Writing Advice from Anne Lamott: Take It a Little at a Time

The second of our living authors is Anne Lamott, who writes both fiction and nonfiction. The advice in this post comes from her classic writing book, Bird by Bird.

Writing a novel is a huge job, and it can seem overwhelming. Lamott deals with this problem by viewing her task through a one-inch picture frame. As she describes it:

 [A]ll I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running. I am going to paint a picture of it, in words, on my word processor. Or all I am going to do is to describe the main character the very first time we meet her, when she first walks out the front door and onto the porch. I am not even going to describe the expression on her face when she first notices the blind dog sitting behind the wheel of her car—just what I can see through the one-inch picture frame, just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her.

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.

In the next paragraph, Lamott tells the wonderful story that gave her the book’s title:

[T]hirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

As with King’s On Writing, there is much more to Bird by Bird than what is quoted in this post. For more of Lamott’s advice, pick up a copy of the book.

And take your writing bird by bird.