So: the promised additional bits on Anne Lamott.
The young lady was an office worker who discovered no one really cares what you do at the office. You could write all day and, if you were cheerful and reasonably well-dressed, no one would notice. Lamott had written, in childhood, about a day at the beach. She'd written about a crab in the sand--or something like this--and you could sense the crab's presence, right there, in the words she had chosen. A textbook company opted to use this prose as a sample of good writing. And so Lamott was hooked. In her early adulthood, she discovered that her father was dying, and so she turned this raw material into a memoir-ish novel, "Hard Laughter." (Get it? They laughed so hard, their sides hurt. But, also, the laughter was emotionally difficult, "hard," laughter.) "Hard Laughter" did well enough to send Lamott on a drinking/drug-use binge, and her twenties became a big mess. And, later, one of her favorite subjects became sobriety. (Lamott really differs from another one of my idols, Lorrie Moore. In Lamott, there's a strong urge to provide a redemptive ending. Moore says: Why bother? Isn't it more enjoyable for the reader to see the main character suffer--and then suffer, and suffer, and suffer, some more? The End. Moore has a bit of a Louis-CK-ish take on narrative.)
Lamott gave a TED Talk recently, and I very much enjoyed it. It was a list of nine or ten things she had learned by the age of sixty. "Family--yikes. But you can do it." "Food: Try to do a little bit better. You know what I mean." "Embrace the concept of shitty first drafts." The last is a reference to writing, obviously, but also a veiled reference to life itself. Lamott is a big believer in screwing up. She tells a story about appearing onstage with her idol--Grace Paley--and falling flat on her face. She was just going to do a jazzy, "improvisational" approach to the talk, and her hubris, and her lack of preparation, were very much on display. Lamott savors the story, now, because she can laugh at it. (Tragedy plus elapsed time: Comedy!) Also, she realized that the act of thumbing one's nose at preparation is a mistake. Toward the end of the TED Talk, Lamott discusses death, and she says, "You have nothing to fear. Your loved ones will be with you. It's just another new thing." I don't follow Lamott here. You don't have any guarantee that your loved ones will be with you. And how can you know it's just another new thing? This seems, to me, one of the signal things we *cannot* know in life. One of the top attention-getters.
A big point of "Bird by Bird" is: Write not for publication, but for yourself. Maybe you will get published, and maybe not. But you will train yourself to pay a bit more attention to your own life. And you will become a better reader, because you will start to notice some of the authorial decisions between the lines--some "elements of craft" you might otherwise overlook. I believe this. It's why "Bird by Bird" feels as much like a Zen Buddhist treatise as it does a writing manual. I also very much appreciate Lamott's descriptions of her students; some gather every other month and discuss their work with one another. That's as far as they get. Maybe one has a piece in a magazine now and then. But: having a shared interest, and pushing a friend to get better in a chosen field: isn't that enough? Are there really better ways of spending one's time? ("This planet and I are not a great match," says Lamott, and I believe that, too. "There's so much despair, and then there's the sky. That's the weirdness of life. There's Donald Trump, and then there's the majesty of komodo dragons. There's homelessness and--simultaneously--there are dignified little penguins marching around on cliffs in South Africa. That's the mystery of life. God's apparent split personality. That's what you're trying to get at--when you write--no matter what your surface-level subject seems to be." Words have been a way for Lamott to cope with life's fathomless awfulness and strangeness; words are like a religion. I don't doubt her when she suggests that.)
And then buried somewhere in the book is a description of a friend's dying baby. There's a vagueness in the baby's eyes. Lamott makes an observation: "It was as if the baby hadn't quite arrived on Earth. As if she were stuck somewhere between here--and wherever it was she had come from. You could see that sense of limbo in her eyes." Does that make you catch your breath? Thinking about "wherever it was the baby had come from"? And the idea of the baby being both *here* and *not* here? That alone is worth the price of admission, if you ask me.
When I began writing, I had a very rigid idea about plot. There had to be a problem, there had to be some failed attempts at resolution, and then there had to be a resolution. And then gradually I loosened up. A big part of recent writing, for me, has just been a sense of a long letter to my husband; I'm not always great with words, in person, so writing is a way to know me. And then another thing that gets me going is Stephen Sondheim's dictum: Before you go to sleep, think hard about whatever literary problem you're having. If you do that, often the answer will arrive for you through your dreams. Whatever floats your boat. There's no real answer to the anxiety you feel when you look at a blank screen in the morning--no matter how long and how assiduously you have been practicing your writing. (That's also part of the fun.)
OK. Probably more--more still!--on Lamott later. Even if you don't write, "Bird by Bird" is a snappy, joyful book. The artist had fun while making her picture, and you can sense it in the work. Subjects don't matter, generally; if the writer had fun, you will have fun. Generally. Is that your experience, as well?
