so a bird, a corpse and a thought about eternity all arrive at the same weight and the reader has to decide what mattered. Then she cuts to something four words long. The short one is where the judgment lands. Lodge's reading of coordinated prose holds for her: the strung "and" makes everything arrive at once, as one continuous experience, instead of in an order of importance.

Vocabulary Complexity

Two vocabularies, kept apart on purpose. One is the field guide, and it is exact: Polyphemus moth, giant water bug, sycamore, mantis egg case. The other is short and old and mostly Anglo-Saxon, the vocabulary of the psalms. She earns the second with the first. A sentence that has named a species correctly has bought the right to say something enormous three lines down, because the reader now has evidence that this writer knows what she is looking at, and that evidence is spendable. McPhee collects the exact technical noun with the same appetite and then holds one pitch for a whole book. Dillard treats the noun as credit and borrows against it immediately.

Tone

Two people seem to share the paragraph. One is a field observer with cold hands and an unimpressed eye who reports what the animal did. The other intones. What keeps the second one from turning into a preacher is the joke she puts immediately afterwards, and the jokes are aimed at herself and at the scenery in roughly equal measure. In Total Eclipse the hotel room holds a painting of a clown assembled out of vegetables, and she gives it real attention before the sky goes wrong. The comedy is load-bearing. Take it out and the intoned sentences set into piety within a page, and she knows exactly that, which is why the funny line so often lands one line after the holy one.

Pacing

Watch where her paragraphs stop. Usually one sentence early. The line that would have explained the scene never arrives, and the white space does the work that a summary sentence does in ordinary essays, which is why the prose feels fast even when nothing is happening. Babel called a new paragraph a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from another side. Dillard uses the break as a camera cut. Total Eclipse jumps from a hotel room to a hill above the Yakima valley to a restaurant afterwards with no bridging paragraph anywhere, and the unmarked gaps between those three places are where the essay does its damage.

Dialogue Style

Speech in her essays has one job, which is to refuse to rise. After the eclipse the people in the restaurant reach for household objects to describe what they saw, and the smallness of their comparisons is the reason she quotes them at all. When she runs up from the basement in An American Childhood to announce that there is an amoeba under her microscope, her parents are warm about it and do not come down. She gives their answer flat, without gloss. Dialogue in Dillard is the sound of the world declining to be as large as the prose around it, and she records that decline without any complaint attached, as a plain fact about how people speak when something has happened to them that their available sentences were not shaped to hold.

Descriptive Approach

The most copied thing about her is the detail. The most useful thing is the pronoun. She writes long stretches in the second person and gives you verbs to obey, so a description turns into an assignment: go out, stand still, wait for your feet to get cold. In the seeing chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she offers the bullfrog she herself could not find while a dozen campers stood around it shouting directions, and the failure is handed over as a task rather than a confession. That "you" carries no decoration. It puts your body on the bank, which means the observation stops being a report you can decline to check, and it is the reason the withheld conclusion works at all, because you were the one looking and the meaning is now your problem.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Annie Dillard uses across their work.

The unannounced lift

One sentence in the paragraph changes pitch and nothing warns you. Three plain reporting sentences, then a fourth in biblical syntax, and the transitional clause that would have made the change feel prepared has been deleted. What it solves is the credibility problem of lyric prose. A reader who has been handed flat, checkable observation for half a page will follow one raised sentence a very long way. The hard part is the floor, because you have to write several sentences you find boring, keep them in when every instinct tells you to make them prettier, and hold your nerve all the way to the fifth sentence, which is the only one in the paragraph allowed to have any altitude in it at all.

The paragraph cut a line early

She ends the paragraph before the sentence that would have explained it, and the break says what that sentence would have said. This kills the summarizing reflex that flattens most essays, where a writer distrusts his own scene and glosses it immediately. Knowing which line is the gloss is the difficulty, since the gloss tends to be the line you were writing toward. Delete the last sentence of every paragraph in a draft, read what survives, and put back only the ones whose absence breaks the sense.

