Bird by Bird

The book talks to every person and it befriends every writer. The author Anne Lammot tells her students to plug their nose, jump in, and write. She writes about the fears, the slack, the disinterest, the “am I having cancer or mental illness” phase, all phases a writer can go through to keep at writing on his or her desk. After every chapter I took down points in my notebook. Apart from addressing writers, the author in her foreword says the book is a narrative of her take on life. A must read book. 📕 It is very interesting, insightful and filled with practical advice.

The author makes you feel like you are accompanied by a friend who is so imperfect as yourself. Navigating through the journey of becoming a writer, the emotional ride that someone goes through as a newbie trapped between the expectation and reality is clearly addressed. Basically this book is for someone who wishes to write yet filled with self doubts and hesitations. Anne comes to rescue you and give a pat on your shoulder to start over.

I highly recommend Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s full of practical advice, written beautifully with self-deprecating humour. She speaks about everything from getting words on a page to reaching deep within oneself for plots — using memory as a creative device. She also offers valuable insights on dealing with rejection, jealousy, and the art of both giving and receiving feedback. It feels like storytelling around a campfire, disguised as a workshop. It’s not so much technical as it is philosophical — there are other great books on craft, but this one is for the writer’s soul. Best of all, much of Lamott’s wisdom also informs our lives — how we relate to ourselves and to others. It shows us the way to becoming not only better writers, but also kinder humans.

A must read for anyone who enjoys reading. Apart from the message and the theme, just the writing itself is STUPENDOUS. Should be must read for schools.

This is a must-read book for authors who need some motivation to complete their book. Authors (and wannabes) often find themselves facing writer's block. So this answers the question, How to eat an elephant? Piece by piece! Instead of considering the book or novel as one big whole thing, consider it as parts. Now you have to focus on completing just one chapter. Thus, by going from chapter to chapter, you complete your book! The book provides many practical solutions to situations where authors get stuck. This is one of the main reasons why you find this book on the desk of almost every author worth his/her salt. To improve your writing, consider reading this book a few times. Your work would improve a lot.

My first book on writing and it was hit when it comes to learnings from it . Author compares life to writing as both needs acceptance in imperfection .Bird by Bird tells the power of story telling and how writting connects individual to deeperselves .Author provides road map for writers by sharing personal memoirs,writting tips and how even small writting each day can bring out a different version of ourselves.#birdbybird

A1 quality, the book cover has some nice asmr feels to it, loved it, tx (sturdier cover than normal books)!

Not really great read. I was expecting to get some motivation to write more which i did in few chapters but the book is not really a pleasant read. It is not a coherent writing, in my opinion. My previous reading The sense of style by Steven Pinker must have set the bar high, I guess.

A classic - funny, insightful, and a keeper. No wonder Bird By Bird is a recommended read in writing programs the world over.

I love the approach to aspiring writers ... Anne is homest and love the story telling ... Yes we all have a stor. I am reading to write science and is working for me so I am for writing facta and it is taking me trhough a great journey ... Thank you Anne!

It's a sincere essay on why we may find it hard to write some times. Sincerity is really valuable in a book on a topic like this, it means that even if you can't relate to everything that's written on it at a literal level, it will connect with you through your feelings as a struggling human being in front of a daunting task, which in this case, is writing something. It's an enjoyable read and by no means it has made me an expert writer, but I'm sure I learnt something and you don't get to say that every day.

No sugar coating in this one. The author tells it like she sees it. I woke up after reading this book. Thanks for writing it. A must read if you want to know the truth about being a published author. Selma Martin.

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” 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. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.” Another thing: we want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing games or being coy or manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability. (Unless a major characteristic of his or hers is coyness or manipulation or lying.) We do not wish to be crudely manipulated. Of course, we enter into a work of fiction to be manipulated, but in a pleasurable way. We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater. Find out what each character cares most about in the world because then you will have discovered what’s at stake. Find a way to express this discovery in action, and then let your people set about finding or holding onto or defending whatever it is. Then you can take them from good to bad and back again, or from bad to good, or from lost to found. But something must be at stake or you will have no tension and your readers will not turn the pages. Think of a hockey player—there had better be a puck out there on the ice, or he is going to look pretty ridiculous. I tell my students to write this down—that the dream must be vivid and continuous—because it is so crucial. Outside the classroom, you don’t get to sit next to your readers and explain little things you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or believable. The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous. She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. There are a number of things that help when you sit down to write dialogue. First of all, sound your words—read them out loud. Second, remember that you should be able to identify each character by what he or she says. Each one must sound different from the others. And they should not all sound like you; 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. I need to digress again for a minute: you create these characters and figure out little by little what they say and do, but this all happens in a part of you to which you have no access—the unconscious. This is where the creating is done. We start out with stock characters, and our unconscious provides us with real, flesh-and-blood, believable people. The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known. But they only work if they resonate in the heart of the writer. When you write about your characters, we want to know all about their leaves and colors and growth. But we also want to know who they are when stripped of the surface show. So if you want to get to know your characters, you have to hang out with them long enough to see beyond all the things they aren’t. you want your readers’ eye-motes to go click! with recognition as they begin to understand one of your characters, but you probably won’t be able to present a character that recognizable if you do not first have self-compassion. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong. If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing. So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. A moral position is not a slogan, or wishful thinking. It doesn’t come from outside or above. It begins inside the heart of a character and grows from there. Tell the truth and write about freedom and fight for it, however you can, and you will be richly rewarded. You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating. “They’re just on loan,” he said. “They’re not ours.” This tape changed how I felt about my students emulating their favorite writers. It helped me see that it is natural to take on someone else’s style, that it’s a prop that you use for a while until you have to give it back. Truth seems to want expression. Truth, or reality, or whatever you want to call it is the bedrock of life. A black man at my church who is nearing one hundred thundered last Sunday, “God is your home,” and I pass this on mostly because all of the interesting characters I’ve ever worked with—including myself—have had at their center a feeling of otherness, of homesickness. And it’s wonderful to watch someone finally open that forbidden door that has kept him or her away. What gets exposed is not people’s baseness but their humanity. It turns out that the truth, or reality, is our home. But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in—then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home. Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. 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. But they are always yours, your books as well as your children. You helped bring your work into being, and every day you have to feed it, help it stay well, give it advice and love it when it ignores you. Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.” Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion. Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. 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.