Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

I read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I liked it.

On getting published

I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. (xxvi)

This sort of thing—the comment about getting published—can reek of “easy for you to say,” but the second part—about writing being all that and more—I wholeheartedly agree with. I’ve only just recently had my writing published by someone other than myself, so I am still close enough to remember and feel the jubilation. But like anything, it can’t be all 100% good, happy feelings. I guess it depends what you crack it up to be in the first place.

On Sisyphus with cash flow problems

Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash flow problems. (xxvii)

I don’t know the exact context of this sentence because I’ve returned my copy to the library, but I’m pretty sure she’s still talking about being a writer. I got a kick out of “Sisyphus with cash flow problems.”

On writing blind

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going. You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing or life I have ever heard. (17)

This makes sense to me, but then again, it’s the opposite what John McPhee does (as described in Draft No. 4, and also well described by James Somers, who has adopted this “McPhee method”). And McPhee’s method also makes sense to me. Life is full of contradictory advice and observations that make sense individually, in different times and places. “Opposites attract,” but “birds of a feather flock together.” It’s useful and comforting having an idiom or advice to fit any moment.

On a likable narrator

“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.” I think he’s right. (47)

Hm, so in my case (narrative nonfiction), I’m the narrator and therefore I need to be likable. It makes sense, but it feels like an awful lot of pressure!

I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good... (48)

Here likable = relatable, which is a tenet of what makes writing interesting: that the reader can relate to it.

On fudging quotes

There is a real skill to hearing all those words that real people—and your characters—say and to recording what you have heard—and the latter is or should be more interesting and concise and even more true than what was actually said. (62)

So if I’m reading this correctly, Lamott implies that you don’t always need to quote verbatim. For any nonfiction, I just can’t get behind modifying anything between quotation marks, save for likes and ums. If there is no recording, then a best-efforts quotation with clearly outlined methodology might be reasonable. But even then I’d prefer paraphrasing to quoting.

Btw: Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer is a fascinating case study of journalistic ethics, including that quotation gray area and other, even grayer areas. I don’t know why I haven’t written a dedicated note for it here in my garden, but that book has it all—a true, dramatic story plus a meta story surrounding the story, involving the author herself.

On garden as metaphor

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Metaphors are a great language tool because they explain the unknown in terms of the known. (73)

This caught my eye because this blog is a digital garden, which has been a useful metaphor for my own writing practice. Now my antenna is up for other deployments of garden as metaphor. Speaking of...

On having your antenna up

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on...Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others. (91-92)

I think what’s most broadly interesting about being a writer is that it makes the world more interesting. That is, you pay attention to things that are now interesting, that you otherwise would not have noticed. Your antenna is up. This phenomenon—having your antenna up—is one of my most referenced mental models of 2026 (see, for example: here, there).

Instead of being scared all the time, you detach, watch what goes on, and consider it creatively. Maybe you never quite get to the point where you think, “Ah, so that’s what a gun looks like from this end.” (142)

Lamott is quite funny, too.

On not “saving” your work

Day by day, you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. (188)

I’ve felt a little caught in this trap lately, wanting to hold off on an email or blog post because it feels like something I should pitch to a magazine.

On interviewing

There are an enormous number of people out there with invaluable information to share with you, and all you have to do is pick up the phone. They love it when you do, just as you love it when people ask if they can pick your brain about something you happen to know a great deal about…What a wonderful and rare experience. Usually, what happens in real life is that people ask you questions you can’t remember the answer to, like what you came into the kitchen to get, or what happened on the 4th of July in 1776. And you sit there thinking, “God, I knew that; it’s right there on the tip of my tongue, let’s see—Okay, wait, the Constitution? No, wait, shit, I used to know…” When you actually do know a bit about something, it is such a pleasure to be asked a lot of questions about it. (136-137)

It’s so true. People love to share their hard earned knowledge, especially if that knowledge is unglamorous and not the sort of thing people ask follow-up questions about at weddings. The anecdote she tells is calling a winery to figure out what the name of that “wire thing” hugging a champagne cork is called (wire hood, apparently). The proprietor is satisfied to tell her, she’s satisfied to have found her answer, and her readers in turn are satisfied to know a highly specific word. Anne Lamott wrote this book in the nineties, so for a question like hers we’d probably reach for ChatGPT or Google (which, hm, calls the wire thingy a muselet), BUT: for complex subjects—and most are—talking to people and clocking body language etc. is irreplaceable.

One more thing: I, too, find these highly specific words (like wire hood) quite satisfying. I’ll link to James again because his wonderful Word of the Day email covered one such word, bindle, back on Sunday, April 12:

bindle, n. In the cartoon depiction of a vagrant they’re often carrying a stick with a bundle attached to the end of it, wrapped in fabric, sometimes looking like a handkerchief -- and this thing is known as a “bindle.” According to the OED it dates to 1900: “A bundle containing clothes and possessions, esp. a bedding-roll carried by a tramp.” I’d put this in a category of words that are worth knowing simply for their specificity. “There’s a word for that?” Another classic example is an aglet (that plastic covering at the ends of shoelaces). Much less obscure, but still qualifying for the category because I recently encountered someone who didn’t know it, is tine, for one of the points of a fork. I wonder what other such words are out there? Would I recognize them?

Petrichor is the canonical example in this category for me. I heard Gretchen McCulloch on a podcast talking about the satisfaction of discovering petrichor for the first time. Now we need a word for those type of words! Is there one?!