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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Paperback – Picture Book, September 1, 1995
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“Superb writing advice…. Hilarious, helpful, and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review
For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title:
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 1995
- Dimensions7.99 x 5.2 x 0.54 inches
- ISBN-100385480016
- ISBN-13978-0385480017
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
—The New York Times Book Review
“A warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps.”
—Los Angeles Times
“One of the funniest books on writing ever published.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“A gift to all of us mortals who write or ever wanted to write. . . . Sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise and alternately cranky and kind—a reveille to get off our duffs and start writing now, while we still can.”
—Seattle Times
“Bird by Bird would be worth reading just for Lamott’s ele- gant, moving, and often-hilarious prose. But the advice she offers is just as fantastic as the style with which it’s delivered.”
—Forbes
“Anne Lamott understands better than anyone that writers need help. . . . She writes so well, in fact, that it’s hard to believe that she, too, has trouble with writing. That’s what’s so deeply comforting about this book.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Deftly and honestly explores the mental challenges of being a writer. . . . Lamott’s advice is, simply put, invaluable.”
—Bustle
“[Lamott] uses her writing exercises or lessons as a way to help us more deeply understand ourselves and the human condition in all its messiness. If you’re looking for sense-making and meaning during this deeply destabilizing time, this book is timeless.”
—Elise Hu, TED Talks Daily
“Delight[s] with insight and descriptive acumen. This humorous, insightful, no-nonsense approach will remind novices why they are writing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Offers unique inspiration. . . . An honest appraisal of what it takes to be a writer and why it matters so much.”
—Library Journal
From the Publisher
"Superb writing advice... hilarious, helpful and provocative." -- New York Times Book Review.
"A warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps." -- Los Angeles Times.
"A gift to all of us mortals who write or ever wanted to write... sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise and alternately cranky and kind -- a reveille to get off our duffs and start writing now, while we still can." -- Seattle Times.
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. Year after year my students are bursting with stories to tell, and they start writing projects with excitement and maybe even joy—finally their voices will be heard, and they are going to get to devote themselves to this one thing they’ve longed to do since childhood. But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith. Their sense of self and story shatters and crumbles to the ground. Historically they show up for the first day of the workshop looking like bright goofy ducklings who will follow me anywhere, but by the time the second class rolls around, they look at me as if the engagement is definitely off.
“I don’t even know where to start,” one will wail.
Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.
Now, the amount of material may be so overwhelming that it can make your brain freeze. When I had been writing food reviews for a number of years, there were so many restaurants and individual dishes in my brainpan that when people asked for a recommendation, I couldn’t think of a single restaurant where I’d ever actually eaten. But if the person could narrow it down to, say, Indian, I might remember one lavish Indian palace, where my date had asked the waiter for the Rudyard Kipling sampler and later for the holy-cow tartare. Then a number of memories would come to mind, of other dates and other Indian restaurants.
So you might start by writing down every single thing you can remember from your first few years in school. Start with kindergarten. Try to get the words and memories down as they occur to you. Don’t worry if what you write is no good, because no one is going to see it. Move on to first grade, to second, to third. Who were your teachers, your classmates? What did you wear? Who and what were you jealous of? Now branch out a little. Did your family take vacations during those years? Get these down on paper. Do you remember how much more presentable everybody else’s family looked? Do you remember how when you’d be floating around in an inner tube on a river, your own family would have lost the little cap that screws over the airflow valve, so every time you got in and out of the inner tube, you’d scratch new welts in your thighs? And how other families never lost the caps?
If this doesn’t pan out, or if it does but you finish mining this particular vein, see if focusing on holidays and big events helps you recollect your life as it was. Write down everything you can remember about every birthday or Christmas or Seder or Easter or whatever, every relative who was there. Write down all the stuff you swore you’d never tell another soul. What can you recall about your birthday parties—the disasters, the days of grace, your relatives’ faces lit up by birthday candles? Scratch around for details: what people ate, listened to, wore—those terrible petaled swim caps, the men’s awful trunks, the cocktail dress your voluptuous aunt wore that was so slinky she practically needed the Jaws of Life to get out of it. Write about the women’s curlers with the bristles inside, the garters your father and uncles used to hold up their dress socks, your grandfathers’ hats, your cousins’ perfect Brownie uniforms, and how your own looked like it had just been hatched. Describe the trench coats and stoles and car coats, what they revealed and what they covered up. See if you can remember what you were given that Christmas when you were ten, and how it made you feel inside. Write down what the grown-ups said and did after they’d had a couple of dozen drinks, especially that one Fourth of July when your father made Fish House punch and the adults practically had to crawl from room to room.
Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point at you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We told you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.
“But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind—a scene, a locale, a character, whatever—and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also, severe hypochondria. There may be a Nurse Ratched–like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.
Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller. But I don’t. All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for almost everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it. And often the right words do come, and you—well—“write” for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper. But the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn how bad your first drafts are.
The obsessing may keep you awake, or the self-loathing may cause you to fall into a narcoleptic coma before dinner. But let’s just say that you do fall asleep at a normal hour. Then the odds are that you will wake up at four in the morning, having dreamed that you have died. Death turns out to feel much more frantic than you had imagined. Typically you’ll try to comfort yourself by thinking about the day’s work—the day’s excrementitious work. You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you; you may find yourself consumed with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with cancer.
