Taking It One Bird At a Time

~ Laura

I'm a little spacy right now. Not in the best blogging form, though I did take the time to release some comments that got tangled in the spam filter. I've been writing all morning, and my head is elsewhere. (There's a new excerpt hidden on this blog somewhere.)

Over the weekend, I started reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which was kindly recommended by Julie G in a comment section.

Lamott is a fabulous writer. I gobbled up Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, when I recovered from my C-Section and nursed Jonah. When you're in the writing mode, it's really best to take the time to read great writers at the same time. Their style will leak into your yours. Like when you're talking to someone from Georgia, you suddenly find yourself dropping a lot of "y'alls." Good writing is contagious, just like a Southern accent.

In bird by bird, Lamott provides some worthy advice for dealing the monstrosity of writing of a book.

 I also remember a story that I know I've told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

… Say to yourself in the kindest possible way. Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Bird by bird. I related that story to Steve this weekend, and he agreed that it was very wise. It's really the best way to undertake any huge job, not just writing.

Published by Laura

16 thoughts on “Taking It One Bird At a Time”

  1. When did you start 11D?
    I see that the archives here go back to August 2004, but by then you’re already in Jersey and out of the eponymous apartment. That’s a lotta birds, Miz McKenna!

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  2. Heh. I started a year before that at the old blogger blog. Yes, but those blogs posts are sadly ill formed and redundant and missing key bits of information. I tried stitching together old blog posts together, but it didn’t work. I have a few birds that can be recycled, but a whole lot of new writing is required.

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  3. Ahem. Dr. McKenna. Laura, you’ll like that my husband and I refer to the whole bird by bird processes as killing birds, rather than merely describing them. It has a certain….finality of feeling to it. One accomplishes something.

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  4. Bird by Bird is one of the books on writing I return to over and over; even though some of her advice is clearly targeted at fiction writers, it is easily adaptable to poets, journalists, essayists, etc. The one-inch picture frame and permitting myself to write sh*tty first drafts have saved me more than once!

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  8. I have a 1″ picture frame that I take with me to class when I talk about writing.
    Reading good books while writing is crucial. I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale during my dissertation. What beautiful prose, what lovely weaving of detail; when I would clear away my mountains of sources for the evening (I was writing on the dining room table in a kibbutz room, so every night, everything got stored), and there Ulrich would be waiting for me.

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  9. I was looking at it from a slightly different angle — if someone had told you, in August 2003, that you would write and publish something practically every weekday for the next seven-and-a-half years, how would you have reacted?
    Not the birds in the book but the birds in the blog, and it’s still a lotta birds.

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  10. I loved Stephen King’s On Writing; I bet I’d like the Lamott book as well. I should get a hold of it.
    Over our recent vacation to Hawaii, I read through a collection of essays by Alan Jacobs. Great stuff–not necessarily brilliant (though some of them were), but just wise, thoughtful, clear sentences, carefully put together. I made me want to be an essayist, which is an old desire of mine, but one which blogging has probably cannibalized to the point of being beyond recovery.

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  11. “I made me want to be an essayist, which is an old desire of mine, but one which blogging has probably cannibalized to the point of being beyond recovery.”
    RAF,
    I’ve seen your blog. You are an essayist!

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  12. Thanks Amy, but no–I’m a guy who thinks he’s writing essays when he’s actually writing blog posts, and I end up somewhere between. If they were essays, then I would spend longer on them; they’d be better edited, more thoughtful, and not so cluttered with links I cram in there. If they were proper blog posts, they wouldn’t be so damn long.

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  14. I love Bird by Bird. If you’re looking for recommendations I also highly recommend The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. It talks a lot about procrastination etc. etc. etc.

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