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Anne Lamott

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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Paperback – Picture Book, September 1, 1995

by Anne Lamott (Author)

4.6 8,197 ratings

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An essential volume for generations of writers young and old. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this modern classic will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. Anne Lamott is "a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps" (Los Angeles Times).

“Superb writing advice…. Hilarious, helpful, and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review

For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title:

“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.’”

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

September 1, 1995
Dimensions

7.99 x 5.2 x 0.54 inches
ISBN-10

0385480016
ISBN-13

978-0385480017
See all details

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
Highlighted by 6,795 Kindle readers
One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
Highlighted by 5,794 Kindle readers
She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.
Highlighted by 5,432 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Think you've got a book inside of you? Anne Lamott isn't afraid to help you let it out. She'll help you find your passion and your voice, beginning from the first really crummy draft to the peculiar letdown of publication. Readers will be reminded of the energizing books of writer Natalie Goldberg and will be seduced by Lamott's witty take on the reality of a writer's life, which has little to do with literary parties and a lot to do with jealousy, writer's block and going for broke with each paragraph. Marvelously wise and best of all, great reading.

Review

“Superb writing advice. . . . Hilarious, helpful, and provocative.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps.”
—Los Angeles Times

“One of the funniest books on writing ever published.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

“A gift to all of us mortals who write or ever wanted to write. . . . Sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise and alternately cranky and kind—a reveille to get off our duffs and start writing now, while we still can.”
—Seattle Times

“Bird by Bird would be worth reading just for Lamott’s ele- gant, moving, and often-hilarious prose. But the advice she offers is just as fantastic as the style with which it’s delivered.”
—Forbes

“Anne Lamott understands better than anyone that writers need help. . . . She writes so well, in fact, that it’s hard to believe that she, too, has trouble with writing. That’s what’s so deeply comforting about this book.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Deftly and honestly explores the mental challenges of being a writer. . . . Lamott’s advice is, simply put, invaluable.”
—Bustle

“[Lamott] uses her writing exercises or lessons as a way to help us more deeply understand ourselves and the human condition in all its messiness. If you’re looking for sense-making and meaning during this deeply destabilizing time, this book is timeless.”
—Elise Hu, TED Talks Daily

“Delight[s] with insight and descriptive acumen. This humorous, insightful, no-nonsense approach will remind novices why they are writing.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Offers unique inspiration. . . . An honest appraisal of what it takes to be a writer and why it matters so much.”
—Library Journal

From the Publisher

"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.'"

"Superb writing advice... hilarious, helpful and provocative." -- New York Times Book Review.

"A warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps." -- Los Angeles Times.

"A gift to all of us mortals who write or ever wanted to write... sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise and alternately cranky and kind -- a reveille to get off our duffs and start writing now, while we still can." -- Seattle Times.

From the Inside Flap

"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.'"

From the Back Cover

"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.'"

About the Author

ANNE LAMOTT is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Almost Everything; Hallelujah Anyway; Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; and Operating Instructions. She is also the author of seven novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Getting Started

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. Year after year my students are bursting with stories to tell, and they start writing projects with excitement and maybe even joy—finally their voices will be heard, and they are going to get to devote themselves to this one thing they’ve longed to do since childhood. But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith. Their sense of self and story shatters and crumbles to the ground. Historically they show up for the first day of the workshop looking like bright goofy ducklings who will follow me anywhere, but by the time the second class rolls around, they look at me as if the engagement is definitely off.

“I don’t even know where to start,” one will wail.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.

Now, the amount of material may be so overwhelming that it can make your brain freeze. When I had been writing food reviews for a number of years, there were so many restaurants and individual dishes in my brainpan that when people asked for a recommendation, I couldn’t think of a single restaurant where I’d ever actually eaten. But if the person could narrow it down to, say, Indian, I might remember one lavish Indian palace, where my date had asked the waiter for the Rudyard Kipling sampler and later for the holy-cow tartare. Then a number of memories would come to mind, of other dates and other Indian restaurants.

So you might start by writing down every single thing you can remember from your first few years in school. Start with kindergarten. Try to get the words and memories down as they occur to you. Don’t worry if what you write is no good, because no one is going to see it. Move on to first grade, to second, to third. Who were your teachers, your classmates? What did you wear? Who and what were you jealous of? Now branch out a little. Did your family take vacations during those years? Get these down on paper. Do you remember how much more presentable everybody else’s family looked? Do you remember how when you’d be floating around in an inner tube on a river, your own family would have lost the little cap that screws over the airflow valve, so every time you got in and out of the inner tube, you’d scratch new welts in your thighs? And how other families never lost the caps?

