One of the best books that I’ve ever read on the process of writing is Anne Lamott‘s book “bird by bird.” The title refers to a grade school report on birds that her brother procrastinated on until the last night before it was due. The phrase “bird by bird” refers to their father’s guidance that best way to approach the larger daunting project is to simply focus on smaller parts one at a time in other words one bird at a time. This is also sage advice for writing a PhD dissertation which can be immensely challenging for PhD candidates especially if the dissertation is their first major (100 pages or more) writing project, which is likely the case. Below are some of my favorite quotes and stories from the book which is a worth a full read.
- Part 1: Writing
- Getting Started: Just dump everything in your brain onto a piece of paper until it is empty ; “…becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.” – AL ; We Who Are Your Closest Friends by Phillip Lopate (poem).
- Short Assignments: a large writing project is “like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E. L. Doctorow
- Shitty First Drafts: No one needs to see the first draft, the goal is simply to complete it. Your advisor should only see the revised second draft ; “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.” – AL
- Perfectionism: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.” – AL ; read the whole thing here in a previous post.
- School Lunches: Best advice on writing: just write and let the words flow.
- Polaroids: “Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t – and, in fact, you’re not supposed to – know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.” – AL ; “It was about the beauty of sheer effort.” – AL
- Characters: “Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.” – AL
- Plot: See also “The Art of Fiction” and other books by John Gardner and “Aspects of the Novel” by E. M. Forster ; “Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.” – AL ; Alice Adams process for writing a short story: ABDCE.
- Dialogue: “I wish there were an easier, softer way, a shortcut, but this is the nature of most good writing: that you find out things as you go along. Then you go back and rewrite. Remember: no one is reading your first drafts.” – AL
- Set Design: “The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives, while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments.” – AL
- False Starts: “You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear.” – AL
- Plot Treatment: “The scene may have triggered the confidence that got you to work on your piece, but now it doesn’t ring true and so it does not make the final cut.” – AL
- How Do You Know When You Are Done?: “What happens instead is that you’ve gone over and over something so many times, and you’ve weeded and pruned and rewritten, and the person who reads your work for you has given you great suggestions that you have mostly taken – and then finally something inside you just says it’s time to get on to the next thing.” – AL
- Part 2: The Writing Frame of Mind
- Looking Around: “The conscious mind seems to block that feeling of oneness so we can function efficiently, maneuver in the world a little bit better, get our taxes done on time.” – AL
- The Moral Point of View: “Telling these truths is you job. You have nothing else to tell us.” – AL
- Broccoli: “”Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” – AL ; “Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. There will be many mistakes, many things to take out and others that need to be added. You just aren’t always going to make the right decision.” – AL
- Radio Station KFKD: “If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement , the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the list of things that one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit…” – AL ; “So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push back our sleeves, and begin again.” – AL
- Jealousy: “My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.” – AL
- Part 3: Help Along the Way
- Index Cards: “My index-card life is not efficient or well organized. Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking what I do with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having filed it away now in my memory.” – AL
- Calling Around: “There are an enormous number of people out there with invaluable information to share with you, and all you have to do is to pick up the phone. They love it when you do, just as you love it when people ask if they can pick your brain about something you happen to know a great deal about…” – AL
- Writing Groups: “So much of writing is about sitting down and doing it every day, and so much of it is about getting into the custom of taking in everything that comes along, seeing it all as grist for the mill.” – AL ; “But if you do need feedback, encouragement, benevolent pressure, and the company of other writers, you may want to consider starting a writing group.” – AL ; “Also an occupational hazard of writing is that you’ll have bad days. You feel not only totally alone but also that everyone else is at a party. But if you talk to other people that write, you remember that this feeling is part of the process, that it’s inevitable.” – AL
- Someone to Read Your Drafts: “I don’t think you have the time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.” – AL
- Letters: To focus your mind, picture a specific person that you are writing a letter to.
- Writer’s Block: “The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if accept the reality that you have been given – that you are not in a productive creative period – you are free to begin filling up again.” – AL ; “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 finish. The discouraging voices will hound you – “This is all piffle,” they will say, and they may be right. What you are doing may just be practice. But this is how you are going to get better, and there is no point in participating if you don’t finish.” – AL ; “It helps to resign as the controller of your life.” – AL ; “So, in the meantime, while the tailor is working, you might as well get some fresh air. Do your three hundred words, and then go for a walk. Otherwise you’ll want to sit there and try to contribute, and this will only get in the way. Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.” – AL
- Part 4: Publication – and other Reasons to Write
- Writing a Present: “Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems. Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer.” – AL ; “He sent it back with the following note: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.”” – AL
- Finding Your Voice: “We write to expose the unexposed.”
- Giving: “If you give freely, there will always be more.” – AL ; A story told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA – “How soon until I start to die?”
- Publication: “All you see are the typos no one caught…And the typos are important ones. They make you look ignorant; they make you look like an ignorant racist.” – AL ; “Hours later, I remembered that if I wasn’t enough before being asked to participate in this prestigious event, then participating wasn’t going to make me enough. Being enough was going to be an inside job.”
- Part 5: The Last Class
- “When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility.” – AL ; “Against all odds, you have to put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can do yo understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” – AL ; “You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.” – AL