Writing Like Weasels

Annie Dillard knows how to unblock a girl

When you’ve been both a buyer and a seller, it’s hard to ever just be a writer. 

I’ve been toiling over this screenplay idea for months now. While I can see the vibe, and I know the audience, and I even know path to selling the damn thing, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the story actually is. After re-reading Save the Cat, I tried to write the logline for the movie multiple times and totally failed. If that’s not a sign it isn’t meant to be written (right now, or ever), I don’t know what else is. 

The first couple months of the strike, I set about having something to show for myself once it was over. Just as I did at the beginning of the pandemic, I refused to allow the idle months to pass in vain. But this time around, the project I’d settled on felt great as a soundtrack to the stories I tell myself in order to live, the daydreams I had about a big feature sale and debut. I was constantly negotiating with my selves, as the network, the producer, and the writer. I was thinking more about the end product than the process. And both were going nowhere.

It’s no secret I’ve been in a slump. This week I spent a lot of Monday on the couch, trying to be productive by reading two books, but really just passing the time reading a sentence then dozing. I’d finally had enough with myself, and on Tuesday resolved to chop some wood instead of sawing some logs. That morning, I read Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels,” and then I read it many more times. After lunch, I read it again while typing it up to send to a friend. The whole essay is phenomenal, but the last paragraph left me breathless:

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your milky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

You have to read the essay in its entirety to fully comprehend what she’s saying with this imagery - of a weasel’s jaw gripped fiercely to the throat of a flying eagle - but this is one of those rare cases where the rhythm and choice of words convey as much as their actual meaning.  

The weasel lifestyle stayed with me as I resumed a regular coffee drinking routine, picked up the house, did laundry, answered emails, and refused myself a nap. That night, instead of consuming three episodes of SUITS before bed, I watched one and then turned on the white noise machine that helps drown out the (probably imagined) ringing in my ears. And I fell into a deep sleep…

…only to be awakened at around 3am hearing a voice - I’m not sure if it was my own, or an ancestor, to be perfectly honest - telling me I needed to try my hand at writing a novel about a particular situation I’d found myself in a couple of months ago. The voice was confident, and crystal clear.  I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. I felt a surge of adrenaline, which was different than the far more frequent cortisol spike that wakes me up at 3. This time, I closed my eyes again and started plotting, and as I drifted back off to sleep, the names of the three main characters came to me with, once again, force and clarity.

When I woke up again at 6, I immediately wrote two paragraphs, from memory as if I’d already said them in a dream. And while I’ve definitely still felt the urge to nap in the afternoons throughout the week, I approach my daily tasks and my quiet moments with the stillness that usually comes as an idea implants itself in my brain. I’m not thinking about selling it, or writing a proposal, or finding an agent, but instead relishing in the mushiness of a notion without expectation. I’m just writing. 

I attribute this creative breakthrough to many things - my own attempt to pull myself out of darkness, Mercury turning direct today, a new moon last night. Mostly, though, I have to thank Annie Dillard for unleashing a subconscious voice that’s affixed itself to my throat, a symbiotic necessity between my voice and it. I look forward to the seizing, the scattering, the heights we’ll reach together.