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 and never opened again. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is the one I keep coming back to. It came out in 1994 and runs about 256 pages, and it is part craft manual, part memoir, part what she has learned from a life of doing this. Mostly it reads like someone sitting across from you who has been at the desk longer than you have and is not going to pretend it gets easier.

She does not hand you rules. She tells you what the work actually feels like, the doubt and the false starts and the days when nothing comes, and then she tells you to keep going anyway.

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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. That is the whole method. The project is too big to look at all at once, so you do not look at all at once. You do the next small piece.

The part people quote most is her chapter on first drafts, where she gives you permission to write a bad one. Get the thing down. It can be a mess. Nobody has to see it, 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.

She is just as good on 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.

And she is good on attention, on the idea that the writing starts before the writing, in noticing the people and the small ordinary moments you would otherwise walk past.

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What I like most is that she is honest about how hard it stays. She is not selling a shortcut. She is funny about the fear and plain about the loneliness of it, and reading her feels less like instruction and more like company. I have handed this book to people who were stuck, and I will keep doing it.

If you write, or want to, this is the one I would give you.

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From the Journal

Anne Lamott's compassionate approach to creativity connects deeply with these writing practices:

• 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

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