Tag Archives: writing

“Bird by Bird” – Sunday Book Review

“Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” by Anne Lamott

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”

I think most of us writers get ourselves so worked up over the big picture, the completed work, the masterpiece, that we forget larger, greater things can only come together when all the little pieces fit. Everything we write comes together the in the same way: word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.

That isn’t to say there is no creativity or mystery involved. Those words we choose, or that choose us, to build those sentences come in a surprising array of ways. It is helpful though to remind ourselves to take it all “Bird by Bird,” to relax and let go of some of that control, to tell our internal editor to shut his or her mouth, and to just focus on taking it step by step.

“Bird by Bird” is probably the most hilarious book of writing advice I have ever read, but it is also one of the most practical. Lamott is frank about the fact that sometimes writing really sucks. Sometimes you pour your heart and soul into a draft, and re-read it only to find out it was pure rubbish. Guess what? Not only is that okay, it happens to all of us.

I know some great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much…Very few writers know what they’re going to do until they’ve done it.

Reading this book is like listening to one side (sometimes more) of a conversation with a close friend (one of those friends who is funny and encouraging, but isn’t afraid to call your bluff). “Bird by Bird” was published in 1994, and since that time I have read it cover to cover at least three times. I thumb through it constantly. When I can’t find where I left it the last time I was reading it, I panic. Whether I need a prompt, a smile, a hug, or a kick in the butt, I can count on this book to give it to me.

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Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

A Room Of Your Own: Commit To One Work

After I’d told yet another story of my struggle to decide just what I should be working on, Carrie (friend; colleague; fellow writer) put it simply:

“Everything’s back on the table.”

The truth of her words struck me hard enough to probe further.

For months now, I have been taking projects on and off the table pretty much every time I sit down to write.

Last August I graduated with my MFA in fiction. During the three years I spent working on that degree, I remained entirely dedicated to one project: an autobiographical novel titled Hallelujah.
Taking work on and off the table has long impeded the realization of my writing goals because I don’t stick with one project long enough to “finish” it. Shaken by the truth of Carrie’s words, I see now what I haven’t seen since I left the program last August. Those three years constitute an exception to my writing life since I began penning my first poems as a freshman in high school.

I often proclaim proudly: “I’ve never had writer’s block.”

It’s true! And I see now why. When the writing gets truly hard, on the third, fourth or fifth read-through–even when I’m stuck mid-story– I switch projects.

Carrie and I spoke in the afternoon. Both high school English teachers, we encourage each other on a near daily basis to make time for writing after the work day is done. It’s hard to do. We have families. School days are long. Dinner needs to be made. Dogs need to be walked. We have other hobbies too. She said, “Everything’s back on the table” in the same way she typically makes such comments, commiserating. So much of our friendship is based on reminding each other that the struggles we face daily as writers, as mothers, as women, as teachers, as lovers are entirely shared. We are not alone. As is often the case, she made the comment as much to herself as she did to me.

The comment sent me reeling and hours later when I sat down with my weekly fiction critique group, a writer I respect offered a simple

solution to the my dilemma. He told me to take all the files I wasn’t currently working on off my computer. He said put them on a disc or flash drive. He advised that if necessary I should even give the files to someone I could trust not to give them back until I finished what I had committed to work on.

Eureka!

All these years I have been buying flash drives and uploading my entire library of documents to my cloud (as that inter-space is now called). A few months ago I bought an iphone and as I searched for apps to download, I thought how cool would it be to be able to access all my Google Docs from my phone.

The fact that I had hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, and several novel drafts at my fingertips at any given moment, comforted me.

Like some other comforts, I see now how having all that work right in front of me every time I sat down to write moored me in indecision, kept me from staying long enough in any one work. This makes sense when I think about it. Staying too long means experiencing pain (such as doubt and fear of failure) and probably writer’s block.

This morning, I deleted all but the start of one story from my Gmail Drive. I took all the other folders and files and saved them in two locations. Until I finish the first draft of novel I started about Travis (a 24 year old stuck-in-neutral romantic who pumps gas at his parents gas station in Southeastern Oregon for a living when he should be moving on to his own life journey), when I sit down to write, I have exactly one choice of files to open, the work I have committed to finish.

