One day, I woke up and decided that I was going to be a writer if it killed me. And sometimes, very nearly, it has, at least in the emotional sense. It’s hard to write, to throw your insides all over something permanent and then release that something all alone into the Multiverse with no parental supervision. It’s hard to wake up and do all the things you have to do (things that make you a “grown-up,” usually, and are fraught with unfun-ness), then convince yourself that it’s worth it to try and continue something that most people consider worthless, lazy, or selfish—especially if those are issues you have trouble reconciling in yourself, which any good self-loathing writer does. Writing in seriousness is brave, and generally, I am not. Whatever possessed me that day, and for the majority of the days since, clearly had no idea what a chicken it decided to inhabit.
The best book I’ve read thus far on the topic of a writer’s competing grandiosity and low self-esteem is Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I reread it recently, and the book seems to ring ever truer with age. Lamott’s dark and twisty sense of humor is something I can easily relate to, and entire passages seem to be literal transcriptions from my mornings:
“Often when you sit down to write… your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.”
I’ve wasted a lot of time hem-hawing, doodling, plotting ways to get rich but not plotting books, not being funny on Twitter, trying to figure out how to spell words I made up, and staring at the ceiling, and crying into my coffee, and digging for the end of a bottomless bag of salt and vinegar chips, and starting then stopping then starting then trying to quit and being told that I am not allowed. (Thankfully, people never allow me to quit, knowing [somehow] that I will do whatever they say is necessary. I love and hate these people in varying degrees—depending on the day, the task and whether or not I actually wanted to quit.)
Bird by Bird is less of a technique guide than a typical “writing book,” instead relying on the author’s extreme likability and honest voice to persuade the reader to actually sit down and put something on paper. It’s good to get permission from people with experience, especially when suffering the wavering self-assuredness specific to writing. Stephen King tells us in On Writing that we may write anything we want—anything! Likewise, Lamott has an entire chapter (hilariously-but-aptly) titled “Shitty First Drafts,” which extends us the freedom to make terrible, heinous, seriously grievous, heartbreaking errors with wanton abandon, to write down everything that floats across the conscious parts of the brain, even if those things are nonsensical and trite, unrelated, full of adverbs and split infinitives or beginning in conjunctions, or part of another story, or a retelling of a day in the life of your toaster, because eventually what happens is that you find the thing you’re really writing about buried underneath all the junk that fell out of your brain and onto the page. That’s a rule I can follow, and since I’ve started doing exactly that, my life has been somewhat less desperate and noticeably uninhabited by coppery-breathed mental illnesses.
Other chapters cover useful topics like jealousy and broccoli, which are things even non-writers might benefit from reading.
Bird by Bird was recommended to me by Caleb Krause, way back when MySpace was all the rage, and I’ll never really be able to thank him for mentioning it in passing and then forgetting all about it. It’s been really useful, more than most books, and I love it.
Actually, I can: Thanks, Caleb, for recommending this book in passing then forgetting about it. It’s been really useful, more than most books, and I love it.
