The phrase comes from a childhood memory that Lamott recounts early in the book. Her 10-year-old brother had to write a report on birds and procrastinated until the night before. Near tears, he was “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” Their father cut through his paralyzing despair by telling him, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” The anecdote is classic Lamott. It conveys “some instructions on writing and life” (the book’s subtitle) in a way that’s quirky, a little bit cheesy, and hard to forget.
Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose. I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which advised me to “avoid slovenliness of form” and “eschew surplusage.” All these authors write with robust confidence about the importance of direct, efficient, streamlined writing. They abominate vague ideas and messy sentences, seeing them as an insult to readers, or worse. And with the exception of Twain, who has a rollicking time trashing an author he clearly enjoys, their attitude toward writing is as serious and dignified as the prose style they praise.
every form of mental illness … surfaces, leaping out of water like trout: the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias.…
you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock.
She’s irreverent, but she’s reverent too, in the style of a hippie aunt. There’s a mystical quality to a lot of her advice—so much so that she jokes about seeming too “California” or “Cosmica Rama.” She approvingly cites the Dalai Lama, Rumi, Wendell Berry, Ram Dass, Tibetan nuns, her Presbyterian pastor, and a Catholic priest named Tom. The flip side of writing misery, it turns out, is occasional writing-induced ecstasy produced by committing to daily writing as a devotional practice. At one point she says, “You don’t have to believe in God, but it’s easier if you do.” She turns “Trust the process” into an entire philosophy of life.
Bird by Bird is not that kind of sacred text for me. Still, it has reassured me by taking for granted that psychological barriers are a common part of the writing process and can be overcome. And it has helped me set aside impossible standards long enough to get some writing done.
What sets Anne Lamott apart from most other writing guides is her insistence on writing’s inherent grotesque indignity.It’s clear that Bird by Bird holds up as a set of practical aphorisms and discrete chapters, but does it hold up as a book? Rereading Bird by Bird now, it’s clear that some things haven’t aged well. Lamott’s jokes about how she has to be a writer because otherwise she’d be totally unemployable are grating in an economy where even prolific published writers have to support themselves with nonwriting jobs. Her eye-rolling exasperation with students who ask her how to get published feels mean-spirited too when opportunities are so scarce for newcomers and have come comparatively easily to her; she is a nepo baby who grew up watching her father write and inherited his agent. The least she could do is to try to open the door for writers without those advantages, and to take their ambition seriously.
This kind of self-absorption pervades Bird by Bird. It’s why Lamott dismisses her students’ desires for publication while indulging her own. And it’s what causes her to respond to criticisms from an editor by literally showing up at his house and pacing back and forth in his living room explaining how and why he was wrong, a move that she seems to think is gutsy and admirable, but one that could quite possibly end a career. (An editor I know was particularly appalled by this story.)
I love Bird by Bird’s attention to the difficulty of the writing process, but I don’t love how it frames it primarily as a struggle with ego, as opposed to a struggle with words, images, ideas, thought.Perhaps it’s perverse to say this, but after 20 years as a writing teacher, I’ve come to believe that many writers could stand to be more perfectionist, not less. I’ve observed that for every writer who is stymied by perfectionism, there is a writer who is held back by the lack of it: who is phoning it in (or ChatGPT-ing it in) and doesn’t understand why that’s a problem. And for every writer who is eaten up by jealousy, there is a writer who could be helped by learning to admire and pay attention to other writers more.
In the last chapter, Lamott takes a brief break from offering advice to contemplate the state of the world. “The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead,” she writes. “I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising.… But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes.”
These days, “shitty first drafts” produced one bird at a time are more than just a writing exercise. They are an antidote to corporate, algorithm-generated “enshittification.” And although creativity without effort may initially feel like a blessing, I suspect that someday soon, readers will turn to Bird by Bird with nostalgia for the days when trying to write was a struggle demanding everything we had to give.
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