“Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realised he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill.”
I bought Bird by Bird after having dipped into it when I visited a friend of mine, and then again at The Brunswick Street Bookstore, and then again at the bookstore from which I purchased it, Readings on Lygon St. I kept dipping into it before I finally sat down to it. Each time I thought it was a winner.
And in one sense it is. It’s funny as well as good for you, like a hot cup of water with honey and lemon. The only problem is it's got way too much honey and lemon.
On the subject of writing she poses the question of why people write. Her answer was simple: “it’s because I want to and I’m good at it.” She writes nicely about the joy of writing, and that got me going about why I write and what it’s like for me to write. And then she wrote something I really liked: “good writing is about telling the truth.” The truth is hard, and being able to find the words that clearly express the truth as they’ve come to see it – and perhaps clearly isn’t strong enough, I mean precisely, deeply, exactly, rendered with every nuance of what was and wasn’t happening somehow captured in what is said and not said and how it is said or not said– that ability to say it how they see it is what makes good writers good. My conceit (and hope) is that I’m capable of being a good writer. It feels like it. I don’t know it but I feel it. My way of understanding the feeling is to compare it with the feeling I get when I try to draw.
I’m not a horrible drawer, but I certainly wouldn’t say I’m good. When I try to draw I can see that what I produce is not what I wanted. The perspective is wrong and I seem to be above and below the object at the same time (and not in a cleverly Escher-like way); the face looks anaphylactic, or the bird looks like an over-stuffed model of the thing in front of me. They say that the people who can’t sing at all, and have no sense of tone or harmony, are the most likely to think that they can sing. I can’t sing, but this isn’t the case for me with drawing. I can see what’s wrong with my pictures, but despite this I can’t make my brain make my hand make the pen make the right lines and marks on the paper. It’s as if there’s a failure of language, as if I can’t communicate in this visual language with enough clarity to get all the required parts to move in unison and get the job done. It’s like being in a country where I don’t speak the language. It’s not as if I’ve suddenly become an idiot because I’ve shifted countries. I know what I want to say. I know how speech happens and that the people around me are all doing it. I just don’t have access to the words.
Writing is different. Writing is about knowing the difference between words, and being able to tease that out in a way that says and does what I want it to. Writing feels, simply, like I have the words. My vocabulary could be bigger, but the feeling of being able to get an idea out – to match the idea with the way to say it (or sometimes the other way around, because sometimes saying something shows me the idea I’d been trying to get to) – the feeling of being able to say it how I see it has been something I’ve always had. It is joyful, to find a truth that needs telling, or just find the truth in a story that somehow nobody needed beforehand but once it is written contributes something, if only to me (in my little unpublished world) or my friends. It’s a new bit of truth. It may be temporary, and true only for today, but when I write well that’s what it is and feels like, and why I want to do more of it.
Lamott, the author of Bird by Bird, then gets into the practical stuff, and pretty soon she’s got me annoyed. Not with what she’s saying, but with the pages of what seems to me to be a particularly American anxious paranoid depressed self-indulgent hypochondriac shtick. I personally don’t get all depressed and anxious and fearful when I sit down to write. I don’t hyperventilate about how I’m unemployable and how writing is impossible. I don’t suddenly have a series of mental illnesses come and sit on my shoulders to watch me fail to write. I often write poorly, and mostly when I write too much about myself and I forget to look around me, but this doesn’t cause me to crumble into a ball and want to cry out, so it pisses me off that she writes as if that is inevitably how I will feel, that it’s funny, or that it’s how I should be feeling, because all the good writers do.
The other thing that has pissed me off is her put-downs of people wanting to be published. I get her point. It’s the same one that, in my world, has always been made about playing the saxophone. You can’t just want to be able to play the saxophone; you have to want to learn it. Wanting to learn means wanting to put in the time and effort. Practicing. Wanting to be able to play means wanting other people to hear you and tell you how good you are and to feel cool because you can play the saxophone.
Wanting to be published may be like wanting to be able to play the saxophone. Wanting to be published may imply that you want to be famous or to feel cool because you can say to other people, “I’m a writer,” and hope that other people go, “Ooh!” and not, “Oh. That’s a shame. You must be very poor.”
