The Directed Life

Notes and quotes from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Date read: 12/27/2022

Big takeaways:

1. Shitty first drafts—just write, no matter how bad. Good authors write shitty first drafts that turn into tremendous fourth drafts.
2. Give yourself short assignments. Commit to finishing stuff.
3. Unlocking your unconscious requires time in solitary boredom staring at the blank screen. Put the hours in and you’ll be rewarded.
4. Publishing shouldn’t be the goal—become a writer for the sake of writing itself.
5. Focus on creating characters. The plot will come easily if you spend your time with the characters.
6. Use your childhood, memories, and people you encounter in everyday life. Dress them up with your own exaggerations and create characters from your own inner psyche and all of your faults and insecurities.

Lamott reflects on how her father influenced her desire to write (pages xiiv – xiv):

Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning … I grew up around this man who sat at his desk in the study all day and wrote books and articles about the places and people he had seen and known … writing motivates you to look closely at life … Writing taught my father how to pay attention; my father in turn taught other people to pay attention and then to write down their thoughts and observations.

Lamott’s father on leisure (page xix):

A life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.

Something magical happens once you begin to believe you’re capable of your greatest desires (page xxi):

I began to believe that I could do what other writers were doing. I came to believe that I might be able to put a pencil in my hand and make something magical happen.

Advice on writing from Lamott’s father (page xxiii):

Do it every day for a while. Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.

The similarity between Eric Liddell’s passion for running and missionary work and others’ passion for writing (page xxix):

The Scottish runner, Eric Liddell … replies [to his sister] that he wants to go to China because he feels it is God’s will for him, but that first he is going to train with all of his heart, because God also made him very, very fast. So God made some of us fast in this area of working with words, and he gave us the gift of loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature.

Good writing (page 3):

Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are … We have so much we want to say and figure out.

But where to start? (page 4):

Start with your childhood … Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can … Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. just start getting it down.

But how do you actually do it? (page 6)

You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively … you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you just stare at it for an hour or so … you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

You have to put in the time and effort to be rewarded with insights and thoughtful prose (pages 8-9):

You don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it … you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing.

Writing is showing up every day (page 13):

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.

Why care about getting better at writing if it’s not going to lead to fortune, power, or status? (pages 13-14):

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave … They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life … An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.

Writing and life are like driving a car at night with headlights (page 17):

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.

Giving yourself short assignments and taking them step-by-step (bird by bird) until completion (page 19):

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

Lamott on awareness inspired from Geenan Roth (pages 29-30):

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.

Developing characters (pages 44-45):

Look within your own heart, at the different facets of your personality. You may find a con man, an orphan, a nurse, a king, a hooker, a preacher, a loser, a child, a crone. Go into each of these people and try to capture how each one feels, thinks, talks, survives … One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t. How would your main characters describe their current circumstances to a close friend, before and then after a few drinks?

Your narrator has to be likeable (page 47):

Having a likeable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal.

Advice on plot that also applies to life and self-improvement (page 52):

Plot grows out of character.

The process: writing, re-reading and editing with fresh eyes, writing more (page 54):

I sit down in the morning and reread the work I did the day before … the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time—but she knows gold when she sees it.

Writing is inviting the reader into a dream, one which must be vivid and continuous (pages 54-55).

Formula for short story writing from Alice Adams: ABDCE—Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending. Draw the reader in with something compelling, provide background of the characters and what was happening that led to the opening of the story, develop the characters, move them through time and space until the story approaches a climax, then explain in the ending what happened how this changed the characters, and what it all means. (pages 59-60)

Lamott points to Hemingway as the transitory figure of dialogue: from elaborate to “sharp and lean.” (page 62)

Cashing in on isolation (page 63):

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you’ve taken in, all that you’ve overheard, and you turn it into gold.

Finding life’s truths in your writing (page 65):

Life is not like formula fiction. The villain has a heart, and the hero has great flaws. You’ve got to pay attention to what each character says, so you can know each of their hearts.

On how “real life” works (page 79):

You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear.

The essence of writing (page 107):

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Aim for the minimum quota of 300 words per day (page 138).

Lamott’s advice to a young writer (page 146):

I told him that the best possible thing was to shoot high and make mistakes, and that when he was old, or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, “God! I’m so glad I took so few risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!”

Best pieces—inspiration for anyone to write (pages 160-161):

The letter’s informality just might free you from the tyranny of perfectionism … Write that person’s name at the top of the page, and then in your first line, explain that you are going to tell them part of your story, entrust it to them, because this part of your life meant so much to you. Some of the best pieces to come out of my classes have been written by people who wanted to tell their children about their own childhoods, or about their children’s childhoods, what the years were like just before these children were born and then after …

Lamott writing to her son on baseball—I particularly enjoyed the passage because of how much I enjoy baseball (pages 162-163):

I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

The importance of finishing (page 167):

In the beginning, when you’re first starting out, there are a million reasons not to write, to give up. That is why it is of extreme importance to make a commitment to finishing sections and stories, to driving through to the finish … this is how you are going to get better, and there is no point in practicing if you don’t finish.

You already have everything you need (page 169):

Everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exists in each of us. Everything you need is in your head and memories, in all that your senses provide, in all that you’ve seen and thought and absorbed. There in your unconscious, where the real creation goes on, is the little kid or the Dr. Seuss creature in the cellar, arranging and stitching things together.

Writing to expose the human condition (page 185):

When people let their monsters out for a little onstage interview, it turns out that we’ve all done or thought the same things, that this is our lot, our condition. We don’t end up with a brand on our forehead. Instead, we compare notes.

Learning to give freely (page 189):

You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Writing a book back to your favorite authors—experiencing the joy of hosting (page 190):

It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

The combination required for writing (page 191):

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it’s right … This sophisticated innocence is a gift. It is yours to give away.

The benefits of becoming a writer (pages 216-217):

One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment … this feeling of liberation that, ironically, discipline brings. Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader … You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way … when I am done for the day, I have something to show for it. When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids … they thought they were working for God, so they worked with a sense of concentration and religious awe.