Bird by bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
Some key points from the introduction.
“Every morning, no matter how late he (my father,
the writer) had been up, my father rose at 5:30AM, went to his study,
wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with
my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning.”
“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.”
“I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore, you exist.”
“I suspect that he (my father) was a child who
thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious
conversations with grownups, who as a young person, like me, accepted
being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.”
“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”
“The months before a book comes out of the chute
are, for most writers, right up there with the worst life has to offer…
totally decompensating.”
“December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. I simply recommend to people that they never start a large writing project on any Monday in December.”
“When my (writer) friends are working (on their writing), they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time.”
“But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. 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. That thing you had to force yourself to do – the actual act of writing – turns out to be the best part… The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
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