The imperative that puts you on the bank

She switches to the second person and gives an order. Go out. Stand there. Watch the water. A description becomes a task, so a reader who was consuming a scene starts performing one, and the essay's claim about attention turns into something you are at this moment either doing or refusing to do. It answers the passivity that sinks reflective prose. It collapses the moment the imperative starts scolding, so the verb has to stay physical and small, something a person could carry out this afternoon without believing anything first.

The name that buys the altitude

The exact species name arrives before the large claim, in that order, and the order is the whole trick. Naming the giant water bug correctly is a demonstration of competence, and that competence is what she spends when she asks you to consider mortality four lines later. Reverse the sequence and the claim floats free of anything. The difficulty here has nothing to do with sentences. It requires you to go and learn the actual names of the things in your subject before you are allowed to write the beautiful part.

The moral she declines to draw

The anecdote ends and no lesson follows it. She builds every bit of pressure a lesson would need, then leaves the paragraph open and goes somewhere else, and the reader keeps carrying the thing, which is harder work than being told what to think and leaves far more residue. Withholding reads as evasion unless the observation was exact, so this device is only available to a writer who already did the earlier labor. That dependency is what makes it the least imitable thing on the page.

Spending the line you were saving

The Writing Life argues against saving your best material for later in the book and against keeping a passage because it is beautiful, and treats both as one error of thrift. Put the good line where you are working today. When a passage has to go, accept that pulling it may bring down what was resting on it. This is the most expensive item in her kit and the one that most visibly improves a draft, since the writer who hoards ends up with a book whose finest sentences are all sitting in chapter nine.

Literary Devices Annie Dillard Uses

Literary devices that define Annie Dillard's style.

Parataxis

Clauses laid side by side and joined with "and", with no subordination to rank them. The grammar comes out of the Authorized Version, and it does two things at once. It flattens hierarchy, so the reader has to decide which detail was the important one. And it builds momentum, because a coordinated string has no natural place to stop, which is how a paragraph about pond water gathers the speed of something with a plot. The cost is control. Parataxis will carry a reader past a weak detail as readily as a strong one, and it does it at speed, so all of the selecting has to be finished before the syntax starts, which is why the sentences look effortless while the choosing they rest on was not.

Anaphora at the turn

When the register is about to change, the sentence openings start repeating. Two or three in a row begin the same way, and the repetition is the signal, the way a raised hand is a signal before anyone has spoken. Wood's observation about Lawrence is the useful one here, that repetition turns out to be alteration, because what follows the repeated words differs every time and the sameness is what makes the difference audible. Angelou runs the device out of the same pulpit tradition and sustains it across whole passages. Dillard keeps hers short, and breaks off rather than resolving.

The second-person imperative

Not simple address, and not apostrophe to something absent. A command to the reader, in the present tense, with a physical verb in it. She tells you to go and look, and the grammar of that sentence makes you either the person looking or the person refusing, with no third position on offer. In an essay with no plot the device manufactures a stake out of nothing except your willingness. The risk is plain. Repeated too often the page turns into instructions, so she tends to use it at the opening of a movement and then drop back into first person for the reporting.

The one-sentence paragraph

A single line standing alone with air on both sides. She puts it where an argumentative writer would put a topic sentence, and it performs the opposite office, since it stops what came before instead of announcing what comes next. Francine Prose points out that the edges of a paragraph carry more weight than its middle, which is why a paragraph consisting only of edges hits as hard as it does. Dillard's are usually plain rather than lyrical. The lyrical sentence gets buried mid-paragraph, and the flat one gets the white space.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Annie Dillard.

Holding the prose at full height for pages

The lift exists only as a difference. Sustain the same pitch for three paragraphs and it stops being a change at all, and a default setting that intones is what readers call fancy prose. Gardner's distinction is the one to keep: choosing the bardic voice means stepping back from ordinary speech toward the intoned, and every time you do it you pay for it in realism. Dillard pays that price in single sentences and returns to a plain floor within a line or two. Imitators pay it continuously, which means they cannot afford anything else, so the moth and the creek and the light stop being objects and turn into occasions for a voice.

