Writing is the Garden of Life

Dillard attempts to dispell any misconceptions readers or mere passersby have about writing by metaphorically comparing it with a gardener and his garden. The author argues that every word tentatively placed on a piece of paper is a living, breathing sustainable life. This imagery permeates Dillard's writing in The Writing Life and transports the reader into an imaginary garden. The question Dillard then poses to the reader is whether or not this garden is like the biblical garden of Eden or a tangled mess of thorns, sprinkled with revisions, grammatical errors, and writer's block. The procedural tediousness of writing, Dillard states, is liked to planting and cultivating a brand new garden. The gardener must rake, water, nourish, tend, and only at the end can he or she plant, seed by seed, the flowers. When taken in this light, the reader is shown into a word of patience and endurance- just like the gardener plants his garden seed by seed, so the writer writes her story “word by word, on down the garden path” (11). As the reader, one is transported to a garden of his or her liking, and told to imagine a barren world with no color, no flowers and then to picture oneself illuminating each crevice, each corner with tenderness, care, words. In sustaining this figurative garden, Dillard argues that a writer is creating life, just as a flower by any other name, is a living thing. The role of writer as creator is made, and Dillard continues to illustrate the importance and difficulty of being a writer. By describing this journey as well as the tangible procedures a writer goes through, even in the simple dictation of her thoughts to paper, Dillard takes the reader by the hand and symbollicaly removes the blind fold they have on the world of a writer. Thus, the juxtaposition of writing with a garden truly highlights and demasks the life of an author and gives new meaning to the duty of informing, entertaining and educating society through the written word.