Bird by Bird.
Anne Lamott. (Anchor Books.
Doubleday:
What starts as a book about writing becomes a book about life. Writing is what motivates us to “look closely at life” and helps us “understand who we are and how we are to behave”. All of the techniques that make a good writer apply to living a life of purpose and value, a life where we must learn to not sweat the small things and concentrate only on what’s important to living right now.
Ms. Lamott organizes her book into four sections, dealing with specific aspects of writing. To get started writing, it is important to set aside time each day for writing. Start by making lists of things you remember – first year in school, vacations with family, holiday events. When you begin to write, start small so you won’t become overwhelmed. Write down as much as you can see “in a one inch picture frame”; take things “bird by bird”. Write a “shitty first draft” where you pour out everything you know about what you are writing. Use the second draft to fix up and the third draft to fine tune. Develop your characters like a Polaroid picture, a little bit at a time. Let your characters drive your plot and your dialogues reflect the personalities of your characters. Make sure your climax brings together all “the tunes that you’ve been playing” and results in profound changes in a least one of the main characters. You’re done when the “octopus has been tucked into bed for the night”, when all the loose ends are put away.
A writer’s goal should be to help people see things in a new way, to become engrossed in something outside of themselves. “The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe” are the language in which you must write. This does not mean that your writing must be moralistic, rather it means that the writer should always try to be part of the solution, to try to understand life and pass this understanding on to the reader.
In part three, Ms. Lamott suggests ways to get help. Using index cards to keep track of ideas, calling others to help collect background, sharing your work with other writers to get perspective are all useful ways to strengthen your writing. Part four discusses how to get published, how to work with editors, and how to deal with the rejections. The bottom line, however, is that we must learn to live as if we are dying, giving ourselves a chance to experience some “real presence”. We must remember that life is a recycling center where “all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe”. We must develop our own voice in order to portray the truth of our experiences and we must learn that the secret to happiness is to get out of ourselves and become “a person for someone else”. We must learn to decrease our sense of isolation and “deepen, widen, and expand our sense of life”. We must learn to feed the soul.