by Anne Lamott
There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure. I pay through the nose for these moments, of course, with lots of torture and self-loathing and tedium, but when I am done for the day, I have something to show for it. When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids. Perhaps they are good role models: they thought they were working for God, so they worked with a sense of concentration and religious awe. (Also, my friend Carpenter tells me, they drank all day and took time off every few hours to oil each other. I believe that all my other writer friends do this, too, but they won’t let me in on it.)
The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion—not to look around and say, "Look at yourselves, you idiots!," but to say, "This is who we are."
In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong." And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you’ve been avoiding all along—your wounds. This is very painful. It stops a lot of people early on who didn’t get into this for the pain. They got into it for the money and the fame. So they either quit, or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making.
Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor. Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician—the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.
Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town — still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. 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.
Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we’re all at a wedding. But you can’t just come out and say, We’re at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this. There was an old desert dog in a comic strip yesterday, sitting with his back against a cactus, writing a letter to his brother that said, "At night the sun goes down, and the stars come out; and then in the morning the sun comes up again. It’s so exciting to live in the desert." That’s the wedding, right? To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be?
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into. Your parents and grandparents will be shouting, "Don’t do it, don’t sit down, don’t sit down!," and you’ll have to do what you did as a kid—shut them out and get on with finding out about life.
Then I look into my students’ faces, and they look solemnly back at me.
"So why does our writing matter, again?" they ask.
Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: Excerpt from "Modern Love," from Getting Over Tom, copyright © 1994 by Abigail Thomas. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Frederick Buechner : Excerpt from essay by Frederick Buechner from Spiritual Quests : The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, introduction by William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Reprinted by permission of Frederick Buechner.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: "I Go Back to May 1937," from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1987 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Phillip Lopate : Excerpt from "We Who Are Your Closest Friends," from The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open by Phillip Lopate (Sun Press, 1972). Reprinted by permission of Phillip Lopate.
Milkweed Editions: Excerpt from "August in Waterton, Alberta" from The Dead Get By With Everything (Milkweed Editions, 1991), copyright © 1991 by Bill Holm. Reprinted by permission of Milkweed Editions.
Pantheon Books: Excerpt from "The Wild Rose" from Entries by Wendell Berry, copyright © 1992 by Wendell Berry; excerpt from "Ripples on the Surface" from No Nature: New and Selected Poems by Gary Snyder, copyright © 1992 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Barbara Stevens: Excerpt from an interview with Carol Chute by Barbara Stevens (Glimmer Train, Fall 1992). Reprinted by permission of Barbara Stevens.
Threshold Books: Excerpt from "Unmarked Boxes" by Rumi, from Open Secret. Reprinted by permission of Threshold Books, RD 4, Box 600, Putney, VT 05346.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Lamott was born in 1954 in San Francisco. After studying at Goucher College, she returned to the Bay Area to write. In 1980 her first novel, Hard Laughter, was published, followed by Rosie (1983), Joe Jones (1985), and All New People (1989). Her memoir, Operating Instructions, appeared in 1993. Her novel Crooked Little Heart was published in 1997. She published Traveling Mercies in 1999, and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith in 2005. A past recipient of a Guggenheim, she has been the book review columnist for Mademoiselle and restaurant critic for California magazine, and has taught writing at UC Davis and at many other writing conferences throughout the state. She lives in San Rafael, California, with her son, Sam.
ALSO BY ANNE LAMO
TT
Hard Laughter
Rosie
Joe Jones
All New People
Operating Instructions
Crooked Little Heart
Traveling Mercies
Blue Shoe
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
ALSO BY ANNE LAMOTT
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS
A Journal of My Son’s First Year
It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors survived and thrived in that important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman’s life.
Family/Childcare/Memoir/1-4000-7909-8
CROOKED LITTLE HEART
Rosie Ferguson, in the first bloom of young womanhood, is obsessed with tournament tennis. Her mother is a recovering alcoholic still grieving the death of her first husband; her stepfather, a struggling writer, is wrestling with his own demons. And now Rosie finds that her athletic gifts, once a source of triumph and escape, place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers is developing an obsession of his own.
Fiction/0-385-49180-8
TRAVELING MERCIES
Some Thoughts on Faith
Traveling Mercies explains how Anne Lamott came to have the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alludes to in her writing. The people in Anne Lamott’s real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. Lamott’s faith isn’t about easy answers, which endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she comes to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself.
Religion/0-385-49609-5
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only)
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Anne Lamott
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Permissions acknowledgments appear on p. 238.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lamott, Anne.
Bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life / Anne
Lamott. — 1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
1. Authorship—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title.
PN147.L315 1995
808’.02—dc20 95-10225
CIP
www.anchorbooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42498-3
v3.0_r1