Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

by Anne Lamott

hope is a revolutionary patience;

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader,

What’s real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you love, you’ll get better.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.

The first useful concept is the idea of short assignments.

one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Mr. Rogers will work.

Envision God as Mr. Rogers

We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

getting all of one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.

Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world.

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all of creation.

Tell the truth and write about freedom and fight for it, however you can, and you will be richly rewarded. As Molly Ivins put it, freedom fighters don’t always win, but they are always right.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

Other emotions poison us like this too- rage, shame, guilt, inferiority

And this ravaged body or wounded psyche can and should still be cared for as softly and tenderly as possible.

Self forgiveness and grace