Blog 2 by Ruthie Heavrin

I was about three seconds away from finding Annie Dillard's address on Google and writing her a nasty gram in my worst possible writing just to spite her and all her rules. Then I read the last sentence and applauded Dillard for recognizing what I was thinking the entire time I read her endless list of do's and do-not's. That last sentence read, “You need to know these things somewhere in the back of your mind, and you need to forget them and write whatever you're going to write” (xvii). When it comes to writing, there are more areas of grey than there are of black and white. Readers can of course decide what is good writing and what is bad writing but not all readers can pin-point why a book or article is enjoyable or just waste of paper. That is where Dillard's rules come in: the writer should know what does and does not work.

Over time, a dancer forgets that they are stepping in patterns and does not consciously think about each move, but rather just moves as they have been trained for years. As beginning writers, we should of course learn the steps and even have them beaten into our heads so they don't exit through the back door as soon as they enter, but Dillard is correct when she concludes that the rules need to be forgotten before sitting down to write. Like motion memory, the rules will perform themselves.

A dancer on stage mouthing the beat and stomping their feet in deliberate steps would almost be painful to watch because the audience expects them to know the routine without a second thought.

When I read Dillard's suggestion to forget what our sixth grade teachers have taught us about “walk” and “say,” I immediately accused her of being a hypocrite for telling us to forget those rules, but to somehow keep all the ones currently being fed to us. How refreshing it was to read the last lines and know that I'm not alone and the jumbled mess of post-its above my desk that read, “No passive verbs!” I have even learned to cringe at the sight of the exclamation point. Suddenly, the entire article took on a new meaning. Those sixth grade teachers replacing “trot” for “walk” and “exclaim” for “say” are only trying to expand the vocabulary of pre-teen writers who probably use the same word six to seven times in the span of three sentences. There will always be new rules for writing based on the experience and level of the one doing the writing. As soon as all of Dillard's guidelines are memorized, practiced, and forgotten, new ones will spring up. All in all, they are an effort to improve an art, but I'm still going to write whatever I want.