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Dear Imagination Tree,

Half way into a ten mile run, half way up a doozy of a hill, you shifted my perspective the instant my brain received the sight of you. Trudging up that hill, by breath, by cadence, by will, I felt your influence before I understood its meaning.

You are like the sight of a rainbow caused by sunlight through a window prism, like stumbling upon a hopscotch board with time and inclination to spare, like the urge to turn a cartwheel just to make sure I still can. I saw you and longed to play under your branches, to let imagination trump sensibility, to pause mid-hill to play.

Imagination Tree, you remind me to:

skip rocks

splash in puddles

smile when I run

and, most of all,

to write what pleases me.

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A Room of Your Own: Boundaries

Let the people you live with know when you are sitting down to write. Tell them that for an hour or two or a page or a word count or whatever your goal is to please not disturb you.

It is your fault that at first they won’t listen to you. You’ve been at their beck and call for so long that they will need you without even thinking.

And you like that they need you.

Even if they do listen to you and they leave you to write just like you asked, you will start to feel guilty about twenty minutes in and begin to wonder how they are getting on without you. You may even make an excuse for needing to talk to them.

You forgot to ask how the oral book report went.

What are some synonyms for relaxed?

Did you remember to pay the car insurance?

What do you think of a trip to the beach this weekend?

You will need to be willing to let the domestic paradise that is your household fall to pieces without you. And you know it will fall to pieces without you.

Barring blood or broken bones, you will need to ignore every crash, every whine, every hard-shut cupboard or door.

When they don’t listen to you, you have to channel another you. The you that is a writer. The you that knows that in the long term you are helping the people you love more by showing them that if you really want something, you have to be ready to put in the time and work at it.

So, tell them when you are going to write and for how long and prove to them that you mean it by staying in the room and writing your heart out until you reach that day’s goal.

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Dear Paper and Pen,

Dear Pen and Paper,

I bought a manual typewriter from a junk shop downtown Aberdeen and typed my first short story on it. I was eighteen. I didn’t own a computer until college. My son was just learning to walk and he spoke only in the roundest sounds and brightest gestures. Before then, I composed in notebooks. I never went anywhere without a notebook in my hand or backpack. I often had several notebooks going a once.

Finding time to write then felt the most impossible it ever has, enrolled in eighteen credits as I was, tied as I was to my first responsibility–parenthood.

In ten years, I composed fifteen or so short stories on the computer and filled twice as many –more–notebooks with a disorganized collection of journal entries, quotes pulled from other writers, poems, and story ideas. On my computer now, I have hundreds of poems, more than fifty short stories, and four full-length novels in various stages of development. But, pen and paper, I always start with you. When I’m stuck, I fall back on your forgiving blank page, nothing like the cold white of the computer screen, cursor flashing.

Pen and paper, with you, I can write anywhere and recline while I write, and there is something about the hand’s grip, the way ink loops and scratches across the page with my whim or intent, something about the way I can scrawl out lines or words and draw arrows to move pieces of prose around on the page.

Pen and paper, I prefer you for starting anything and when I’m stuck. You are my choice for letters and love notes. Among all the remedies prescribed for writing emergencies–the software, the apps, the social networks–you emerge as that simple solution people sometimes talk about.

Love,

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The Review I Promised You: The Chronology of Water

The reading didn’t happen. I went to my first Gray Skies Reading Series with a marked-up copy of The Chronology of Water in hand only to find that there had been a change in plans. Yuknavich would be rescheduling the reading due to a death in the family. Bummer. Understandable, but still a bummer. There was to be an open mic instead. I enjoyed the open mic and left impressed with the reading series and excited to return to their next and next events. I finished the book and will write the review I promised, though I was hoping that something she said at the reading would help me communicate the wounds and pathways opened by this book in language.

How to begin?

