Selections
from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
New York:
Anchor Books, 1994.
Short
Assignments
(page
16) The
first useful concept is the idea of short assignments. Often when you sit down
to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your
childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of--oh,
say--say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It's hard to get
your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up. Then 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.
What
I do at this point, as the panic mounts and the jungle drums begin beating and I
realize that the well has run dry and that my future is behind me and I'm going
to have to get a job only I'm completely unemployable, is to stop. First I try
to breathe, because I'm either sitting there panting like a lapdog (page 17) or I'm
unintentionally making slow asthmatic death rattles. So I just sit there for a
minute, breathing slowly, quietly. I let my mind wander. After a moment I may
notice that I'm trying to decide whether or not I am too old for orthodontia and
whether right now would be a good time to make a few calls, and then I start to
think about learning to use makeup and how maybe I could find some boyfriend who
is not a total and complete fixer-upper and then my life would be totally great
and I'd be happy all the time, and then I think about all the people I should
have called back before I sat down to work, and how I should probably at least
check in with my agent and tell him this great idea I have and see if he thinks
it's a good idea, and see if he thinks
I need orthodontia--if that is what he is actually thinking whenever we have
lunch together. Then I think about someone I'm really annoyed with, or some
financial problem that is driving me crazy, and decide that I must resolve this
before I get down to today's work. So I become a dog with a chew toy, worrying
it for a while, wrestling it to the ground, flinging it over my shoulder,
chasing it, licking it, chewing it, flinging it back over my shoulder. I stop
just short of actually barking. But all of this only takes somewhere between one
and two minutes, so I haven't actually wasted that much time. Still, it leaves
me winded. 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 to write down as much as I can see through a
one-inch picture frame. This is (page 18) 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.
So after I've completely
exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my
more arresting financial problems, and, of course, the orthodontia, I remember
to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my
story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. 1 also remember a
story that I know I've told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a
grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time,
(page 19) 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."
I
tell this story again because it usually makes a dent in the tremendous sense of
being overwhelmed that my students experience. Sometimes it actually gives them
hope, and hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances
that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor,
because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be
heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It
is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
So here is another story I tell often.
In
the Bill Murray movie Stripes, in which he joins the army, there is a
scene that takes place the first night of boot camp, where Murray's platoon is
assembled in the barracks. They are supposed to be getting to know their
sergeant, played by Warren Oates, and one another. So each man takes a few
moments to say a few things about who he is and where he is from. Finally it is
the turn of this incredibly intense, angry guy named Francis. "My name is
Francis," he says. "No one calls me Francis--anyone here calls me
Francis and I'll kill them. And another thing. I don't like to be touched.
Anyone (page 20) here ever tries to touch me, I'll kill them," at which point Warren
Oates jumps in and says, "Hey--lighten up, Francis."
This
is not a bad line to have taped to the wall of your office.