On Writing – Bird By Bird
Some quotes wrote by Anne Lamott that I write to remember
Sorry for those that read this blog for the security stuff. The thing is that sometime I want to write, and share these writings, on other subjects than security. The more I write the more I have things to write about. Ideas come up in my minds and only disappear when I wrote them, otherwise they say: “I’ll not go out of your brain until you write me down! Otherwise you’ll lose me forever!” As you know, I started to write for myself with this blog. At first it was an experience. More and more it become a part of me; I become more and more with the writer’s thinking. Hahaha not a professional, but a tinny neophyte. I don’t aspect to be a professional writer (hope for you); I just aspect to continue to write for myself.
I just finished reading a beautiful book called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s a book that anybody who write for fun or profit need to read and reread. It’s a true and inspirational work on writing and writers. It initiates you in world of writing and publishing. I really appreciated the work and I need to write quotes from the book to be able to remember them time to time.
It can seem that I ripped the whole book but I hadn’t the patience to do it. I suggest you to buy it at your local bookstore or if there is none, on Amazon. It’s a 15$ well spent.
“Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.”
“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 trop 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, 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, or 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. I 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, was trying to get a report on bird 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.”
“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.”
“Then I do the menial work of getting it down on paper, because I’m the designated typist, and I’m also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time – but she knows gold when she sees it.”
“You need to trust that you’ve go it in you to listen to people, watch them and notice what they wear and how they move, to capture a sense of how they speak. You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.”
“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.”
“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it. […] that what it means fo us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw.”
“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. 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 – not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. […] Write as if your parents are dead.”
“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.”
“But they are always yours, your books as well as your children. You helped bring your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”
“Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, and when you realize how artfully this has happened, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it.”