READINGS IN LANGUAGE

Bracing nuggets of wisdom about the writing process

If you are in the dumps because you can’t seem to get started with your feature story for a magazine, your short story for a literary contest, or perhaps your essay for your English class, then Anne Lamott’s collected reflections on the writing process, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Knopf Doubleday, 272 pages), just might help you surmount your despondency and give you a fresh burst of creativity. The book, published way back in 1995, has heartened and guided many aspiring writers and published professionals ever since with its nuggets of wisdom about the writing process and its playful wit and sense of humor.

A novelist, writing teacher, and public speaker, Lamott offers in Bird by Bird a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer’s life, discussing in a bracingly honest but funny way how to get started and how to deal with character, plot, and dialogue all the way to how to cope with writer’s block and how to get published. Here, for instance, is Lamott reassuring writers that to come out with “shitty first drafts” isn’t all that bad: “I know some great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much...Very few writers know what they’re going until they’ve done it.” 

According to the Kirkus Reviews, Bird by Bird is a writer’s guide that is bound to teach and inspire by example: “Paragraph by paragraph, this humorous, insightful, no-nonsense approach will remind novices why they are writing: to tell the truth, to live from the heart, and to share their gift with others.”

Read the first chapter of Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird in Amazon.com’s Kindle edition now!

Read several excerpts from Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird in the NotAlone website now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anne Lamott is a novelist and nonfiction writer. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is the author of the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers Grace (Eventually), Plan B, Traveling Mercies, and Operating Instructions as well as seven novels, including Hard Laughter, Rosie, Crooked Little Heart, and All New People. She is also a political activist, public speaker and writing teacher.

RELATED READING:
In his column in the October 18 and 25, 2010 issues of The Philippine Star, Jose “Butch” Dalisay, English professor at the University of the Philippines and Hall of Famer of the Palanca Awards for Literature, wrote about what he calls “a package of practical tasks and skills that [he] thought would help the typical English major make a profession of writing.” He explains: “I was worried that our students were graduating with wispy notions of poetry and fiction in their heads, but without the foggiest idea of the kind of writing that the world out there will actually pay for, enough for them to make a living.”

Read Butch Dalisay’s “Editing as a profession (Parts 1 and 2)” in The Philippine Star now!

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