And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.” You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is.
And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. And it really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run: “his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”
I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit there long enough, something will happen.
My students stare at me for a moment. “How do we find an agent?” they ask.
I sigh. When you are ready, there are books that list agents. You can select a few names and write to them and ask if they would like to take a look at your work. Mostly they will not want to. But if you are really good, and very persistent, someone eventually will read your material and take you on. I can almost promise you this. However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.
But my students don’t believe me. They want agents, and to be published. And they also want refunds.
Almost all of them have been writing at least for a little while, some of them all of their lives. Many of them have been told over the years that they are quite good, and they want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout—the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia.
You can be defeated and disoriented by all these feelings, I tell them, or you can see the paranoia, for instance, as wonderful material. You can use it as the raw clay that you pull out of the river: surely one of your characters is riddled with it, and so in giving that person this particular quality, you get to use it, shape it into something true and funny or frightening. I read them a poem by Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes:
We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; 1st Paperback Edition (September 1, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385480016
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385480017
- Item Weight : 9.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.99 x 5.2 x 0.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions, and the forthcoming Hallelujah Anyway. She is also the author of several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.
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Now, this book should be in every creative writing class, the textbook.
What struck me repeatedly in Lamott's mini-lessons was her deep understanding of process -- that output of a work is not so much the full work itself, but an assembly of building blocks, one at a time, each a commitment, and only in totality something more. She does not advocate bonehead process or ridiculous formulaic mandate - this is not a how-to manual -- she just wants us to care about what we are doing and accomplish it in a series of heartfelt steps. There are no shortcuts, it's a little more each day, a continuum that adds up to a satisfying and cohesive whole. This is not breakthrough thinking, but it's a lesson we need to learn over and over, and it's not just about writing. Creative process is the heart of innovation. Think of all the elements that make the iPad great. If all the elements weren't great, it would not be great. Same with a restaurant menu and wine list. Same with an office skyscraper or memorial monument. Same with a short story, same with a novel. Summary impression rests in the details, all the many tiny parts or moments -- and all those details require hard thought and careful design.
Lamott is smart about this, she tells you that getting it right is not going to happen out of the gate and unnerving strides at perfection can be your worst enemy. She has an excellent descriptor for the real quality of the first drafts to which we aspire. I'll let you discover that on your own so the word does not get scraped here. Her point is, just get the words out, work on making them better later, a layer at a time.
She also allows us not to obsess unnecessarily with locking the full road map before we explore, because again that can impede our work. How far do we need to see ahead? "About two or three feet ahead of you" is plenty she tell us, quoting E.L. Doctorow: "..writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." She says this is "right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard." I tend to agree.
There is tremendous empathy in Lamott's world view, she offers a sense of shared experience that is reinforcing and comforting. Lamott talks about the imaginary radio station playing in your head -- another colorful descriptor I will let you discover -- that tells us over and over again why we can't do something, why the work we are doing is neither good nor worth doing. Learning to turn off that radio is our key to moving forward, we all hear it from time to time, but when it becomes perpetual, that is when our ability to create interesting work stops completely.
Lamott is just so honest and clear about all the factors that stop us from moving forward because she not only has experienced them, she continues to experience them. She does not position herself as a guru or weekend seminar success evangelist, but simply as someone who can reflect on problems of creativity because she deals with problems of creativity endlessly in her own life. She is even more honest in telling us that no one can make these problems go away once and for all, certainly not with any form of temporal success. All we can do is know that these obstructions will always be there, so we must embrace confronting them. Sometimes it really is good to know that none of us are experiencing roadblocks on our own, the fact that someone like Lamott tells you she is experiencing what you are experiencing is precisely the empathy that builds strength and resistance because the experiences are shared, bad and good. Her humility is reinforcing and refreshing and uncompromisingly inspiring.
"Bird by Bird" is not a long book, it can be read if you wish initially in a single sitting, but it is the kind of book you will find yourself coming back to for this chapter or that, this phrase or that. Lamott writes with good humor, even when she tackles very difficult and personal matters of her own life and those around her. The more I think about her framework, the more I am convinced it is much more broadly applicable then perhaps she even considered. I see the guidance as useful in company life, in financial life, in family life, in political life, and in government life. All of these require effective process to get them right, there are no shortcuts, and the rewards can be the smallest where the challenges are the greatest. That does not mean the rewards aren't meaningful, but it is the context of those rewards and the expectations that one sets for success that truly inform us when we are steering toward a final draft.
Review excerpted from my blog:
[...]
The rest of the review had me thinking the reviewer was just a jaded old grump…
Then as I was reading it, I couldn’t help but feel like a jaded old grump myself.
Not only is much of the advice geared toward young/beginner writers (literally “I tell my students [this] and I tell my students [that]” is how much of the book goes), but Ms Lamott does a whole lot of rambling and many of the rambles feel irrelevant.
However, the book grew on me over time. There were some rambles I related to and some even moved me on an emotional level. By the end, I could safely say I loved this book. I can’t give it 5 stars or count it among my “favorites,” but I found it a worthwhile read and there may at least be a few quotes about writing in it I could call “favorites.”
Great book