Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
I keep a small shelf of books about writing and most of them I read once. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is the one I keep coming back to, a craft manual that keeps turning into memoir.
I keep a small shelf of books about writing, and most of them I read once and never opened again. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird I keep coming back to. It came out in 1994 and runs about 256 pages, a craft manual that keeps turning into memoir, what she has learned from a life of doing this. Mostly it reads like someone sitting across the table who has been at the desk longer and is not going to pretend it gets easier.
There are no rules in it. She tells you what the work feels like, the doubt and the false starts and the days when nothing comes, and then she tells you to keep going anyway.
The title comes from a story about her brother. He had a school report on birds due the next day, one he had months to do and had not started, and he was at the kitchen table near tears looking at the size of it. Their father sat down next to him and said, bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird. The whole method is in that line, the project too big to look at all at once, so you do the next small piece and then the one after it.
Her chapter on first drafts is the one I hear quoted, where she gives permission to write a bad one. Get the thing down. It can be a mess that only you ever see, and you cannot fix a page that does not exist yet. I freewrite every morning, and the only way that works is to stop caring whether any given page is good while I am writing it. She put words to something I had felt for years and never named.
Then there is the voice in your head that tells you it is all worthless. She gives it a shape, a mean little radio station you can reach over and turn down. It does not go away, you just stop letting it run the room.
She writes about attention too, how the writing starts before the writing, in noticing the people and the small ordinary moments I would otherwise walk past.
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She keeps saying how hard it stays, and there is no shortcut anywhere in the book. She is funny about the fear and plain about the loneliness of it, and reading her feels like company. I have handed this book to people who were stuck, and I will keep doing it. If you write, or want to, it is the one I would hand you.
📖 Buy Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life on Amazon
From the Journal
A few of my own pages on the same ground.
- The Art of Showing Up: Writing, Work, and Wandering Thoughts - On showing up daily to the creative practice
- Mining the Mind: Freewriting, Creativity, and the Relentless Pursuit of Ideas - On 'shitty first drafts' and the mining operation of thought
- From Sleepless Nights to Business Insights: Writing as a Tool for Thought - How writing serves as both catharsis and creation
- The Weight of Monday and the Wisdom of Birds - A bird-by-bird morning, taken one small thing at a time
- Gertrude Stein on Writing Masterpieces - A twenty-page lecture on why the writing that lasts is so rare
- Hello, Beautiful Page: Letting the Pen Drift and the Breath Guide the Hand - The shitty-first-draft permission Lamott gives, in practice
- The Freewriting Journal as Anchor: On Energy, Practice, and Processing the World - Writing as the daily anchor, not the performance
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