If this doesn’t pan out, or if it does but you finish mining this particular vein, see if focusing on holidays and big events helps you recollect your life as it was. Write down everything you can remember about every birthday or Christmas or Seder or Easter or whatever, every relative who was there. Write down all the stuff you swore you’d never tell another soul. What can you recall about your birthday parties—the disasters, the days of grace, your relatives’ faces lit up by birthday candles? Scratch around for details: what people ate, listened to, wore—those terrible petaled swim caps, the men’s awful trunks, the cocktail dress your voluptuous aunt wore that was so slinky she practically needed the Jaws of Life to get out of it. Write about the women’s curlers with the bristles inside, the garters your father and uncles used to hold up their dress socks, your grandfathers’ hats, your cousins’ perfect Brownie uniforms, and how your own looked like it had just been hatched. Describe the trench coats and stoles and car coats, what they revealed and what they covered up. See if you can remember what you were given that Christmas when you were ten, and how it made you feel inside. Write down what the grown-ups said and did after they’d had a couple of dozen drinks, especially that one Fourth of July when your father made Fish House punch and the adults practically had to crawl from room to room.

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point at you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We told you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

“But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind—a scene, a locale, a character, whatever—and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also, severe hypochondria. There may be a Nurse Ratched–like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.

Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller. But I don’t. All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for almost everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it. And often the right words do come, and you—well—“write” for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper. But the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn how bad your first drafts are.

The obsessing may keep you awake, or the self-loathing may cause you to fall into a narcoleptic coma before dinner. But let’s just say that you do fall asleep at a normal hour. Then the odds are that you will wake up at four in the morning, having dreamed that you have died. Death turns out to feel much more frantic than you had imagined. Typically you’ll try to comfort yourself by thinking about the day’s work—the day’s excrementitious work. You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you; you may find yourself consumed with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with cancer.

And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.” You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is.

And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. And it really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run: “his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”

I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit there long enough, something will happen.

My students stare at me for a moment. “How do we find an agent?” they ask.

I sigh. When you are ready, there are books that list agents. You can select a few names and write to them and ask if they would like to take a look at your work. Mostly they will not want to. But if you are really good, and very persistent, someone eventually will read your material and take you on. I can almost promise you this. However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

But my students don’t believe me. They want agents, and to be published. And they also want refunds.

Almost all of them have been writing at least for a little while, some of them all of their lives. Many of them have been told over the years that they are quite good, and they want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the 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. And especially, the paranoia.

You can be defeated and disoriented by all these feelings, I tell them, or you can see the paranoia, for instance, as wonderful material. You can use it as the raw clay that you pull out of the river: surely one of your characters is riddled with it, and so in giving that person this particular quality, you get to use it, shape it into something true and funny or frightening. I read them a poem by Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes:

We who are

your closest friends

feel the time

has come to tell you

that every Thursday

we have been meeting,

as a group,

to devise ways

to keep you

in perpetual uncertainty

frustration

discontent and

torture

by neither loving you

as much as you want

nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is

in on it,

plus your boyfriend

and your ex-husband;

and we have pledged

to disappoint you

as long as you need us.

In announcing our

association

we realize we have

placed in your hands

a possible antidote

against uncertainty

indeed against ourselves.

But since our Thursday nights

have brought us

to a community

of purpose

rare in itself

with you as

the natural center,

we feel hopeful you

will continue to make unreasonable

demands for affection

if not as a consequence

of your disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st Paperback Edition (September 1, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385480016
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385480017
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.99 x 5.2 x 0.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Authorship Reference
- #4 in Writing Skill Reference (Books)
- #5 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)

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Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions, and the forthcoming Hallelujah Anyway. She is also the author of several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.

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Ken Goldstein

As Much About Life As Writing

Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2011

Verified Purchase

Anne Lamott is not a cheerleader, more like the Burgess Meredith with the water bottle and bucket in Rocky's corner between rounds -- I'm also guessing she wouldn't wilt if she had to slash your eye open if like Rocky it got sealed shut. She knows you are going to get hit hard, and she reminds you that you know it too. She tells you not to get distracted by that which doesn't matter to the process of writing. Much of this she learned from her father, who was also a career writer. He taught her it was the doing that mattered, not the surrounding mechanical functions that seem like they matter.

