Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

by Anne Lamott

You can’t write down your intellectual understanding of a hero or villain and expect us to be engaged. You probably have got to find these characters within the community of people who live in your heart.

The only thing to do when the sense of dread and low self-esteem tells you that you are not up to this is to wear it down by getting a little work done every day. You really can do it, really can find these people inside you and learn to hear what they have to say.

what could he say that lets us see this? Let’s dress him carefully because we may have to humiliate him in a minute.

I wish there were an easier, softer way, a shortcut, but this is the nature of most good writing: that you find out things as you go along. Then you go back and rewrite. Remember: no one is reading your first drafts.

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known. But they only work if they resonate in the heart of the writer. So I felt a little understaffed here, loving the metaphor when I came upon it, wanting to work with it, and yet not loving to garden.

I have been going there for four years now. I don’t ever really look forward to it, but I keep going back for reasons I do not quite understand. Perhaps I am subconsciously hoping it will help me get into the Junior League someday.

When you write about your characters, we want to know all about their leaves and colors and growth. But we also want to know who they are when stripped of the surface show. So if you want to get to know your characters, you have to hang out with them long enough to see beyond all the things they aren’t.

You may try to get them to do something because it would be convenient plotwise, or you might want to pigeonhole them so you can maintain the illusion of control. But with luck their tendrils will sneak out the sides of the box you’ve put them in, and you will finally have to admit that who they are isn’t who you thought they were.

because the one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

Then I started to cry and told him I had to go right that very second. He said to phone him the next day. I said I would, although I did not actually expect to be alive then. Luckily, I was still drinking at the time.

When a more or less ordinary character, someone who is both kind and self-serving, somehow finds that place within where he or she is still capable of courage and goodness, we get to see something true that we long for. This is what helps us connect with your characters and with your book. This is what makes it a book we will foist on our friends, a book we will remember, that will accompany us through life.

But you have to believe in your position, or nothing will be driving your work. If you don’t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has.

The issue now is how to take care of one another. Some of us are interested in any light you might be able to shed on this, and we will pay a great deal extra if you can make us laugh about it. For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are the ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food. So write about the things that are most important to you.

Write instead about freedom, freedoms worth fighting for. Human rights begin with and extend to your characters, no matter how horrible they are.

A moral position is not a slogan, or wishful thinking. It doesn’t come from outside or above. It begins inside the heart of a character and grows from there.

As Molly Ivins put it, freedom fighters don’t always win, but they are always right.

It means, of course, that when you don’t know what to do, when you don’t know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside.

You need your broccoli in order to write well. Otherwise you’re going to sit down in the morning and have only your rational mind to guide you. Then, if you’re having a bad day, you’re going to crash and burn within half an hour. You’ll give up, and maybe even get up, which is worse because a lot of us know that if we just sit there long enough, in whatever shape, we may end up being surprised.

Let’s say it’s only 9:15; now, if you were to stick it out, the image or situation might come to you that would wedge the door open for a character, after which you would only have to get out of the way. Because then the character could come forward and speak and might say something important; it might even be the thing that is most important to him or her, and your plot might suddenly fall into place.

you feel defeated and shaken and hopeless, and tomorrow is going to be even harder to face because today you’ve given up only fifteen minutes after you sat down to work.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen. Squint at the screen in your head, and if you look, you will see what you are searching for, the details of the story, its direction—maybe not right this minute, but eventually.

Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff, and then be naive enough to get it all down on paper.

be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother.

whatever you come up with needs to suggest a voice that you are not trying to control. If you’re lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home. You have to stop directing, because you will only get in the way.

If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Listen to your broccoli. Maybe it will know what to do. Then, if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.

KFKD is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer—please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.

Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster.

another friend, and she read me some lines by a Lakota Sioux: “Sometimes I go about pitying myself. And all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky.” That is so beautiful, I said; and I am so mentally ill.

“What’s the silver lining here? I can’t seem to remember today.” “The silver lining is that you’re not going to have to see any more naked pregnant pictures of Demi Moore.”

It was such a rare scene that you would think I would remember it forever. I used to think that if something was important enough, I’d remember it until I got home, where I could simply write it down in my notebook like some normal functioning member of society. But then I wouldn’t.

(Who was it that said, “A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded”?

Sam and I walked Bill and Adair up to their car after dinner. Crisp cold starry night. Bill, holding Sam, inhaled deeply. “Doesn’t it smell wonderful, Sam?” he said. Sam inhaled deeply, too, like he was smelling a delicious meal, looked off into space, and said, “It smells like moon.”

Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone—and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.

every single day a kid needs discipline—so it’s useful to give yourself a minimum quota of three hundred words a day. But also every single day a kid needs a break. So think of calling around as giving yourself a break.

All four of them are excellent writers, but only one of them has been published at all, and that was just one article. But you know what? They love each other. They still look forward to their meetings after all these years. They are better writers and better people because of their work with each other. Almost always at least one of them is well and able to help, while someone else is always on the verge of giving up and dropping out of the group. But so far they have been able to talk one another into sticking it out.

I made sounds of empathy and reminded her that she’d been this stuck before. Short assignments, I whispered. Shitty first drafts.

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon of two men sitting on a couch at a busy cocktail party, having a quiet talk. One man has a beard and looks like a writer. The other seems like a normal person. The writer type is saying to the other, “We’re still pretty far apart. I’m looking for a six-figure advance, and they’re refusing to read the manuscript.”

If you know for sure that some smart and civilized person loves your work, you can ask that person if she would be willing to look at a part of your novel or your latest short story. If this person writes, too, ask if she would like you to take a look at her draft. If she says no to both offers, pretend to be friendly, so she won’t think less of you than she already does. Then you can move into a trailer park near your therapist’s house until you’re well enough again to ask someone else.

Would you stand for someone talking this way to your children—for instance, telling them that they are not very talented at painting and shouldn’t even bother? Or that their poetry is not very interesting? Of course not. You’d want to go pay this person a little visit with your flamethrower.

Why waste what little time you may have left with such scum? I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.

Anyway, the dress fit perfectly, and I came out to model it for her. I stood there feeling very shy and self-conscious and pleased. Then I said, “Do you think it makes my hips look too big?” and she said to me slowly, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.” And I don’t think you have that kind of time either. I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.

writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water—just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness. The emptiness destroys enough writers without the help of some friend or spouse.

There are always a couple of rank beginners in my classes, and they need people to read their drafts who will rise to the occasion with respect and encouragement. Beginners always try to fit their whole lives into ten pages, and they always write blatantly about themselves, even if they make the heroine of their piece a championship racehorse with an alcoholic mother who cries a lot. But beginners are learning to play, and they need encouragement to keep their hands moving across the page.

If you look around, I think you will find the person you need. Almost every writer I’ve ever known has been able to find someone who could be both a friend and a critic. You’ll know when the person is right for you and when you are right for that person. It’s not unlike finding a mate, where little by little yo...

We have all been there, and it feels like the end of the world. It’s like a little chickadee being hit by an H-bomb. Here’s the thing, though. I no longer think of it as block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.

The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.