But wanting an agent, and wanting to be published, to get a book deal and an advance on your next project, may also be about wanting the chance to write instead of go to work as a data entry person or store manager or teacher. Lamott sighs at her students when they ask how to get an agent, suggesting that writing is hard and full of bad days when the ideas don’t come and your insecurities will sit on you and make your hands numb lumps of coal, and that they should just focus on that, on working through the hard days to get to the moments when things start to come together and they can enjoy the feeling of writing well. That’s great, but not everyone gets to make blank paper the biggest challenge they face in their day. (And personally I find it a significantly smaller challenge than going to work to waste eight to ten hours of each day doing something of no benefit to me, humanity or the planet, which is what working in retail eventually felt like). So it really annoyed me when Lamott, in the middle of one of her long rambles about her upwelling paranoia at having the opportunity to sit and write at nine in the morning, says that one of the things she thinks about during this panicked procrastination, is “how I should probably at least check in with my agent and tell him this great idea I have and see if he thinks it’s a good idea.” She has an agent. She is published. She has the opportunity to sit down at nine in the morning and write precisely because she has an agent and is published.
I think it was Robert McKee, in his book, Story, who wrote that if you want to write then at some point you have to find a way to make some money out of it, because otherwise you have to keep doing another job that takes up all the time you could be spending writing. I like that concept. Apparently Robert McKee is the kind of tough-love-giving mentor who approaches writing more like a sports coach than an English teacher. With people like McKee, you do the work, but if there are shortcuts you take them, if there are formulas you follow them, and then you sell it so you have the luxury of sitting down and writing the next one. In some ways, I side with Lamott in wanting to hold onto and celebrate the idea that I write because I want to and because I’m good at it, and because it holds so much magic and truth whenever it’s done well. But I love having the time to sit and do it, not because I’m published (yet) or because I have an advance on my next project, but because I’ve decided to pay myself to be a writer for a year, and (as I turn 40) it’s the best, most probably life-changing gift I can give myself.
And we’ll see what happens next.
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One of the first chapters in Bird by Bird, is called “Short Assignments.” Lamott has on her desk a one-inch picture frame. It’s there to remind her to just write what she can see within that tiny frame, to focus one thing at a time and take it, as the title suggests, bird by bird. Below is a parting paragraph in the vein of Lamott’s humour, describing the process of buying, or in fact not buying, Bird by Bird. It is called: “Farting in bookstores.”
Farting in bookstores is my least favorite habit. Recently, after I’d eaten something that left me painfully bloated, I ended up browsing through The Brunswick Street Bookstore. While mooching through the new releases, then contemporary fiction, then the books on writing sections, I farted. Not just once. A few times. My farts were smelly and seemed to curl up inside my windstopper jacket and linger on me, the stench somehow both pungent and sticky. I became so self-conscious that I couldn’t buy anything, not even to alleviate the guilt I felt for perhaps having put other customers off their purchases. I could not stand in a queue or look at a sales assistant, knowing how a slight twitch in her nostril would reveal to me the conversations she would have with other staff as they unpacked deliveries in the storeroom. “Did you smell that guy in the grey jacket?” she would say. “He smelled like arse.” Once I’d left, found Lily, found a bathroom and dealt with my bloating bowels, I was left with one problem. I’d found the book I’d seen at Rachael’s; it looked good, and I still wanted it. The bookstore was only a five minute stroll away, but I had to tell Lily we couldn’t go back. I would not risk having some quiet, bookish assistant come up to me and, being forced to overcome her natural reserve and so overcompensating and speaking quicker and louder than she had intended, she would say, “You’re back!” This would cause a few customers to look, thinking perhaps I was a writer or someone important. This would cause others to hush and turn, creating a little alcove of quiet in which her nervously loud voice would boom like a fishmonger’s. In this split second before she continues, I will imagine some tiny upward inflection and cling to the hope that she knows me for some other reason which I happen to be unable to remember. Even in my imagination my hopes would be dashed. She would continue: “You were here an hour ago. You farted before and stank up the whole back of the shop, even the kids’ section. I know it was you; we all do. I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to leave.” At this point the audience of sane and hygienic customers all look at me with disgust and at her with that gleam of approval people get when someone else does something they themselves would find difficult, the silent “good on you” of the nod, the tilt, or the bookstore golf-clap. I would have to leave, again, and again without the book.
My self-conscious paranoia was almost out of control. I could not go back, perhaps ever. Lily looked at me with sympathy and understanding, and gave the best answer she could. “It’s okay. I farted in there earlier as well.”