What struck me repeatedly in Lamott's mini-lessons was her deep understanding of process -- that output of a work is not so much the full work itself, but an assembly of building blocks, one at a time, each a commitment, and only in totality something more. She does not advocate bonehead process or ridiculous formulaic mandate - this is not a how-to manual -- she just wants us to care about what we are doing and accomplish it in a series of heartfelt steps. There are no shortcuts, it's a little more each day, a continuum that adds up to a satisfying and cohesive whole. This is not breakthrough thinking, but it's a lesson we need to learn over and over, and it's not just about writing. Creative process is the heart of innovation. Think of all the elements that make the iPad great. If all the elements weren't great, it would not be great. Same with a restaurant menu and wine list. Same with an office skyscraper or memorial monument. Same with a short story, same with a novel. Summary impression rests in the details, all the many tiny parts or moments -- and all those details require hard thought and careful design.

Lamott is smart about this, she tells you that getting it right is not going to happen out of the gate and unnerving strides at perfection can be your worst enemy. She has an excellent descriptor for the real quality of the first drafts to which we aspire. I'll let you discover that on your own so the word does not get scraped here. Her point is, just get the words out, work on making them better later, a layer at a time.

She also allows us not to obsess unnecessarily with locking the full road map before we explore, because again that can impede our work. How far do we need to see ahead? "About two or three feet ahead of you" is plenty she tell us, quoting E.L. Doctorow: "..writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." She says this is "right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard." I tend to agree.

There is tremendous empathy in Lamott's world view, she offers a sense of shared experience that is reinforcing and comforting. Lamott talks about the imaginary radio station playing in your head -- another colorful descriptor I will let you discover -- that tells us over and over again why we can't do something, why the work we are doing is neither good nor worth doing. Learning to turn off that radio is our key to moving forward, we all hear it from time to time, but when it becomes perpetual, that is when our ability to create interesting work stops completely.

Lamott is just so honest and clear about all the factors that stop us from moving forward because she not only has experienced them, she continues to experience them. She does not position herself as a guru or weekend seminar success evangelist, but simply as someone who can reflect on problems of creativity because she deals with problems of creativity endlessly in her own life. She is even more honest in telling us that no one can make these problems go away once and for all, certainly not with any form of temporal success. All we can do is know that these obstructions will always be there, so we must embrace confronting them. Sometimes it really is good to know that none of us are experiencing roadblocks on our own, the fact that someone like Lamott tells you she is experiencing what you are experiencing is precisely the empathy that builds strength and resistance because the experiences are shared, bad and good. Her humility is reinforcing and refreshing and uncompromisingly inspiring.

"Bird by Bird" is not a long book, it can be read if you wish initially in a single sitting, but it is the kind of book you will find yourself coming back to for this chapter or that, this phrase or that. Lamott writes with good humor, even when she tackles very difficult and personal matters of her own life and those around her. The more I think about her framework, the more I am convinced it is much more broadly applicable then perhaps she even considered. I see the guidance as useful in company life, in financial life, in family life, in political life, and in government life. All of these require effective process to get them right, there are no shortcuts, and the rewards can be the smallest where the challenges are the greatest. That does not mean the rewards aren't meaningful, but it is the context of those rewards and the expectations that one sets for success that truly inform us when we are steering toward a final draft.

Review excerpted from my blog:

[...]

45 people found this helpful

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FitOldDog

Hilarious, full of truths, essential reading for would be writers, and inspiring.

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2024

Verified Purchase

I loved this remarkable book, so full of insights, guidance, reality, and yes, inspiration. As a retired scientist, and aspiring writer for over a decade, who's experience supports that of John Grisham, that, "It's easier to write a book, than to sell a book," I loved the down to earth stories of this remarkable narrative adventure. I also enjoyed some real belly laughs. A must read for all wannabe writers, seduced by the illusion of financial riches. The rewards of writing are so much more. Highly recommended. Kevin Thomas Morgan

3 people found this helpful

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kerene

A True Mentor From The Pages

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2024

Verified Purchase

I had always had a yearning to make income from writing -whatever form that might have taken, I've looked at a few. Remarkably, in my most recent research, I came upon this book as a recommendation for guidance to beginner writers. I read the sample of page 1 online and knew that this was the one; the guide of all guides for me. I'm glad I bought this book because in 6 pages it has already done galaxies for me than all of my research on writing combined.

