Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There is a peculiar pleasure in reading books about writing. It is the only craft in which the manual to do it is an example of the craft itself. And since writers tend to be on the eloquent side, they are very good at making their particular pursuit sound interesting and admirable and arduous. Have you heard musicians talk about music? Poor fellows. Either they use the jargon of theory, or are reduced to the blandest platitudes.
Nevertheless, while writers may be in an excellent position to beautify and dramatize their profession, they are in a poor position to teach it. Writing simply cannot be broken down in the way that music can, into notes, scales, chords, etc. You cannot sit down and practice writing by typing the alphabet. Indeed, anyone who tries to teach writing in any capacity will quickly find that it involves so many subtle skills—from basic grammar, to the conventions of spelling and punctuation, to literary sensibility and aesthetic taste—that it resists being broken down into a set of teachable skills. Either it’s all working together, or it’s not.
Lamott begins on solid ground, by reiterating the advice given to all aspiring writers. Start small, write what you know, chuck perfectionism, give yourself permission to write bad first drafts. Nobody pretends that this advice is original, but it bears repeating, and often, since writers for some reason seem particularly prone to crippling self-doubt. I suppose it’s because writing, unlike playing guitar or painting a watercolor, is not particularly fun in itself. There is no sensory or physical feeling to enjoy. And writing being such a solitary pursuit, there is not even a social element. It is just you and the content of your words, and it can be a lot to bear.
Yet Lamott adds quite a bit to this basic, timeworn advice; and unfortunately for me, much of it rubbed me the wrong way. The rest of this review will thus seem unduly negative. So before I move on, I should say that any book that encourages people to read or to write is, for me, a good book. And this one has done a lot of encouraging.
The quickest way I can summarize what I felt was lacking in Lamott’s book is this: she does not pay enough attention to aesthetics. Put another way, I think her approach to writing is overly confessional. Lamott is concerned, above all, with expressing truth—not scientific truth, but personal, emotional, or even spiritual truth. There are times when this approach can be powerful. There are others when it can be horrifically boring.
Here is what I mean. She advises writers to carry around index cards and write down passing thoughts or overheard remarks. She encourages her students to write about their childhoods and to use their traumas. She gives careful advice about how to avoid libel by changing key details about the people in your life you intend to write about. Every story she tells about writing one of her books starts with an experience in her life that she wants to turn into fiction. And this book is peppered—“littered” is perhaps a better word—with anecdotes from her own life.
This is a recipe for thinly veiled autobiographical fiction (which seems to be the exact kind of fiction she herself writes). And the risk of writing such fiction is that it can easily become self-indulgent. It does not take an extraordinary narcissist to overestimate how interesting her life is to others. Most of us already torture our friends with long, boring stories about our days. Let’s not torture our readers the same way.
Of course, our experiences must inform our writing; and of course, most writers do want to express the truth as they see it. But what makes writing pleasurable and memorable, for me, is not that it tells the unvarnished truth about our various traumas, but that it transforms our experience into, well, literature. And this requires just the skills that Lamott neglects in this book.
For example, her chapter on plot counsels the writer to base the story on what her characters would plausibly do next. This strikes me as highly incomplete advice. Though some aspects of a story do grow organically from a character’s personality, most of the famous plots I know have a larger structural integrity. From the white whale to the ghost of Hamlet’s father, stories often contain elements that propel their characters into new situations, rather than vice versa. In the best stories, I think, a perfect balance is achieved between external events and internal turmoil. Thus the Greek tragedies.
This is a quibble, I suppose. More glaring is a complete absence of even a mention of different genres. One would never suspect, from reading this, that there are writers who wish to set their stories in the future or the past, in outer space or a fantastical dimension. One would also not suspect that many writers, rather than taking their inspiration directly from lived experience, are responding mainly to other books. Borges comes to mind as an obvious example, but I think most successful writers do their work in conversation with other authors, living or dead.
A good novel, after all, is not good because it captures something the author felt or thought or lived through. One can read all of Henry James’s books and learn very little about the man. The same can be said for authors as diverse as Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. A novel, once born, should stand on its own, and not serve as a window into the life of its author. This is what separates literature from confession.
Perhaps the most telling thing I can say about this book is that it reads more like a spiritual self-help book than a writing guide. And considering that Lamott seems to have achieved far more success with her series of spiritual self-help guides (she’s a proud Christian) than her fiction, this should perhaps come as no surprise. Indeed, I found this book most moving and powerful when she discussed how writing has helped her get through hard times. It may not be great advice for a novel, but it is not bad advice as far as life is concerned.
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