THE LANGUAGE:

A language bandit, she calls herself, and in many senses she is lawless and resourceful as a bandit must be. With the confidence of Cummings to flout convention and the tenacity of Faulkner to push language to the point where it approximates lifetruth, she tells the story of a woman whose love of language gave her the voice she needed to write her life as she could imagine it, literally and figuratively. She pushes words together, pulls them apart and stretches them wide. She makes up words, alludes to words that came before her, and places one word in place of another in a way that makes shocks logic but makes meaning-sense. She follows conventions of grammar, then breaks them. She lengthens or shortens sentences and paragraphs with courage, grace, and mad rhythm. Straight to the heart. Of the matter. Of feeling. Of memory. My attention to her story never once waned.

THE SUBJECT:

She tells us from the beginning that her story is not an addiction memoir, though addiction courses through it and nearly drowns her before the happy ending. It’s also not a story about sexual abuse or sexuality, though the pages throb with details of her scars and her sex. This is a story about a woman who has the strength of a swimmer and who made a “wordhouse” (191) of her life.

WHAT IT MEANT TO ME:

If you endeavor to write, you should read this book. Yuknavitch closes, “It’s a big deal to make a sentence. The line between life and death” (292).
I will admit that reading this book at times discouraged me, filled me with envy. I have tried to write a book something like this, something about how a woman pulls herself up through language and practice. I finished that book, tried to send out into the world and failed, then put it in the proverbial drawer. I have two other books I’m trying to write. Reading this book helped me come to a truth I had been at the edge of: I’m done with that book yet. I haven’t given it my best. I gave up too soon. I may not have the strength of a swimmer (I didn’t even learn until I was twelve), but I have my own strength and a wordhouse of my own.
Even if it’s the only book I ever finish. Even if the wounds if opens break me and my own dexterity with language falls short of success.

The Chronology of Water succeeds on every possible level.
Read it. It quite possibly will change you.

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A Room Of Your Own: Pick A Fight

You are a writer. Just consider it.

There is nothing that can get get you in the mood for sweeping or writing like a good fight.

I don’t care what they tell you, it’s healthy. And the make-up is oh-so-sweet, you know.

You know!

Sometimes in order to write you have to make some wrinkles, break things up, let words fly.

Come on, let it all hang out.

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Dear Adulthood,

Why did I not hold you off a while longer?

I used to skip classes to spend hours penning ideas into notebooks–black coffee, toasted bagel to fuel my inspiration. I would stare out windows, at lovers walking down the street, and at old ladies on their raincoats on the transit bus that I took home for one shiny quarter. I would write and listen to music and daydream for hours.

“What will you do?” They asked.

“I’ll write,” I answered.

“What if your writing isn’t any good?” They replied.

“I’ll write better,” I stood my ground.

“Will you go to college?” They added.

“Why?” I asked.

Impassioned, impertinent, rebellious, alone against the world: Ah, that was me!

Eight years college. Twelve years high school teacher. Fourteen years wife. I learned to sacrifice writing for dollars and gold stars.

What if I let the house go? What if I stopped putting things back in their place? Started coming to work unprepared?

What if I got fired? If all I had to do was pen these lines?

I tell myself–being adult as I am–I don’t deserve to write at all until I’ve done my duty.

What you “do” if the first thing we ask a person we’ve just met.

I’m a teacher.

I’m a mother.

More meekly, I’m a writer.

When I tell people that they want to know if I’ve been published and whether I’ve written any books.

Adulthood,

These responsibilities are endless.

What if I refused? Made unreasonable demands? Used my charm to get my way?

Would you tell me to be more mature?

What if I stopped cooking dinner? What if I really wrote every day? Really put in the time and let the muse take me even if it meant I wasn’t pulling my weight, wasn’t being my best in every way? Meant I missed appointments and forgot to pay my bills?

What if I lost track of time?

Adulthood,

You tell me I must care, I must serve. I must work hard even if the reward is merely the satisfaction of having done my best work. I should put others before myself. I should volunteer more. Exercise more. Keep my house cleaner. Be a better parent. Stay in touch with old friends and make new ones if I can. Organize all the clutter. Be generous to my lover. Have a solution for every problem.

