Hello Dear Readers. For this week’s review I re-read Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. It is a must read for writers, and indeed for anyone interested in understanding themselves and the human condition. There are lots of accessible and practical writing tips for fiction and non-fiction writers alike. The exercises and lessons are presented with humour and compassion and act as a doorway into ourselves. What follows is my take on what’s good, what’s bad and what the author says about getting onto the writing path.
The Good
Bird by Bird is to writers what good sex education is to teenagers or good period preparation is to soon-to-be menstruators. Mechanics without meaning get everyone nowhere fast. Facts over feelings and foibles isolate and silence us. Anne Lamott keeps these mistakes miles away by addressing mechanics and meaning, facts, feelings and foibles all together. In the book we learn about
- why we write,
- what and who we write for,
- what we write about and how we write it,
- as well as what gets in the way.
The challenges that come with trying to write, be it for private or public consumption, take center stage.
Writing is not for everyone, but if you try it on for size, you might be surprised. Who better to go on the journey with than Anne Lamott? She will make you laugh and cry and cringe. She will also get you to the goal while teaching you a few things about life along the way. It’s not for nothing that a 25th Anniversary edition is now available both in print and electronically.
The author takes you on the adventure of your life. You will have mindfulness down pat by the time you have learned to think and act like a writer. If you do the exercises in the book, you will get in touch with reality and identify options for dealing with it. Awe will take you by the shoulders and shake you awake and then heal you. Add a dose of Lamott’s humour with a serving of stream-of-consciousness insight into the human heart and brain and you are away laughing. Then get on the rollercoaster of human connections via friends and writers’ groups who read your drafts. If you put your hands in the air and scream loud enough as you go through the loop-de-loop, you will breath a sigh of compassion and grace when you reach the end of the ride. Lamott also tells you what your therapist and priest ought to tell you, but are too scared to because of what society might think. The book is full of pithy wisdom from everyday life, local heroes, writers past and present.
There are anecdotes and nuggets of wisdom for anyone interested in living an authentic life as well. “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there, shining.”
Lamott is less concerned with teaching you to write well than she is with getting you to just write and understand why writing is important! She promises that if you write you will become a better reader and a better person. If you write you will start to pay attention and soften. You will acknowledge and touch some of your deepest needs: to be visible, to be heard, to make sense of your life, to wake up and grow and belong. Forget Matthieu Ricard, David Steindl-Rast, and Eckhart Tolle — she may just be the only guru you ever need. The author is a friend to herself, and if you pay attention you will find she teaches the rest of us how to befriend ourselves too.
The Bad
The by-line for Bird by Bird is: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It’s important to know what this book is not…
It is not a manual on learning to write. If you want a list of drills on how to use adjectives, or tricks for making time move or stand still, or an agenda for running a writer’s group, step-by-step instructions on how to get published, or what you need to include in a good how-to book, you will be disappointed. You will also be disappointed if you are looking for tips and criteria for producing great non-fiction. Lamott’s focus is on writing fiction. Good fiction for her is about seeking truth by telling lies every step of the way. “It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth , and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.” I also love that she says “You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”
If your primary goal it to get published, this book is probably not for you either. Lamott does talk about getting published, but more in terms of the motivation for doing so and the sensations when it happens. She sees it as one of the lesser by-products of writing. You might remark that this is easy to say for someone who is already published. She will tell you that is is precisely because she is published that she is most qualified to say so.
It is a book about the process of writing, and the experience of it. She lets you into the head and heart of wannabe and professional writers. She does this in a humorous, ironic and, at times, exaggerated way. This can become annoying for some readers who are not as paranoid and self-critical as she or I. It might also be off-putting for people who are only just starting out on the writing journey.
The book reads like a story – the story of Anne Lamott’s personal forays into the writing badlands as well as the writing classes she teaches. The table of contents acts like a course outline. Because there is no index of exercises, you will have to read through each chapter to find the practices that will help you weather the storms that batter every writer of fiction and non-fiction alike.
For reference sake, here is a list of some of her exercises that might tickle your fancy but that you will have to read through the whole book to find:
| Mine your childhood | Talking about it until the fever breaks |
| The one-inch picture frame | Feel your feelings |
| Describe one bird at a time (take it bird by bird | Index cards |
| Shitty First Drafts | Call around |
| Isolate the voices | Writing groups |
| Polaroids | Getting feedback |
| ABCDE | Writing letters |
| Sound your words | Accept emptiness |
| Practice | Death Awareness |
| Ritual | Go and do something else |
| Breath | Go through the forbidden door |
| Broccoli | Give freely |
The How To
Short assignments are the mainstay of Lamott’s approach to writing, and the backstory to the book’s title. She will come back to them over and over again throughout the book. They are her antidote to overwhelm and the ship that will keep your writing afloat and heading somewhere.
Actually, this review came together around a series of short assignments. I was at sea and didn’t know where to begin because the book is complex and covers so much. So I started with drafting my Instagram mini-reviews. Each Instagram post functioned like the one-inch picture frame.
The one-inch picture frame is something Lamott keeps on her desk to remind her that all she has to do is write down as much as she can see through it. It’s a bit like that exercise that people sometimes do when learning to draw. The teacher puts an empty frame around an object and tells the student to only draw what they see in the frame, or to draw the negative space between the frame and the object. So, you pick one small scene, one memory, or one exchange to write about. And you take one thing at a time — bird by bird!
To emphasise her point, she quotes E.L.Doctorow as saying, “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
A short assignment is a short piece of writing, NOT a piece of writing that takes a short period of time to accomplish. It’s important not to confuse the two. The rest of the book is about all the subsequent work that goes into shaping that short piece into useful and satisfying writing.
You don’t have to have it all figured out from the start. One short thing will lead to the next and suddenly you have what you were after even though you didn’t know what, exactly, that was to begin with.
Conclusion
I first read this book 22 years ago and got a lot out of it. I didn’t really get it, though, until I read it again now. Lamott recognises that the craft of writing is not easy and she requires a lot of you! A certain amount of life experience along with a willingness to look yourself squarely in the eye and delve into the hole in your heart is necessary. Beware! The humour, easy-going style and humanising stream-of-consciousness writing can lull you into a false sense of security. Bird by Bird is brimming with all kinds of practical ways to get writing. Simplicity notwithstanding, they will exact everything of you if you do them sincerely. They will also help you deal with the challenges that come with the writing life.