Taking the withheld conclusion as license to be vague

Two very different things look alike on the page. One is an exact observation whose meaning has been left open on purpose. The other is a writer who has not worked out what he saw. Dillard's sentences are hard, specific and finished at the level of grammar, and the openness sits above them, in the question of what they add up to. Copy the openness without the exactness and you get haze, plus a reader who cannot tell whether you are refusing to explain or unable to. The diagnostic is simple. Could a stranger redraw your scene from your sentences alone? If not, there is nothing there to withhold.

Borrowing the cadence and then asserting the doctrine

Her sentences take the rhythm of scripture and stop short of its claims. A paragraph will run right up to God and leave the sentence in the air, and the reader is free to hear a believer, a doubter, or somebody who has not settled the question. C. S. Lewis does the other thing entirely. He argues a position and expects your assent, and that is a legitimate mode with a craft of its own. Splicing the two is the error. Take Dillard's cadence, attach a proposition to it, and you have written a sermon in a naturalist's clothes, which loses the readers who came for the seeing and fails to satisfy the ones who came for an argument.

Breaking paragraphs early with nothing behind the break

A cut works in proportion to what it cuts off. Her short paragraphs land because a long, patient, accumulating one came directly before them, so the white space arrives as a held breath rather than a shrug. A page of three-line paragraphs has no accumulation to interrupt, and the breaks read as a nervous tic. Count the sentences before each of your own breaks. If the answer is two or three all the way down the page, you have taken the mannerism and left the mechanism behind, and the repair is to write one long paragraph that earns the silence after it.

Books

Explore Annie Dillard's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Annie Dillard's writing style and techniques.

What actually makes Annie Dillard's prose recognizable?: The change of register inside a paragraph. She reports in flat, checkable sentences and then raises one line into the syntax and vocabulary of the King James Bible, with no transition to soften the jump. Plenty of writers can be taught to look at a frog carefully. Far fewer will set a psalm down next to the frog and then refuse to explain why the two are adjacent. Read the water bug passage in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and mark the exact word where the pitch moves. The mark falls between two full stops.
Why do her essays stop without a conclusion?: Because the withholding is the argument. If she told you what the burning moth in Holy the Firm meant, the meaning would be hers, and you would be reading a report of somebody else's experience instead of having one. Left open, it stays a live question you have to hold yourself. This is not the reporter's question that gets answered in chapter eight, and it is not ambiguity used as a mood. Her sentences resolve completely. What she declines to resolve is the relation between the sentence and the world.
How does she write about religion without preaching?: She uses the sound of belief and stays off its content. The cadence, the parallel clauses and the old plain nouns all come out of liturgy and carry the weight of liturgy, and then she stops one step before the assertion that liturgy exists to make. Holy the Firm sets a moth burning in a candle beside a girl badly burned when a plane came down, and holds those two facts next to each other with no theology offered to reconcile them. Whether she believes any particular thing stays undecided on the page. That is a compositional decision and it can be repeated by a writer who believes something else, or nothing.
What does The Writing Life say about cutting?: Its central instruction is uncomfortable and short. Do not save your best material for a better place later, and be suspicious of the passage you love most, because your affection for it is not evidence that the book needs it. Then she goes further. The beloved passage may turn out to be structural, so pulling it can bring down whatever was standing on it, and she tells you to pull it anyway. Treat the sentence you are proudest of as the first suspect whenever a draft will not work, and find out what the rest of the piece was leaning on it to say.
Is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek nature writing?: Only in the sense that a creek is where she happened to be standing. The subject is attention, and the creek supplies the material attention needs in order to work on anything. The tell is what she does with a natural fact once she has it. Nature writing builds toward a verdict about the natural world, usually a warning or a defense of it. Dillard builds toward a question about the person doing the looking, which is why the frog and the moth and the eclipse turn out to be interchangeable in her hands, while the looking itself is the one element she will not substitute, or hurry, or hand off to a source she read somewhere.
Can her style be practiced, or is it temperament?: Three parts of it are mechanical and can be drilled tonight. Write a plain paragraph and raise exactly one sentence in it. Cut the final line of every paragraph in an old draft. Rewrite one passage in the second person with a physical order in its first sentence. What resists drilling is the noticing that supplies the material, and that is less a talent than a practice carried out away from the desk, which Klinkenborg describes as an exercise in not writing. It has to happen before the sentences do, at whatever creek you have.

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