You make it so hard to write, sometimes.

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A Room Of Your Own: Don’t Put The Groceries Away

It started with some wild honeysuckle on my way home from writer’s group. A deep red like I’d never seen growing right there at the edge of the parking lot. I picked one, then four more. Then, it was California poppies from the edge of someone’s yard. I felt rebellious. Did anyone see me pick them? I looked around. Then calendula, rhododendron, and some white decorative something–also from the edge of people’s lawns. When I reached my house, I added some fading forget-me-nots from my backyard. While I’m writing this blog, I am looking at the bouquet I made from them.

For the second week in a row, I didn’t bring any pages of my own to writer’s group. I didn’t have many and I’m feeling protective of the ones I have. On the walk home tonight I was listening to Stephen King’s On Writing. As always with audio books, I lost track of his narrative in parts, but I caught what he said about how a story should start inward, then move outward. Yes, I thought, this story is still inward.

When I came in the house tonight, my stomach growling, a bag of groceries I had stopped off to pick up on the way, I put the grocery bag on the counter and sat down to write. People are trying to talk to me (my son; my boyfriend) and I want to talk to them( I love talking to them), but I am mostly ignoring them so that I can write this blog. I’d rather be taking a shower–eating dinner–finding out how the evening went. I didn’t even put the groceries away and I’m not sure I’ve ever just left the groceries sitting out.

How did I get in the room tonight?

I picked a bouquet of flowers and sat it next to my writing desk.

I did not put the groceries away.

What are your tricks, writer friends?

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Sunday Book Review…Well, sort of…

The book I want to review is The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, but I haven’t finished it yet. I know I want to write a review on this book because since I bought it a week ago it has never been far from sight. I carry it in my handbag when I go for walks (in case I find a nice bench to sit on, I guess). I put it on the counter when I clean the kitchen. I take it to school with me and read it whenever I ask my students to quietly read. I am likely to finish it tonight (50 pages to go!).

This Thursday, Yuknavitch is coming to Olympia as a featured reader in the Gray Skies Reading Series. I will be there and I promise you, dear blog readers (who are you out there? what are you writing now?) I’ll write this review then.

We post the Sunday Book Review in the spirit of Hart Crane: “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones appear in the proper pattern at the right moment.” I was delighted when one of my students (senior; high school) explained to me the topic for her personal narrative on how reading challenging books has changed her. She’s going to talk about how she has a deeper appreciation of craft, how she is a better writer for reading.

Hallelujah!

Sometimes I think I should just give up writing for a year or ten and read good books. Jane Smiley did this and wrote about it in her wonderful book 13 Ways of Looking At The Novel.

I am in a book group for writers and we read one book a month together and then meet to talk about it. If I had to choose between my writing groups (the other being a critique group), I have have to pick the reading group.

Thankfully, I don’t have to choose. 🙂

I am one of those people who believes ALL the answers can be found in b0oks. I buy more books in a month than I could possibly read and blame the fact that I haven’t found all the answers mainly on the fact that I have yet to read all the books. Sometimes, feeling bad about my rate of purchase compared to my rate of consumption, I will buy a book that catches my eye for someone else rather than not buy it at all.

I don’t check books out or borrow them because I have to write in them. When I read without a pencil in my hand, I feel helpless and unprepared.

There are plenty of books I could write a review for instead of Yuknavitch’s memoir and I suppose that would have been the sensible thing to do here.

It’s Sunday. It’s your turn. You have a blog to write.

I can’t.

It has to be that one. So look for it here Thursday night. I promise to write it after the reading.

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Tag Archives: writing

“Bird by Bird” – Sunday Book Review

A Room Of Your Own: Commit To One Work

Dear Imagination Tree,

A Room of Your Own: Boundaries

Dear Paper and Pen,

The Review I Promised You: The Chronology of Water

A Room Of Your Own: Pick A Fight

Dear Adulthood,

A Room Of Your Own: Don’t Put The Groceries Away

Sunday Book Review…Well, sort of…