Bird by Bird Quotables

The following = my favorite quotes by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, an entertaining and often brilliant book about the art of writing!  Whatever else I'm supposed to do in life, I know that writing is part of it... I'm a bit intimidated by the act of writing a book, but it's a challenge that's worth accepting.  Between reading this book and going through the AuthorLaunch course and slowly mapping out what I want to write about, I'm feeling more and more inspired to WRITE from the heart and to build my own "little lighthouse!" ;)

If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Writing is about learning to pay attention and communicate what is going on.  Writing involves seeing people suffer and finding some meaning therein.  Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense…  If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days – listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off… try to remember that to some extent, you’re just the typist. A good typist listens. 

Loved this part. ;)

When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished… So you may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on.  It is essential that you get it back… You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side… Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff, and then be naïve enough to get it all down on paper.

You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits… Think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, “Yes!”  And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communion.

The books and poets being taught in my English and philosophy classes gave me the feeling for the first time in my life that there was hope, hope that I might find my place in a community… Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of… This business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself… How alive am I willing to be?

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…  Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth… You cannot write out of someone else’s big dark place; you can only write out of your own...  It’s wonderful to watch someone finally open that forbidden door… What gets exposed is not people’s baseness but their humanity.

Try to write in a directly emotional way instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal.  So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.

Life is like a recycling center where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

Unacknowledged truth saps your energy… I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see… We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.  Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words… You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place… so you have to breathe or pray or do therapy to send them away. Write as if your parents are dead.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor… it will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force… Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up… we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here – and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems. Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer. There will be a very long buildup to publication day, and then the festivities will usually be over rather quickly… Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises… The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

“So why does our writing matter, again?” they ask.

Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart… It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, 1994