Bird By Bird
By Anne Lamott
There are only so many books about writing a person can read in a certain period of time before all writing advice boils down to the two rules of 1) Read and 2) Write. It’s not bad advice. Most authors lead with the fact that they are rehashing second hand information you could probably find on the back of a cereal box, but it does make you wonder what the point of reading the book might be. The author often openly wonders what the point of writing the book is themselves. Why write another book on writing when everything they’ll say has been written before? Why do they deserve to be in the spotlight for something as unoriginal as words that have been passed along to every author in existence until everyone’s parroting back and forth different versions of the same advice? Is it ego that drives them, or a sense that somewhere along the way, they learned something special?
Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird does what every good book about writing does. It informs the reader in the beginning that the only way they will ever write anything is by writing it, and then spends the rest of the book trying to show how they might go about doing that. Evergreen as the advice is, there is a personalized touch to it; pushing it forward in front of other similar books with stories from Lamott’s life and time teaching. Her personal stories shape the way she appears as a character in her own advice, giving form to her lessons, shaping them into story within curriculum. When she describes teaching in the classroom, her instructions then feel personalized to the reader, as if you are sitting at a desk taking notes and raising your hand to ask the same questions her students do.
I enjoyed Bird by Bird, especially the story that inspired the title, but I wonder if I would have liked it more had I read some of Lamott’s other writing. It’s hard to get the full picture of a person when they are referring to other writing they’ve done about their lives. It’s like being on a guided tour that refers you to other museums where you can see more art. Maybe I’ll come back after visiting the others, but that doesn’t help me today. And I liked this museum! I liked the stories of her father, of struggling with her editor on how to write her book. There was never a point where her writing felt ingenuine, or like she didn’t care for the listener, be it of her book or classroom. Still, it was hard to shake that disconnect at times, and I’ll be interested to see what time with her other books may bring another reading.
Sometimes these books are more memoir than writing advice, some are more technical grammar than advice. Lamott has written memoir/autofiction already, and she treats Bird by Bird as a distillation of her best writing advice. I think I will return to it again soon, sticky notes and highlighter in hand, seeking out her best lessons and skipping past the personal touches, saving those for another visit among the birds.