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Bird by Bird and Wild Mind

© Roxianne Moore

Reviews of Two Excellent Books on the Writing Life

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

The subtitle says, "Some Instructions on Writing and Life," and I guess that's as good a description as any. I got the book because someone here recommended I review it. I'd hesitated to buy it because I figured I'd read enough books of this type, and what I ought to be looking at was books of the nuts and bolts variety.

Well, in Bird by Bird, Lamott dresses up the nuts and bolts, and gives them a nice polish so that they seem part of the finished product.

I especially liked her idea of writing short assignments. When you come right down to it, everything you write is short assignments. Even a novel can be broken down - has to be broken down, in fact - into small, manageable chunks. The key, I suppose, is to figure out how much you can write at a normal sitting - if there is such a thing - and use that as your guideline for short assignments.

"Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of - oh, say - say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It's hard to get your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up. Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back."

What Lamott suggests is to look at your project through a one-inch picture frame. You don't need to look at the whole thing, just this one paragraph, this one page, this one scene. And each time you sit down at the keyboard, you look at another one-inch frame, and keep doing that every day until the whole thing's done.

Sounds easy enough. In fact, it sounds like the way I've tackled other projects. Not all of them. Sometimes I forget, and lose my perspective. It certainly helped with a monstrous project that I have been putting off because it seemed too huge to attempt. Now that project's off my back, and I'm ready to try the next one.

The rest of the book is like this - glimpses of Lamott's personal life and her writing habits tied in with specific instructions for using her techniques.

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