The following is an excerpt from Annie Dillard's 1989 book The Writing Life (non-fiction narrative). This continues our series on good descriptive writing.
This night I was concentrating on the chapter. The horizon of my consciousness was the contracted circle of light inside my study - the lone lamp in the enormous, dark library. I leaned over the desk. I worked by hand. I doodled deliriously in the legal-pad margins. I fiddled with the index cards. I reread a sentence maybe a hundred times, and if I kept it, I changed it seven or eight times, often substantially.
Now a June bug was knocking at my window. I was wrestling inside a sentence. I must have heard it a dozen times before it registered - before I noticed that I had been hearing a bug knock for half an hour. It made a hollow, bonking sound. Some people call the same fumbling, heavy insects "May beetles." It must have been attracted to my light - what little came between the slats of the blind. I dislike June bugs. Back to work. Knock again, knock again, and finally, to learn what monster of a fat, brown June bug could fly up to my second story and thump so insistently at my window as though it wanted admittance - at last, unthinkingly, I parted the venetian blind slats with my fingers, to look out.
And there were the fireworks, far away. It was the Fourth of July. I had forgotten. They were red and yellow, blue and green and white; they blossomed high in the black sky many miles away. The fireworks seemed as distant as the stars, but I could hear the late banging their bursting made. The sound, those bangs so muffled and out of sync, accompanied at random the silent, far sprays of color widening and raining down. It was the Fourth of July, and I had forgotten all of wide space and all of historical time. I opened the blinds a crack like eyelids, and it all came exploding in on me at once - oh yes, the world.
Related reading: Annie Dillard - Official Site; Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; Annie Dillard's Advice to Writers; The Descriptive Writing of Dorothy Sayers; Jonathan Swift's Descriptive Writing; Joseph Conrad's Descriptive Writing; The Descriptive Writing of Martha Grimes; Willa Cather's Descriptive Writing
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