All though high school and college, if you had asked me my career plans, I would have said I would be a writer. I dutifully attended the School of Journalism & Mass Communication in college because it seemed like a practical way to combine my love of writing with a paycheck.
The problem is that traditional journalistic writing has so many rules and constraints that I felt suffocated. I changed my emphasis from print journalism to advertising, and with it my interest slowly migrated from the written word to the designed page. The rest is career history.
With that, however, I never lost my desire and drive to write. So when I heard about Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, I wanted to read it immediately. And in all honesty, it’s the best book I’ve read in a long time.
Lamott combines practical advice on topics like how to deal with writer’s block and how to get started with anecdotes about her own self-doubt and neurosis. Then she throws in great life lessons with laugh out loud humor. What more could you want from a book, really?
Take this excerpt, for example, when discussing how she was dealing with jealousy over a friend’s writing success:
“I started telling myself that if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to. This cheered me up to no end.”
Perhaps most exciting to me is that reading through this book made me want to get pen to paper regularly. Even if that means nothing more than updating this little blog more frequently (because lets face it – blogging isn’t the aristocracy of the written word, but it’s writing, nonetheless).
If you have any interest in writing, no matter how small, I strongly encourage you to read this book. Now. Get it like yesterday and get to reading. Then get to writing.
Finally, the title of the book is explained on the back cover, and is the best advice I’ve seen in a while. Particularly fitting in the middle of this wedding season madness my photography work has been in (Photo by photo, buddy…)
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] 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 off 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.”
Article by Kelli. She's the primary caretaker of this here site. Hope you're enjoying your visit. 