Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Lamott’s first piece of advice is: writing is an interesting way of “telling the truth” (3). When her students do not know where to begin, she suggests writing from memory, starting with early experiences in school, then moving onto vacations, holidays, and other big life events.

Next, Lamott suggests creating a daily writing ritual. This habit can be hard to maintain in the face of daily pressures and obligations. For Lamott, the answer is to create a time and place set aside solely for writing. When all other concerns are temporarily shut out, then stories and ideas can come out on the page.

Lamott emphasizes the importance of the rough draft. The writer must not be afraid to waste time writing things that will later be deleted. It sometimes takes filling several pages with writing before arriving at the story you want to tell. This involves figuring out what stories you are not telling. What the writer cannot afford to do, she says, is wait for inspiration. Lamott says inspiration does not come to her nearly as often as she likes, but she keeps up her writing habit.

She contrasts this advice about the practice of writing with the questions her students ask about getting an agent. Lamott suggests focusing on improving writing and reading skills before querying agents. Ambition and anxiety about your future career are emotions that distract from the writing process. Rather than give in to those emotions, Lamott suggests channeling them into your characters.

After reprinting a poem by Phillip Lopate, Lamott contrasts people who want to be published from people who want to write. Becoming a better writer is a difficult process, but it helps one become a better reader. The power an author has is to draw attention to the little details of life and the beauty of language.

Lamott notes how writing projects can feel overwhelming, and how trying to take on too much at once can result in a barrage of intrusive thoughts. Her advice to overcome this barrier is to focus on describing something that fits in a “one-inch picture frame” (17). She suggests that writers give themselves short assignments or “prompts” to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the scope of a larger project. A prompt might be a description of a place or person, for instance. She quotes the novelist E.L. Doctorow, who describes the task of writing a long story or novel by using the analogy of a car driving at night. The driver can see only as far as the headlights reach, but by covering that distance again and again they can safely navigate the whole way to their destination.

Lamott shares the anecdote that led to the book’s title. As a child, her brother felt overwhelmed by the scale of a school assignment about birds, and their father told him to take it bird by bird, focusing on one bird at a time. This story is akin to Doctorow’s analogy about the car headlights—it means that one does not sit down to write a whole novel, but rather to write one small piece of the story and then the next.

While Lamott admits there are writers who don’t need to revise, she argues that most writers initially produce work that is filled with problems. In the early stages of writing, she says, you should allow your inner child to run free. It may take several pages of freewriting to find a direction.

Lamott describes her process of writing food reviews. When she would get stumped on how to begin, she would start by focusing on one paragraph at a time, ignoring her inner critic, caring only about getting a terrible draft completed. Once that “shitty first draft” was done, she had something to revise, and revision, she says, is where the real work of writing happens. Lamott takes each piece through multiple rounds of revisions, working on it at least three times before submitting.

At the end of the chapter, Lamott describes some intrusive thoughts that appear when she is writing. She suggests a technique she learned from a hypnotist: When she hears critical voices in her head—her own, those of her friends, her agent, her parents, or whoever—she visualizes the speakers as mice and mentally puts them in jars to quiet them.

Perfectionism stands in the way of creating art. Messiness aids in creating art. Lamott suggests, somewhat ironically, enlisting the assistance of God to move beyond perfectionism. Failing that, she says, you might try being kind to yourself. She contrasts perfectionism with persistence. Unlike perfectionism, which can lead to writer’s block, persistence is useful. The only way to get to a good draft is to write several “shitty” drafts, and it takes persistence to do that. Lamott again notes that bad writing is part of the process of creating good writing.

Lamott suggests the subject of school lunches as a writing prompt. Lamott’s schoolmates classified items as signs your family life was, or was not, terrible. Citing Natalie Goldberg, Lamott says the most concrete advice she can give is to simply practice writing and write a lot. Freewriting produces characters and/or other usable elements.

Lamott compares the way a story comes together to the way a Polaroid photo develops. The first draft is like the incomplete image on the photo paper. She describes how her story about the Special Olympics developed by watching events and talking to athletes. It came into focus as a piece about joy and effort. She believes her students would also think it was good material for writing.

Lamott advises allowing characters to develop like Polaroids, just as stories do. She describes a character’s internal state as their “emotional acre” (44)—an unknown land that writers must explore. Character traits can come from different aspects of the writer’s personality and/or from observing other people. They can be formed by considering what they would journal privately or how they would behave around other people in public.

