Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

If I had to describe this book in three words, then I might say “honest, insightful, and refreshing!” Happily, this is not a movie review, so I have the chance to possibly say something meaningful about this honest, insightful, and refreshing work. Anne Lamott is like a word doctor who steps into a waiting room packed with sickly writers and announces “I have some good news, and I have some bad news.” I felt like I had already been given advice dealing with short assignments and shitty first drafts. On second thought, I wasn’t sure if some of this advice had been given to me in earlier writing workshops or if it sometimes just seemed so intuitive that I merely thought I had encountered it before. That is part of the genius of this book; it starts with the seemingly obvious before branching off into subtleties that somehow take us back to those natural ideas.
Even the title parallels this natural flow achieved by Lamott. She guides us gently through the concept of short assignments such as writing as much as you can see through a one inch picture frame, and I felt my frustration mounting when she recounted an excruciating personal experience of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a novel. Yes, but how do we move from short assignments to full length books? I was enlightened by my own stupidity when I reread earlier sections and then actually bothered to comprehend the title. Bird by bird, piece by piece means that there is no secret technique to writing a short passage or a novel. A vengeful part of me was heartened by the mention that published writers still have to endure this painful process. The main concept that stuck with me was the perseverance required in learning how to let yourself go (listening to your broccoli) while keeping yourself pinned to the computer screen or piece of paper on which you are writing. Bird by Bird is not a book that I will reread all the way through again. Instead, I believe that a better approach to this book is passage by passage as different difficulties arise in my own writing process.