“Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.” Lesson 2: There Is No Such Thing As a Perfect Book So where do you start, you might ask? Lamott suggests starting with your childhood. But we all have to start somewhere and it’s likely that the first good bit of what we put on paper may never see the light of day. Many writers lose faith in their ability to craft genuinely interesting stories from their truths.
She says that “…telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.” If you want to write about farm life, for example, you damn well better have some experience with it! The tough part about this, according to Lamott, is that the actual unveiling of the truth (your truth, mind you!) can be quite tiresome. In the opening sentence of Lamott’s book, she says, “…good writing is about telling the truth.” If you stretch yourself too far and try to cover topics and subject areas in which you are a relative novice, your readers will see right through you. Simple, right? Most authors would give this advice. So today I’m going to take some time to share a few of the lessons from Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I know that creative writing can be a different process for every writer, but I also recognize the value of learning from authors that have been successful in the past. I find it so much easier to sit down and write a short blog multiple times a week than to really dive into the multi-year task of writing a full book. My dream of publishing a full-length novel is a dream that’s still sitting somewhere off in the future, waiting for me to finally attain it.
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