"Bird by Bird" and My Journey Through the Drafting Trenches

in which I talk about the difficulties of being a writer and give a sort-of review of "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott

You may not know this about me, but I am a writer. (A writer of fiction, not just Substack articles; I suppose I should clarify.) I’ve been a writer since I was a child, when writing was easier for many reasons. One of those reasons was that I didn’t hate first drafts. I didn’t know enough to hate them. (RIP to innocent 12-year-old me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Those were the days.)

By the time I reached high school, writing had become my most deeply-held passion—and I say “passion” because I can’t think of another word for it, but it was more than that. Writing became my entire life. It consumed me, and I began to think that I should probably start to figure out how one became a Serious Writer, so I started to study craft. (You can see now where the loathing of first drafts began.)

There arose from this a simple problem, which can be summed up in the words of Gustave Flaubert: “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true but whose fingers refuse to produce precisely the sound he hears within.” Of course, this is, at least in part because, as V.E. Schwab says, “One of the hardest reminders is that a first draft is the farthest your story will ever be from the idea in your head. Revision is the act of closing that gap.”

To put it concisely, I was very frustrated and prone to existential breakdowns. (This has not entirely gone away, but it is better.)

Now, I say this not to discourage anyone from studying writing craft. I think studying writing craft is absolutely necessary. Not enough writers seem to do it seriously. I say this because I need you to understand how refreshing it was when I picked up Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and she said that it was Okay for a first draft to be shit.

Yes, yes, you’re thinking, you’ve heard this before. We all have. But what this book did was not only give permission for the writing of shitty first drafts, but an in-depth blueprint for how, exactly, one is to cope with that. Because you will always have to write a first draft. And they will always need work. Understanding this, it turns out, is what separates serious writers from unserious ones.

I’ve read a lot of writing-craft books. A lot. Most of them were the kind that told you how to develop characters, or that using adverbs was Bad. Most of them had mostly good advice, though none of them were Gospel, because nothing about storytelling really is. This one was different.

Bird by Bird didn’t focus so much on How to Make Your Writing Better; instead, it focused on How to Survive Your First Draft: Existential Breakdowns Included.

Bits of advice like: “Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we’re going to do for now is write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird.”

The concept of thinking about your draft in a series of short assignments has been world-altering for me. Now, when I feel the crushing magnitude of the vision of my story that exists within my head, I try to remember: one short assignment at a time, one foot in front of the other. Bird by bird, buddy, bird by bird.

The other thing about this book was its focus on Thinking Like a Writer, which, when you read it after having studied craft for a long, long time, you realize that this was the way you thought about writing when you first came to it, either when you were a child, or when you first started out. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You saw possibility everywhere, but somewhere along the line, that ability became stunted and dulled by immersion in the buzzing, schizophrenic world of work, politics, sports, and social media. The same things on repeat. In Bird by Bird, Lamott talks about how to get it back, because God knows you’ll need it if you want to be a Serious Writer.

“One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material. Sometimes you’ll sit down or go walking and your thoughts will be on one aspect of your work, or one idea you have for a small scene, or a general portrait of one of the characters you are working with, or you’ll just be completely blocked and hopeless and wondering why you shouldn’t just go into the kitchen and have a nice glass of warm gin straight out of the cat dish. And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or an image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish.” –Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

The secret is all in that first line: permission to start writing. It’s so simple, really. The problem, Lamott says, is that, “[These] people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published.” And let me be the first to tell you: writing a shitty first draft is nearly impossible when all you want—all you can think about—is getting published. You’ll be drinking gin from the cat dish before you know it with that attitude.

So I had to let this go. It took years, unfortunately, and frankly, it is still somewhat of a work in progress. (It helped when the publishing industry went so batshit woke I didn’t want to work with them anymore anyway, but that’s another story.)

If you can mange to shed the skin of idolatry around publication, and just write for the heck of it, you’ll be much better off—which is to say, marginally less prone to existential breakdowns induced by first drafts being, well, first drafts.

So, to my fellow first-draft-haters, I encourage you pick up Bird by Bird. Hopefully you’ll find it as cathartic as I did.

And now, back to the trenches.