Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

By: Anne Lamott
Date Read: 2017-10-21
Rating: ★★★★★

Introduction

He taught us to be bold and original and to let ourselves make mistakes, and that Thurber was right when he said, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.”

While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don’t have to dress up, for instance, and you can’t hear them boo you right away.

I became a socialist, for five weeks. Then the bus ride to my socialist meetings wore me out.

“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

They will have days at the desk of frantic boredom, of angry hopelessness, of wanting to quit forever, and there will be days when it feels like they have caught and are riding a wave.

Writing Groups

You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.

Part One: WRITING

Getting Started

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.

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.

Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.

Remember that you own what happened to you.

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.

Becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.

My son, Sam, at three and a half, had these keys to a set of plastic handcuffs, and one morning he intentionally locked himself out of the house. I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper when I heard him stick his plastic keys into the doorknob and try to open the door. Then I heard him say, “Oh, shit.” My whole face widened, like the guy in Edvard Munch’s Scream. After a moment I got up and opened the front door. “Honey,” I said, “what’d you just say?” “I said, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” he said. “But, honey, that’s a naughty word. Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it. Okay?” He hung his head for a moment, nodded, and said, “Okay, Mom.” Then he leaned forward and said confidentially, “But I’ll tell you why I said ‘shit.’ ” I said Okay, and he said, “Because of the fucking keys!”

Short Assignments

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Shitty First Drafts

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page.

A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there.

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

Character

How would your main characters describe their current circumstances to a close friend, before and then after a few drinks?

I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”

Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them.

Plot

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen. Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up.

Find out what each character cares most about in the world because then you will have discovered what’s at stake.

John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous. I tell my students to write this down—that the dream must be vivid and continuous—because it is so crucial.

The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff—just like a joke.

She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?

Dialogue

Then when you’re out in the world—that is, not at your desk—and you hear people talking, you’ll find yourself editing their dialogue, playing with it, seeing in your mind’s eye what it would look like on the page. You listen to how people really talk, and then learn little by little to take someone’s five-minute speech and make it one sentence, without losing anything. If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off.

I don’t think the right words exist already in your head, any more than the characters do. They exist somewhere else. What we have in our heads are fragments and thoughts and things we’ve heard and memorized, and we take our little ragbag and reach into it and throw some stuff down and then our unconscious kicks in.

You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.

The villain has a heart, and the hero has great flaws.

Try to remember that to some extent, you’re just the typist. A good typist listens.

Set Design

People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here. They’d end up looking like I watered them with Agent Orange.

Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known. But they only work if they resonate in the heart of the writer.

False Starts

You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear.

How Do You Know: When You’re Done?

…perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

Part Two: THE WRITING FRAME OF MIND

The Moral Point of View

If your deepest beliefs drive your writing, they will not only keep your work from being contrived but will help you discover what drives your characters.

If you don’t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling.

Broccoli

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Radio Station KFKD

So now I always tell my students about the Gulf Stream: that what it means for us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw.

Jealousy

My therapist said that jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born out of feeling excluded and deprived.

Part Three: HELP ALONG THE WAY

Index Cards

I think that if you have the kind of mind that retains important and creative thoughts—that is, if your mind still works—you’re very lucky and you should not be surprised if the rest of us do not want to be around you.

Someone to Read Your Drafts

Beginners always try to fit their whole lives into ten pages, and they always write blatantly about themselves,

Writer’s Block

We’re mimics, we’re parrots—we’re writers. But knowing the source of all our stuff deprives it of its magic, because then the material feels mundane, clichéd; you didn’t have to discover it because it was already there for all to see.

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions. Some people will sing it spontaneously, with a lot of soulful riffs, while others are going to practice until they could sing it at the Met. Either way, everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exists in each of us. Everything you need is in your head and memories, in all that your senses provide, in all that you’ve seen and thought and absorbed.

Part Four: PUBLICATION—AND OTHER REASONS TO WRITE

Writing a Present

Violet Weingarten’s Intimations of Mortality, a journal of her chemotherapy…

Finding Your Voice

Write as if your parents are dead.

We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in—then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment.

Part Five: THE LAST CLASS

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Vocabulary