Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott | Book Summary
Title: Bird by Bird
Author: Anne Lamott
Genre: Writing, Memoir
Finished: May 2021
Published: 1994
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Good writing is about telling the truth, because as people, we want and need to understand who we are.
Telling the truth starts with expressing your unique voice, which is achieved by honest interrogation of our own experience.
Writing is an often arduous process that must be performed bit by bit - ideas will never emerge fully formed or perfectly articulated without the repeated work of writing. This process is often one of discovery in itself, to find out what you’re really trying to say.
🎨 Impressions
The craft of writing can seem like a black box to those of us who aren’t as accomplished with the written word. Bird by Bird is a great guide for anyone with an interest in improving their fiction and non-fiction writing. Less of a practical ‘how to’ and more of a way to think about and approach writing, this guide is great for explaining what makes good writing good. I think a lot of us have this instinct, but it helps to have it illuminated in simple terms.
While clearly the ‘audience’ for Lamott’s book is aspiring writers of literature, it’s a great grounder for anyone who works in a creative role that involves the written word. I liked how the author practices what she preaches. According to her, good writing is about telling the truth, even if that truth is ugly sometimes. She readily interrogated difficult or embarrassing moments from her past, puts them under the microscope, and holds them up to the light in order to excavate the capital T Truth at the bottom of it (to horribly mix metaphors).
There were a lot of things that I think strategy people can take from this book. The big takeaways for me were about honesty and truth in writing and communication. People have extremely sensitive bullshit radars and marketing jargon will make our brains glaze over instantly. So having that authenticity at the heart of everything you write (especially if it’s expressed in simple but exciting terms) is a great asset.
This point is also directly related to voice, which only sounds interesting and unique when it sounds like you, authentically. So when we circle back to strategy and brands, it’s good to remember that brand voice normally trumps consumer needs in the hierarchy. Without an interesting perspective on the situation, you’re just another hawker of mayonnaise.
Finally, her other lesson that I took out is just get the shitty drafts out. I have heard this time and time again about writing and ideas in general but it always bears repeating. Just get the rubbish down on the page. Great writing starts as unrefined garbage. Having a commitment to writing and your ideas will make you faster and better.
📚 Who Should Read It
People who want to get better at writing.
☘️ How This Book Changed Me
I hadn’t come across a ‘philosophy for writing’ before and it’s made me reflect on why we write and why we are drawn to good writing. I will try to write with more honesty and truth in mind. I’ll also give myself more leniency when getting the ideas down and more time and bandwidth to redraft, edit, and refine.
🕵️♂️ How I Discovered It
I think I came across this one through Mark Pollard’s blog. He’s a big proponent of writing for strategists, and he even wrote a book called ‘Strategy is Your Words’.
✍️ My Top Four Quotes
All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view.
Then I started to write about my envy. I got to look in some cold dark corners, see what was there, shine a little light on what we all have in common. Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
On the murky process of how ‘the truth’ emerges from a situation: I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line—and all of a sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish-green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort.
🤓 Further Reading
On Writing by Stephen King
