Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

by Anne Lamott

  Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

  So I wrote all this down in my letter to Sam, and little by little memory and detail and fact and feeling wove themselves together. Like a Polaroid, the letter emerged, and from it the essay, clear and bright, full of smells and sounds, and full of hope, because baseball, like life, throbs with hope, or it wouldn’t exist—and full of me, for Sam and his children to read one day.

  Writer’s Block

  There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer’s block, where 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. Or you look at the notes you’ve scribbled recently on yellow legal pads or index cards, and they look like something Richard Speck jotted down the other night. And at the same time, as it turns out, you happen to know that your closest writing friend is on a roll, has been turning out stories and screenplays and children’s books and even most of a novel like he or she is some crazy pot-holder factory, pot holders pouring out the windows because there is simply not enough room inside for such glorious productivity.

  Writer’s block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you’ve written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit. A blissfully productive manic stage may come to a screeching halt, and all of a sudden you realize you’re Wile E. Coyote and you’ve run off the cliff and are a second away from having to look down. Or else you haven’t been able to write anything at all for a while. The fear that you’ll never write again is going to hit you when you feel not only lost and unable to find a few little bread crumbs that would identify the path you were on but also when you’re at your lowest ebb of energy and faith. You may feel a little as if writing a novel is like trying to level Mount McKinley with a dentist’s drill. Things feel hopeless, or at least bleak, and you are not imaginative or organized enough to bash your way through to a better view, let alone some interesting conclusion. You know where every idea, quote, and image came from; none of them is fresh. You’re so familiar with what you’re saying that your words all sound utterly commonplace. Writers are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up all that we can see and hear and read and think and feel and articulate, and everything that everyone else within earshot can hear and see and think and feel. We’re mimics, we’re parrots—we’re writers. But knowing the source of all our stuff deprives it of its magic, because then the material feels mundane, clichéd; you didn’t have to discover it because it was already there for all to see. You may start to feel that you are trying to pass off a TV dinner as home cooking.

  We have all been there, and it feels like the end of the world. It’s like a little chickadee being hit by an H-bomb. Here’s the thing, though. I no longer think of it as block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.

  The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty. As I said in the last chapter, this emptiness can destroy some writers, as do the shame and frustration that go with it. You feel that the writing gods gave you just so many good days, maybe even enough of them to write one good book and then part of another. But now you are having some days or weeks of emptiness, as if suddenly the writing gods are saying, "Enough! Don’t bother me! I have given to you until it hurts! Please. I’ve got problems of my own."

  The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given—that you are not in a productive creative period—you free yourself to begin filling up again. I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how much they hate writing—just for the hell of it, just to keep their fingers from becoming too arthritic, just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every day. Then, on bad days and weeks, let things go at that.

  I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this one particular night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on some distressing developments. She couldn’t, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because she’s teaching you how to live."

  I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours. So instead of staring miserably at the computer screen trying to will my way into having a breakthrough, I say to myself, "Okay, hmmm, let’s see. Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?" Then I can decide to read Wallace Stevens for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but I’d also be aware of other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did simple, I think. And I would want to be present.

  In the beginning, when you’re first starting out, there are a million reasons not to write, to give up. That is why it is of extreme importance to make a commitment to finishing sections and stories, to driving through to the finish. The discouraging voices will hound you—"This is all piffle, they will say, and they may be right. What you are doing may just be practice. But this is how you are going to get better, and there is no point in practicing if you don’t finish.

  I went through a real crisis of faith about two-thirds of the way through my last novel. The thing is that I had gotten twenty-seven bad reviews in a row on my previous novel, and I was feeling just the merest bit unsure about my skills and the joys of publication. But during that crisis of faith, I made a commitment to the characters in the new novel, instead of to the book itself. So I spent a little time at my desk every day, just writing down memories of my family, my youth. I went for walks and to lots of matinees, and I read. I spent as much time as I could outdoors while I waited for my unconscious to open a door and beckon.

  It finally did. I did not have some beautiful Hallmark moment when I threw back my shoulders with a big smile, dusted off my old hands, and got back to work. Rather, it was like catching amoebic dysentery. I was just sitting there minding my business, and then the next minute I rushed to my desk with an urgency I had not believed possible.

  It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right. We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they’re not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures. Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of river weed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull.

  All the good stories are out there waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way. Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, a
nd there will still be four billion different renditions. Some people will sing it spontaneously, with a lot of soulful riffs, while others are going to practice until they could sing it at the Met. Either way, everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exists in each of us. Everything you need is in your head and memories, in all that your senses provide, in all that you’ve seen and thought and absorbed. There in your unconscious, where the real creation goes on, is the little kid or the Dr. Seuss creature in the cellar, arranging and stitching things together. When this being is ready to hand things up to you, to give you a paragraph or a sudden move one character makes that will change the whole course of your novel, you will be entrusted with it. So, in the meantime, while the tailor is working, you might as well go get some fresh air. Do your three hundred words, and then go for a walk. Otherwise you’ll want to sit there and try to contribute, and this will only get in the way. Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck. You’ll sit there going, "Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?" But it is trying to tell you nicely, "Shut up and go away."

  Part Four

  Publication — and Other Reasons to Write

  Writing a Present

  Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems. Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer. There will be a very long buildup to publication day, and then the festivities will usually be over rather quickly. We will talk about all of this at great length shortly. In the meantime, let’s discuss some of the other reasons to write that may surprise a writer, even a writer who hasn’t given up on getting published. There are arenas full of potential for rich reward, where your life and your sense of self and of abundance really can be changed. (All of a sudden I cannot remember if we are allowed to use the word abundance in California anymore. I will have to get back to you on this.)

