Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. This week’s roundup is too similar to two weeks ago. Annie Dillard died on Tuesday, one of my biggest writing idols who had me asking myself “you can do that?,” and later taught me through her work how to write and live.

Here are 10 interesting things about Annie Dillard I’m sharing this week:

Last week I wrote about how Cory Doctorow separates how he feels about his writing from the writing itself.

Annie Dillard would agree:

“Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.” “The Writer’s Life”, page 15

Annie Dillard died on Wednesday, who’s been one of my top influences, inspirations, and mysterious benefactor of writing wisdom for the past 10 years.

Her book, “The Writing Life,” is one of my favorite books about writing, but because she’s such a good writer, it doesn’t even rank in my Top 3 Best Dillard Books. Maybe Top 5. Maybe. Because each of her books is so good, and teach you so much about life and nature and philosophy and writing — her book about how to write and how to live is just the surface.

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The humidity dropped in Minnesota, so I ordered a new winter coat and can’t wait for colder weather.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. “I’m a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs and hammocks into pungent tech criticism.” Love this Longreads Questionnaire with Cory Doctorow, the tech blogger and fiction writer who I didn’t know had a thing for David Byrne, too!
2. I loved learning about the book clusters R.F. Kuang draws on for each of her books — Victorian lit for “Babel” with its maximal prose, Dante/Milton/Ovid for “Katabasis.”
3. I wrote about Cory Doctorow’s and R.F. Kuang’s advice to not pay too much attention to how you feel about your writing when you’re writing. First it has to exist, then you can make it good.
4. Love these illustrations Gustave Doré made for Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve taken a break from reading Inferno, but they complement the mood!
5. Love this video about how Terry Gross reads a book.
6. “Reading is prismatic, and a great writer shows us how to read far beyond their own works.” Enjoying this series from The Guardian asking writers about influential books they’ve read, especially this one with Madeline Thien about running up and down mountains listening to Middlemarch, the plurality of reading, and The Iliad.
7. “It’s clear the problem isn’t the writing, but the starting. In those cases, it’s helpful to think about why starting is difficult and then apply a solution.” Writing is easy once I’m actually writing, but the procrastination and hand-wringing before starting is my biggest obstacle. So I like this idea of using writing catalysts to get in the writing flow with less activation energy.
8. Taking notes on how to take good travel notes.
9. I’m still reading out of season with Dan Simmons’ “The Terror,” but pretty soon that will invert to reading thick, hot summer books.
10. The psychology behind why you rewatch the same movies (the same probably also applies to books).

See you on down the dusty trail,

I’ve written about how Cory Doctorow consciously separates how he feels about his writing from the writing itself:

“My writing epiphany was there was no relation to the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality. … You can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad while you’re writing it. … Once you start thinking about what you’re writing, you lose the ability to stop writing it.”