the_lady_lily | Bibliography

Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

I picked this up because it was a book about how to write well. It is. It is an absolutely excellent book about how to write well - it's a real case of someone sitting down and opening a vein about writing. Lamott's prose is dark, amusing and very readable - and the advice that she gives about how to make sure you do write, and how to approach writing, is all thoroughly excellent.

The only minor problem with this book, alas, is that it is targeted at people who want to write fiction. I don't need to learn how to write fiction, so a lot of Lamott's advice about getting to know how your characters work and the sort of exercises that are helpful for that and techniques for churning out the material from which you will select your novel - that is all pretty irrelevant to me, sadly. I really mean sadly as well, because since reading this book my mind has been bringing up all sorts of strange thoughts and memories and ideas and inspiriations - like when I used to have ideas before going to university sucked up my creativity and turned it into writing papers. Maybe I'll be going back to that territory again, but not right now.

That said, there's a lot of good general advice here too, like the need to set a regular writing time and just to have at, and the use of the shitty first draft, and taking things one small step at a time, and problems you will encounter in getting into the writing headspace. But there's also a rich seam of autobiography, of where Lamott is coming from when she writes, that really gives the advice an edge that I've not found elsewhere. So even though this is targeted at fiction writers, I'm very, very glad I read it.

I am recommending this to