When a friend of mine learned that I was writing a blog, she read some of my posts and then told me that she admired my commitment to improve my writing and that I was well on my way, but that I might want to consider taking a writing course. Oof, right? But even though I can be a little thin-skinned, I found that her suggestion didn’t sting. The fact is, I am interested in improving my writing, and I’ve looked for courses that would help me do that. I haven’t taken one because they’ve all dealt with fiction writing, which is not what I’m up to right now.
But my friend also recommended a book on writing called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, so I bought it. It turns out that the book, by the writer Anne Lamott, is also focused on fiction writing, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
The title comes from an episode in Lamott’s childhood when her ten-year-old brother had an important paper to write for school. He had procrastinated for three months and it was due the following day. Lamott writes,
We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
Bird by Bird is funny throughout and full of what seems to me to be excellent advice. And though it’s intended for those who aspire to write fiction, I’ve already gleaned some guidance that’s relevant to my blog writing. In particular, I like Lamott’s suggestion that one should begin by writing “shitty first drafts.”
I was already comfortable with the idea of writing a first draft without worrying about getting it exactly right, and then going back to tighten and wordsmith it. But Lamott’s suggestion goes beyond that. She proposes giving yourself license to just dump words onto the page with an explicit expectation that you’ll subsequently throw most of them out. The idea is that buried in those pages of garbage will be a nugget that’s worth keeping and even building upon. That’s a new idea for me. I usually sit down with a fairly good idea of what I’m going to say, and the revisions I make to my first draft typically amount to tightening and clarifying rather than completely overhauling. But that can be limiting when there’s something I’d like to write about but I’m not sure how to approach the topic.
I employed Lamott’s suggestion when I wrote about my neighborhood’s July 4th get-together a couple of days ago. I came back from my walk around the block that day knowing that I wanted to blog about it but having no clear idea what to say. So I just started writing — writing about what I’d seen, what people had said, and how it all had felt. I wrote with no commitment to keeping anything I was writing, but rather as an experiment to discover whether anything worthwhile would show up. Just as Lamott suggested, I threw out most of what I’d written and ended up with a piece that I would not have come up with had I used my usual approach.
I’m less than half-way through Bird on Bird, so I may have more to say once I’ve finished it. But I can already recommend it to anyone who wants to start writing, or get better at writing, and feels they’d benefit from being pointed in the right direction.