  Twice now I have written books that began as presents to people I loved who were going to die. I’ve told you a little about my father’s diagnosis of brain cancer, how all of a sudden I had a sad story to tell. It was a story rich with drama and humor, about a father and his three semigrown children living in a tiny town filled with aging hippies, trust-fund radicals, artists, New Agers, and ordinary people, whatever that means. Out of nowhere, the rug was suddenly pulled out from under the family, when it looked as if the father had a terminal illness and was actually going to go ahead and die.

  So I started writing about our new life. I recorded moments of my brothers trying to help our father, trying to help one another, all of us trying to keep our senses of humor, trying to find meaning in it all, and saying what was really on our minds. There were lots of descriptions of the townspeople and the landscape that I’d already written that I still liked and could use. But the best stuff was what my father and brothers were going through right then, right at that moment. I scribbled down the funny things they said, the tender moments, the black humor, the weirdness of it all. Then I started shaping that material into self-contained stories. I showed them to my father, who thought it was great that all this pain and fear and loss were being transformed into a story of love and survival. He would hand me back my pages, raise his fist in the black-power salute, and smile. This was enough to keep me going. In a sense, I was giving him a love letter. He never got his version of the story written, but the miracle was that I finished mine while his brain was still working. He got to read the whole thing. He got to know that he and his story were going to exist long after he took off his dog suit and went to the great beyond.

  Another propellant for this first novel of mine was that I found myself desperate for books that talked about cancer in a way that would both illuminate the experience and make me laugh. But there weren’t very many. In fact, there was only one that I was aware of, Violet Weingarten’s Intimations of Mortality, a journal of her chemotherapy, from which I got my book’s epigram: "Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it?" I read the book over and over, read it out loud to my brothers over the phone, then went to the library and said, "Do you have any other really funny books about cancer?" And they looked at me like, Yeah, they’re right over there by the comedies about spina bifida. There didn’t seem to be any. A book about our experience, showing one family’s attempt to stay buoyant in the face of such a potentially flattening process, seemed like it might be a welcome present to other people with sick relatives. This is all I tried to do, to tell our family’s story, because with an enormous amount of support from friends, there were laughter and joy folded into all that fear and loss. It helped my father have the best possible months before his death and the best possible death. I can actually say that it was great. Hard, and fucked six ways from Sunday, but great.

  Of course, not everyone loved my book. There were some terrible reviews. My personal favorite was from a newspaper in Santa Barbara, which said that our black sense of humor made us look like a New Age Addams family. "Here’s your review from Santa Barbara," my editor wrote on a note enclosed with it, "where people never die."

  Fifteen years later my friend Pammy was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had been keeping a journal about my new son, whom she was helping me raise, so most of the journal entries already included her. And now all of a sudden it turned out that she was not going to be around for much longer. So I started typing up the journal entries and sending them off to my agent. Sam was getting bigger and Pammy was getting sicker, and I was writing as fast as I could, trying to get it done in time for her to read it. And I did. I gave her a finished copy four months before she died. It was another love letter, mostly to her and Sam, and for her daughter, Rebecca. Pammy knew there was something that was going to exist on paper after she was gone, something that was going to be, in a certain way, part of her immortality.

  Again, there was a part of me that believed that my journal could be a gift for others, for single mothers. I couldn’t find any books about single parenting when Sam was first born that were funny and sick and therefore true. There were some great books on child rearing, but none that made me laugh, and none that went into the dark side, the Seventh-Seal-with-milky-bras part. They were all so nicey-nice and rational and suggested that surely if you did this or that, the colicky little darling would come around, pull himself or herself together, get a grip. And this simply wasn’t true. Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world’s worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you. All the available baby books recommended things like white noise to soothe the yowling little savant. So I’d sit there by Sam’s side and play him Sierra Club tapes of rivers at night, complete with crickets and owls and frogs, and he’d look over worriedly for a moment, like "Are you out of your mind? Why don’t you just play me a tape of shark fights?" And then he would really start to cry.

  I would have felt so relieved if there had been a book written by another mother who admitted that she sometimes wanted to grab her infant by the ankles and swing him over her head like a bolo. So I went ahead and started writing one myself, as a present, as a kind of road map for other mothers.

  I would have been so relieved, too, if after Pammy got sick when Sam was eight months old, there had been a book about losing your best friend that was real but also funny. So I ended up trying to write one, weaving together these two stories, of Sam and Pammy, for both of them and for anyone who might know anyone like either of them.

  A couple of years later, a few months after Pammy died, two close friends of ours had a baby who was born so damaged that he died at five months old. I began to wonder if I was some sort of carrier. Sam and I spent a lot of time with the parents and their little son. They did such an amazing job and taught me so much, and their son taught me so much that I wanted other people to know about it. I wanted to write about it as a present for the parents, so that this baby would keep on living. So all those months when Brice was alive,
I scribbled down notes on index cards, with no idea of whether I would ever actually write a story about him. I watched all that went on inside me: how I automatically think that closing down is safe, but that really staying open and loving is safer, because then we’re connected to all that life and love. And I watched Sam watch Brice and scribbled some of this down on index cards. I felt self-conscious and vaguely ashamed that so much of what I’d written lately concerned suffering and death, but I let myself take notes anyway.

  Brice died that May. A month or so later I had the opportunity to write a three-minute essay for a radio show on anything I wanted, and I asked Brice’s parents if it would feel like an invasion of privacy if I wrote about their son. They said no, just the opposite. So I sat down with my index cards, and I looked through the one-inch picture frame, and started writing: