Book Report: Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

Investigating the writing craft canon

I’ve decided to start reading through the writing/craft books I’ve purchased over the years. There are some that you hear every writing teacher talk about:

• Bird-by-bird

• Save the Cat

• On Writing

• The Artist’s Way

• Writing Down the Bones

I LOVE craft books. I find it fascinating to read about how other writers approach process and craft. There are books about the writing life, there are books for writers struggling to get words on the page, and then there are the structural tomes that give you processes and tools to do it all yourself. I love them all. At least I think I do.

I’ll admit, as a beginner writer, I would buy any craft book I could get my hands on or had heard praised in some capacity. I hoard them like the little book wyrm I am. What I haven’t done…is read them. There are a few I got through, but I don’t think I retained the information like I thought I would.

So, I’ve decided to take a more scholarly approach and share some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned from reading these books. I also want to look at whether I find the book helpful for my writing specifically. Please know these are my thoughts, and you may find these books to be insanely helpful to you.

Reading is all about timing. Sometimes, the right book finds you at the wrong time.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

A long-long time ago, my high school English teacher mentioned this book. And then years later, my mother mentioned it. And then the instructor of my writing group mentioned it. Needless to say, I bought a copy after the first referral. However, I haven’t read it until now.

Bird by Bird was first published in 1994, but a lot of the advice still stands. There are some pieces of Anne’s commentary that I think might not fly today, but I appreciate a lot of the honesty she shares about the writing life.

So let’s get to it!

Advice in Four Parts

Anne breaks down her advice in four distinct parts, but I think there is so much overlap. Not in the “ugh, she’s repeating herself” way, but in the way that it all ties together beautifully. It is a small book, but packed full of observations about why we write and what that means.

• Writing

• The Writing Frame of Mind

• Help Along the Way

• Publication - and Other Reasons to Write

We read and write to feel seen.

“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” (p. 19).

This is why we often feel so very precious about what we’ve written. It is not only our desperate attempt to share a story, but also our deepest desire to be understood emotionally while doing so. The very best reading is that which makes us feel seen, and the very best writing is the same. A lot of us are writing to understand the emotional side of ourselves. It is very scary to be that vulnerable with an unknown number of people.

She also relates this to why we’re so desperate to get published. She talks a lot about what students want out of the workshops she teaches. More often than not, they want to be published. They want the acclaim, the achievement, and most of all the attention.

“The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them. There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. 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. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way” (p. 13).

This book is not about publishing; it is about writing. Which is why she only has a very small section at the end dedicated to publishing and sharing your writing. Anne makes her publishing journey sound like an anxiety-ridden nightmare — the waiting, the vulnerability, and the critiques. You can tell that Anne is a very sensitive soul, which is why she urges so heavily to lean into emotions. She also takes things quite personally because of this (and jokes about how she does).

So, say you do want to write for the internal benefits instead of for the attention it may bring you. Her advice for this is quite heartfelt, and I agree with a lot of it.

“Good writing tells the truth” (p. 3).

A lot of the commentary in this book can be boiled down to this sentence. She emphasizes throughout the book that you must first learn to tell yourself the truth, the hard, painful, dark truths that you keep shoved to the back of the closet. Sharing the truth is how we connect with others. If you are writing for other people to read, vulnerability is key to making real emotional connections.

“Write down all the stuff you swore you’d never tell another soul” (p. 5).

We all have a character arc we’re going through, and we are all at different stages of feeling and accepting certain emotions. To truly connect with characters, we need to know they have deep emotions that they might not even realize are driving their actions. Getting in touch with ourselves and communicating those emotions in writing gets us more and more in touch with how characters might show those emotions or act because of them.

“…each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways” (p. 45).

We obviously can’t show all of it. But, knowing your characters as people helps to know what is informing their actions. The why of how they speak, act, dress, and think. The reader doesn’t need to know all of this in minute detail, but the writer should know their characters well enough to pull these details up in their mind if they needed to.

“You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world” (p. 69).

How do we get good at making characters fully-rounded people?

Observation.

She has an entire chapter called “Looking Around” because observation is the entire point. Whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction, knowing how to describe what is happening, not just on the outside but also on the inside, is the whole point.

Books are like mirrors for people’s souls. They want to read them and see something relevant to their lives and their feelings. They want to feel seen!

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on” (p. 97).

Writing Tips and Tricks:

Here are a few of the suggestions Anne makes to get writing, whether you’re a beginner or just stuck:

• Start with your childhood.

• Take on short assignments.

  Anne has a small one-inch picture frame on her desk to remind her that “all I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame” (p. 17). “Just take it bird by bird” (p. 19).

• Write 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” (p. 23).

• Write about your school lunch.

  “Sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches” (p. 33). A detail may come up that surprises you and leads to even more content.

• Write for one specific person in your life.

• Listen to people talk.

• Write to discover what it isn’t to discover what it is.

• Develop a writing ritual.

  “Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in” (p.117).

• Take notes everywhere, all the time!

My personal takeaways

Anne has a very cynical view of publishing for someone who, more or less, had immediate access to the network thanks to her father. Maybe that’s why she has so much anxiety around it? I’m not sure. It feels a lot like a rich person telling you that money only makes more problems, when you’re staring at your grocery cart wondering if it will be worth it to buy the ice cream after a shitty day at work or if you should save the $5 for gas for the car. Or, maybe that’s just jealousy on my part? I rolled my eyes a lot when she discussed the publishing journey specifically, but her advice for getting writing is still pretty solid.

I first started writing to keep making up the stories that my friends and I had given up acting out on the playground. We had a blast playing pretend, and we still wanted to do that. So, we turned to notebooks and paper. One friend turned to drawing comics, which I hope she still does. The rest of us passed around our notebooks full of stories and wrote in the margins about how certain parts were funny, exciting, or sad.

That is what I chase with my writing. That someone else will read my stories and play pretend with me through them. I want to share my imagination with others and see theirs as well. I want to share what keeps me up at night, makes me emotional, or things I’m thinking through and can’t let go of.

“Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul” (p. 237).

I write to feel less alone. I write, yes, for the attention. Not in some narcissistic thinking that my thoughts and stories are important, but because I want to share them to see if others feel or think the same. I write for the community. I write for the chance that that one line in an otherwise mediocre book might have somebody say, “Yes! That’s it exactly!” I write to be somebody’s favorite author because I “just get it.”

Most importantly, I write for me. Because at the end of the day, it’s fun to make up stories and share them with my friends. This book made me want to write. So I think it worked.