LeAnn's Reviews > Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I'm getting to the point where I've read a handful of books on the writing life by authors and I found this one to be particularly resonant at this point in my writing career. I actually found myself underlining things that Anne Lamott wrote and thinking, "I need to reread this so that I can absorb its message better."

Perhaps the one thing that I'd like to pass along from her book that I wholeheartedly believe is her assertion that novels should have hope in them. I've spent several years thinking about what turns me off in much of the "literary" fiction that I pick up and it's that most of it is bleak and hopeless, albeit written with exquisite feeling. As an adult and as a writer, I'm past the need for escapism that drove me to read as a child and young adult but I'm not past the need for hope. I really don't have any more time to waste on stories that make me feel depressed and dark at the end.

Ms.Lamott also talks about writing as a spiritual activity and that I also believe in. If not done as a form of "candy making" (her phrase, not mine), then writing satisfies the soul like nothing else and that this is what matters most, not some illusory, nigh impossible, success in terms of publishing, fame, and fortune.