The Writing Life

I found Annie Dillard's book to be very enlightening and charming.  I found myself often chuckling at her wit.  At first, I was confounded by her mixing of metaphors in the first few chapters, but she made it coalesce extremely well.  That is something I'd like to steal from her--her unabashed use of a multitude of metaphors and seem to work so well together in context. 
Her honesty about her work environment, about the painful process of writing was humbling.  She made a grueling process of hard work, blood, sweat and tears become beautiful.  The scene of her working on the Fourth of July and heeding the June bug's thumping was remarkably striking.  Also, her description of said workspace and the need to not look outside was intriguing.  I have found that more and more I need almost sensory deprivation to get work done and find it admirable that willingly did that.  I find that the hardest part of writing--the will to actually sit down and focus on what you're working on.  Very tough to do.Thus, I found The Writing Life encouraging.  It tied in spectacularly with the Writer's Series event.