The young lady was an office worker who discovered no one really cares what you do at the office. You could write all day and, if you were cheerful and reasonably well-dressed, no one would notice. Lamott had written, in childhood, about a day at the beach. She'd written about a crab in the sand--or something like this--and you could sense the crab's presence, right there, in the words she had chosen. A textbook company opted to use this prose as a sample of good writing. And so Lamott was hooked. In her early adulthood, she discovered that her father was dying, and so she turned this raw material into a memoir-ish novel, "Hard Laughter." (Get it? They laughed so hard, their sides hurt. But, also, the laughter was emotionally difficult, "hard," laughter.) "Hard Laughter" did well enough to send Lamott on a drinking/drug-use binge, and her twenties became a big mess. And, later, one of her favorite subjects became sobriety. (Lamott really differs from another one of my idols, Lorrie Moore. In Lamott, there's a strong urge to provide a redemptive ending. Moore says: Why bother? Isn't it more enjoyable for the reader to see the main character suffer--and then suffer, and suffer, and suffer, some more? The End. Moore has a bit of a Louis-CK-ish take on narrative.)
Lamott gave a TED Talk recently, and I very much enjoyed it. It was a list of nine or ten things she had learned by the age of sixty. "Family--yikes. But you can do it." "Food: Try to do a little bit better. You know what I mean." "Embrace the concept of shitty first drafts." The last is a reference to writing, obviously, but also a veiled reference to life itself. Lamott is a big believer in screwing up. She tells a story about appearing onstage with her idol--Grace Paley--and falling flat on her face. She was just going to do a jazzy, "improvisational" approach to the talk, and her hubris, and her lack of preparation, were very much on display. Lamott savors the story, now, because she can laugh at it. (Tragedy plus elapsed time: Comedy!) Also, she realized that the act of thumbing one's nose at preparation is a mistake. Toward the end of the TED Talk, Lamott discusses death, and she says, "You have nothing to fear. Your loved ones will be with you. It's just another new thing." I don't follow Lamott here. You don't have any guarantee that your loved ones will be with you. And how can you know it's just another new thing? This seems, to me, one of the signal things we *cannot* know in life. One of the top attention-getters.
A big point of "Bird by Bird" is: Write not for publication, but for yourself. Maybe you will get published, and maybe not. But you will train yourself to pay a bit more attention to your own life. And you will become a better reader, because you will start to notice some of the authorial decisions between the lines--some "elements of craft" you might otherwise overlook. I believe this. It's why "Bird by Bird" feels as much like a Zen Buddhist treatise as it does a writing manual. I also very much appreciate Lamott's descriptions of her students; some gather every other month and discuss their work with one another. That's as far as they get. Maybe one has a piece in a magazine now and then. But: having a shared interest, and pushing a friend to get better in a chosen field: isn't that enough? Are there really better ways of spending one's time? ("This planet and I are not a great match," says Lamott, and I believe that, too. "There's so much despair, and then there's the sky. That's the weirdness of life. There's Donald Trump, and then there's the majesty of komodo dragons. There's homelessness and--simultaneously--there are dignified little penguins marching around on cliffs in South Africa. That's the mystery of life. God's apparent split personality. That's what you're trying to get at--when you write--no matter what your surface-level subject seems to be." Words have been a way for Lamott to cope with life's fathomless awfulness and strangeness; words are like a religion. I don't doubt her when she suggests that.)
And then buried somewhere in the book is a description of a friend's dying baby. There's a vagueness in the baby's eyes. Lamott makes an observation: "It was as if the baby hadn't quite arrived on Earth. As if she were stuck somewhere between here--and wherever it was she had come from. You could see that sense of limbo in her eyes." Does that make you catch your breath? Thinking about "wherever it was the baby had come from"? And the idea of the baby being both *here* and *not* here? That alone is worth the price of admission, if you ask me.
When I began writing, I had a very rigid idea about plot. There had to be a problem, there had to be some failed attempts at resolution, and then there had to be a resolution. And then gradually I loosened up. A big part of recent writing, for me, has just been a sense of a long letter to my husband; I'm not always great with words, in person, so writing is a way to know me. And then another thing that gets me going is Stephen Sondheim's dictum: Before you go to sleep, think hard about whatever literary problem you're having. If you do that, often the answer will arrive for you through your dreams. Whatever floats your boat. There's no real answer to the anxiety you feel when you look at a blank screen in the morning--no matter how long and how assiduously you have been practicing your writing. (That's also part of the fun.)
OK. Probably more--more still!--on Lamott later. Even if you don't write, "Bird by Bird" is a snappy, joyful book. The artist had fun while making her picture, and you can sense it in the work. Subjects don't matter, generally; if the writer had fun, you will have fun. Generally. Is that your experience, as well?
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