She shares quotes from other writers, like Andre Dubus and Ethan Canin, about developing short stories and likable narrators. Lamott is in favor of likable and reliable narrators but emphasizes that narrators—and other characters—should have flaws. She also is in favor of stories that are at least somewhat hopeful.

Writing is a way to tell the truth by lying. Though the fiction writer in theory has total freedom to invent characters, they have to understand their characters in order to make their actions “true”—that is, believable to readers. Again, she notes how important it is to write a lot about your characters—enough to get to know them—and that not all of this writing should be included in later drafts.

Plot develops from understanding characters and their relationships to one another. Establishing stakes is also key to plot. Lamott clarifies that stakes are what characters desire, as they create tension that makes stories compelling.

Having another person critique your work will help you find its issues and problems. It can help to work with a group of writers who all address the same prompt, as different writers will write different stories in response, illustrating what kinds of techniques most effectively build narrative tension. Lamott defines drama as a method for keeping the reader’s attention, and as “setup, buildup, payoff” (59), like a joke.

It is important to keep a sense of forward momentum for characters. Character motivations and actions are what drives the plot, she argues. Therefore, it is important to get to know your characters in order to develop your story. Writers should focus on character development, rather than reaching a predetermined climax of the story. Otherwise, the plot can feel contrived.

She offers a formula from Alice Adams that uses the acronym ABDCE, which stands for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. This can also help writers with developing plot.

Lamott distinguishes dialogue from other aspects of a book by its orality. In other words, dialogue stands out because it is conversational rather than descriptive. Lamott explains that Hemingway changed how dialogue is written, making it less verbose and more natural—closer to the way people actually speak.

She advises saying your dialogue out loud and listening to how people talk in public spaces. Characters should sound different from the writer, and from each other, in dialogue. As a prompt, Lamott suggests forcing two characters who hate each other into dialogue with one another, such as if they were in a stuck elevator. Eventually, she asserts, dialogue will flow through the writer, as if they are simply recording what characters say.

Lazott believes that dialogue is the best way to develop characters. Writers should feel compassion for all of their important characters, including villains, and try to understand their mental and emotional states. She gives an example of a story going in a different direction than originally planned. Characters are created by the unconscious mind and refined by the conscious mind.

She explains that writing is how you think about things. In first drafts, writers should include many thoughts that will later be revised or cut, as this will help them find the right words for the final version. Writing is something that must be practiced. Lamott advises against using dialect unless you can do it skillfully.

Settings of novels also provide information about characters. To write about a setting you are unfamiliar with, Lamott suggests doing research. For instance, interviewing a rich person about what their house looks like can help a writer create a rich person’s house for their story.

As an example, she recalls wanting to put a garden in one of her novels, but realizing that she knew very little about gardening. Her research involved calling a nursery, reading a book on gardening, and talking to her friends who garden. As a result of all that research, she wrote a novel that led many readers to believe she was interested in and good at gardening. This is just one example of the kind of research she has done for her books.

Lamott discusses how the practice of writing includes work erasing and replacing earlier work. She compares writing and rewriting to painting over a canvas with white and painting a new image on top. This comparison is part of character creation and development.

She recalls taking trips to a convalescent home with a church group and how her perspectives of the elders there changed over time. Each time she visits them, she learns more about them, and her perception of their personalities shifts. This process of gradually getting to know who someone is applies to the creation of fictional characters as well: each draft produces a deeper understanding of the character. Lamott paraphrases a friend of hers who compared aging and dying people with trees in winter. This causes her to rethink how people—and characters—present themselves externally and how they are internally. She connects the image to a different friend of hers passing and having a tree planted in her memory.

Lamott assures readers that many writers struggle with structuring their plots. She describes the process of writing her second novel, which was rejected by her editor several times. Part of the rewriting process was printing out her manuscript and collecting scenes in different piles all over a large floor. This way, she moved scenes around and put in notes for scenes that needed to be added. The rewriting process involved only working on one short section (or, as she calls it, short assignment) at a time.

However, her editor was unhappy with the new version. After she tells him the plot, while hungover, he suggests she write a plot treatment. Her plot treatment ended up being 500-1000 words describing each chapter, or about 40 pages total. This resulted in her being given the rest of her advance, which allowed her to finish a new version of the novel. The novel was more successful than her others. She allows her students to read the plot treatment.

Lamott compares finishing a final draft to tucking an octopus into bed, with the tentacles representing various issues with the draft. She warns against being held back by perfectionism, and to stop working on a draft when there is “no more steam in the pressure cooker” (94).