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Kwan Chung Howe

Great book on writing!

Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2023

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Great insight into the mind of a writer. Enjoyed the ideas and processes discussed. Written in a intelligent and conversational manner, like having a friend who just lays out the bottom line..

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2024

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Everything 100% perfect!!

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Kendall Giles

Getting words onto the page!

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2011

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There seem to be as many books about how to write as there are actual writers, yet Anne Lamott makes a solid if not altogether inspiring contribution to the collection. Also known for her non-fiction books dealing with depression, Christianity, and alcoholism, in Bird by Bird author Lamott turns her humor and autobiographical lens toward offering sage advice and inspiration for writers of all levels. While far from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, and mute on the meter of poetry and the tropes of science fiction, Lamott instead focuses more on psychological issues that confront and haunt writers from all genres, such as defeating the blank page, avoiding perfectionism obsessions, cranking out that first draft, and writing for the right reasons.

A breadth of writing advice, Bird by Bird gets its title from wisdom Lamott's father once gave to her brother, incapacitated by the task of writing a school essay on birds. The senior Lamott advised the younger to break the assignment down into manageable chunks: "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." Divided into five parts, in part one Lamott first addresses writing itself -- getting words onto the page. Lamott starts by giving the aspiring author permission to write and then by encouraging the author to just get the words onto the page. Go ahead, just create that first, messy draft: "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere." She then suggests focusing more on creating compelling characters than worrying about plot: "If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen." She even discusses a short story template -- action, background, development, climax, ending -- that can be used as an initial story structure. Dialog is important too, and compelling dialog can be influenced by real-life encounters, but the main goal is to get that first draft written, in short steps, a little each day.

In part Two Lamott talks about the writing frame of mind -- about how authors can psyche themselves into writing using rituals at the beginning of each writing session and by believing in the stories they are telling. Part Three presents specific tools authors can use to help recall memorable quotes and scenes, how to collect new material, and how to gain feedback on drafts, such as using index cards on which to jot down ideas, joining or forming writing groups and sending drafts to a short-list of people an author trusts to give honest and useful feedback, and overcoming writer's block by refilling the author's emptiness through short exercises just to get the fingers moving. In part Four Lamott talks about the publication process and why an author simply giving herself to the writing act in and of itself is often the best reward: "There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver." Part Five contains final words of wisdom and encouragement for the budding author. For example, an author should not hesitate to use experiences from their childhood (and tips are given on how to avoid libel when using autobiographical material).

Overall, rather than being the strict writing schoolmarm, Lamott is more like a writing companion. She chats over your shoulder with you at the end of the day, sipping a glass of wine, reflecting on her own experiences in the writing trenches, and sharing what worked for her in achieving success. Her advice is true and her voice is encouraging -- she uses self-deprecating humor to convince any reader that their writing anguish is neither new nor unique since Lamott herself has likely already confronted and conquered those same demons. She persevered and achieved success, and the reader of her book too shall overcome and get their story onto the page. She mentions God throughout, but she does not come across as preachy. Again, she's relating what worked for her, using anecdotes from memorable episodes in her life. There's no magic and no divine inspiration to solve writing problems--she uses real techniques and encouragement to help confront and conquer the blank page.

Indeed, we can all use encouragement and insights from someone who's already been there. Like the oft-repeated "Practice, practice, practice" response by legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein when he was stopped on a street in New York and was asked, "Pardon me sir, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?", Lamott's response to writers in Bird by Bird is just as wise and true, but perhaps even more motivational due to her humor and honest expression from the trenches.

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Rémi Fournier

Parfait

Reviewed in Canada on January 23, 2024

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Merci

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Madhuri

Inspiring

Reviewed in India on November 17, 2023

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Writer’s block, slump, depression, self doubt or just starting to write? This book helps you find your rhythm and begin. Funny with great ideas and interesting anecdotes from the author’s large makes this an enjoyable non fiction. To be re-read repeatedly.

Antonia Benet Badia

Precioso

Reviewed in Spain on September 29, 2023

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Un muy buen libro, sobre todo para los amantes de la lectura.

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Amazon Customer

Simple, concise, funny

Reviewed in Germany on May 11, 2023

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Such an easy read! So practical and heartfelt. I recommend it for lifting your spirits and not give up on writing.

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César Alejandro Martínez Ortíz

It's a good book (:

Reviewed in Mexico on October 25, 2020

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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.

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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Paperback – Picture Book, September 1, 1995

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