Notes From ‘Bird by Bird’

Given to me as a gift on my birthday, Anne Lamott’s ‘Bird by Bird’ is perhaps my favorite book I’ve ever read on the subject of writing. That’s because it’s much less about the subject of writing from some staunch, academic perspective; and much more about writing as a human being. Writing as a passion — a passion that can be painful.

Lamott grew up writing, with a father who was a writer. At an early age her work was published, and the experience was in a way transformative:

I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in prints therefore you exist. Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal — a spiny blenny, for instance from inside your tiny cave? Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere.

In her youth, she was aware of her father’s work, and she seemed to learn a central lesson from what he made: words can be both beautiful and dangerous:

My father wrote disparagingly about the men in the community, their values and materialistic frenzy, and about their wives, “these estimable women, the wives of doctors, architects, and lawyers, in tennis dresses and cotton frocks, tanned and well preserved, wandering the aisles of our supermarkets with glints of madness in their eyes.” No one in our town came off looking great. “This is the great tragedy of California,” he wrote in the last paragraph, ”for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death — the greatest leisure of all.”

These experiences didn’t dissuade her from writing. If anything, they made her write more — and as she tried (and failed) her father gave her key advice:

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

Now a published author and writing professor, Lamott gives this advice:

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

What makes ‘Bird by Bird’ so powerful is that it isn’t interested in talking about writing as an isolated experience. Writing is connected to ‘you’, and sometimes life is hard. Sometimes good writing comes from reflecting on pain, or being open to remembering it in the first place. So much of the book is dedicated to discussing this very experience, and Lamott likens the experience to getting your tonsils removed:

She explained that when we have a wound in out body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more violation and from infection, and that I would need to use these muscles if I wanted them to relax again.
 I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds — the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both — to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp.

This isn’t the only time that perfectionism comes up. At another time, Lamott offers these powerful words:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

One of my favorite chapters was on reconnecting with a part of yourself that comes naturally as a child, the part that trusts instincts. This part, she explains, is lost as you are lied to by those you love:

When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. God forbid you should have your own opinions or perceptions…So you may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.

I expect I’ll be revisiting this book often. It’s a book that makes me want to write, but more than that, it’s a book that makes me want to be honest. One more quote: As she closes, she offers these powerful and beautiful words on how to write with meaning:

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it’s right. To be great, art has to point somewhere.

Indeed.