Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

by Anne Lamott

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.

But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you;

The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft.

Then, a month later, when it was time for another review, the whole process would start again, complete with the fears that people would find my first draft before I could rewrite it.

Fathers loved apricot jam; I don’t know why, but I’m sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.

As soon as you start protecting your characters from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless, just like in real life.

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off.

I tried not to make any big decisions about how to salvage the book or my writing life, because the one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

He says simply, “My true religion is kindness.”

Train yourself to hear that small inner voice.

You get off the phone, and your mind has become a frog brain that scientists have saturated with caffeine.

You are going to have a number of days in a row where you hate everyone and don’t believe in anything.

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.

So much of writing is about sitting down and doing it every day, and so much of it is about getting into the custom of taking in everything that comes along, seeing it all as grist for the mill.

My New Age friends claim that they’ve started groups by just “putting it out to the universe.” Now, I love this sort of talk; I always picture the universe hearing the call, and flipping breathlessly through its little Rolodex, because these friends have all ended up in flourishing writing groups. So who’s to say?

You’d want to go pay this person a little visit with your flamethrower.

We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings.

All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

A book about our experience, showing one family’s attempt to stay buoyant in the face of such a potentially flattening process, seemed like it might be a welcome present to other people with sick relatives.

like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.

“You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.”

wrote for an audience of two whom I loved and respected, who loved and respected me.

So I wrote for them as carefully and soulfully as I could—which is, needless to say, how I wish I could write all the time.

You cannot write out of someone else’s big dark place;

think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, “Yes!”

Let’s talk about the myth of publication.

Other times they suggest that you are a show-offy vacuous loser, and they hope you die so that they won’t have to read your work anymore.

Because if you are a writer, it is going to happen to you.

I knew it was a nice big plate of cocaine for my ego.

“The world can’t give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts.”

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.

Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you.

Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration,

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you.

To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be?