Missmeganbunny’s Weblog

The book I’m reviewing today is called Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. Anne is an author who has published some books of both fiction and non-fiction, including titles such as Hard Laughter (1980), and Operating Instructions: A Journal Of My Son’s First Year (1993). She’s also written three books about her Christian faith. She’s known, however, to be slightly controversial in the Christian sector. I mean, she uses swear words, for God’s sake. She’s hardly a “conventional Christian”. I think that’s why I like her so much. I don’t see myself getting interested enough in Christianity to pick up one of her three books on faith any time too soon, as I’m sort of on a migration AWAY from it presently. Albeit, she has piqued my interest because of her openness to talk about alcoholism and drug abuse in a very candid, down-to-earth way. No holier-than-thou here.

But I’ve gone entirely off topic, because Bird By Birdis NOT about Christianity or drinking. It’s a book on writing. I picked it up almost simultaneously with my decision to participate in Nanowrimo this year, and honestly I’m not sure which decision came first (reading her book, or deciding to write a novel). They seemed to happen at the same time. And reading this book gave me a full-speed kick in the pants towards getting serious about writing again. It wasn’t about the nitty-gritty, grammatical and phonetic elements of writing. It was more like a book full of inspiration to just write.

In Bird By Bird, Lamott uses a lot of personal anecdotes that really disclose who she is as a person to readers. I think that’s what makes the book so inspiring. She writes a lot about her writing workshops that she teaches, and the silliness of the students involved. She points out the humor in how fastidiously her students subscribe to the idea of being published as a simple, fill-out-the-paperwork or get-good-connections endeavor. She puts heavy emphasis on writing for your OWN personal fulfillment, and she suggests that publishing be made a secondary (or even lesser) goal. I think this is great advice for writers. I am not published, and have never produced anything worth publishing. I don’t ever assume I’ll be published. But if I write a book… I will be so proud of myself, and that’s all that matters. The book Bird By Bird affirmed that attitude for me tenfold.

This book will give you great advice about how to get started in writing. Lamott basically says just GO. Do it badly, just DO it, and go back later to make it good. She came up with the term “shitty first drafts”, which are mentioned tons of times in this book. She believes that it is crucial to write shitty first drafts as a beginning to any writing assignment or project. It may indeed be shitty, but it’s the diamond extracted from the earth. With some polishing, it will be beautiful. I think that many people attempt to write things once and expect them to be good enough for publishing… or even good enough to meet their own expectations. And the writings aren’t good enough. And then people give up.

I’d recommend Bird By Bird to anyone who wants to get serious about writing, but needs some inspiration to get moving. Or to anyone who’s made lots of attempts to write something, but they always seem to fail. This isn’t a guide to getting published, or a handbook to writing grammatically correct material. It’s a book about the writer’s PROCESS. And that’ s one of the most important things you should read about, as a writer.

Lamott tells us not to ever think of what we write the first time we sit down and work on something as the product. This is advice I will cherish forever.