Bird by Bird Lesson #1

In which we discuss the basics of Anne Lamott's view of writing

Photo by Gauravdeep Singh Bansal on Unsplash

Hello!

I’m so excited to be taking this dive into Bird by Bird with you and I can’t wait for our first gathering. If you’re just learning about this and wonder what it’s all about, here is a link to my post about the class, where you can learn everything you need to know. Here’s that link again. There’s still time to join! (And I also have a 40% off sale on annual memberships running at the moment.)

Okay, now we move onto the lesson part of this post.¹

I asked you guys to read up through page 41, and so this week we’ll discuss the following:

Short Assignments, pp. 15-19

Shitty First Drafts, pp. 20-26

Perfectionism, pp. 27-30

Polaroids, pp. 38-41

(And yes, I am skipping over the School Lunches chapter. It didn’t ring my bell and we have plenty to discuss without it.)

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Short Assignments

Honestly? I think this is one of the most useful things you can take away from this book. Almost, but not quite, as valuable as the idea of shitty first drafts.

We are a culture prone to overwhelm. Because, duh. So much coming at us all day every day. And that overwhelm can carry over to our writing. We sit down at our computers, or pull out our notebook and pen and cringe at the blank page. And that is because all we see ahead of us is the entirety of our project stretching out ahead, blank page after blank page marching into eternity.

And so we turn away from the page to go mop the floor or pull weeds or some other torturous activity that will punish us over our digression from writing.

But Anne (I feel like we know her well enough to refer to her by her first name) suggests a simple solution to this problem, short assignments:

“I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is 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….”

I can hear writers all over the globe exhaling. Doesn’t it just feel so much better to think of approaching your writing in this way? Doesn’t it feel doable?