Annie Dillard is the author and narrator of The Writing Life who appears in the book as an experienced writer offering advice, consolation, and encouragement to her readers. At the time of publishing, Dillard was an established, award-winning author and professor of writing at various colleges. Dillard was born April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but she has lived all over the United States during her career—from Roanoke, Virginia to the remote Lummi Island in Washington. For much of the book, Dillard looks back at her early writing career around the time she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and other early nonfiction works. In The Writing Life, Dillard focuses heavily on where she wrote, as her experiences in each environment helped to inform the topics she wrote about. She occasionally mentions friends and family who were with her at the time—neighbors and an unnamed husband—but because her advice and analysis of writing centers so deeply on the internal world, Dillard does not delve profoundly into the dynamics of these relationships.

Due to the vignette-like structure of the book and the ambiguous genre, the reader does not receive much concrete biographical or physical information about Dillard.