Bird by Bird

Some Instructions on Writing and Life

(1994)

• the idea of spending entire days in someone else’s office doing someone else’s work did not suit my father’s soul

• One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

• to put a little bit down on paper every day, and to read all the great books and plays we could get our hands on ... “Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”

• Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public.

“for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death — the greatest leisure of all”

• Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) ... 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.

• And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it. I want the people who come to my classes to have this feeling, too.

• Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done.

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 trip that way.”

Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

• getting to know your characters

“I am trying to learn to stay in the now — not the last now, not the next now; this now.”

“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better”, Ethan Canin

• Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal.

• imperfection by concern with important things

• You mostly go along from scene to scene simply because it’s all so immediate and compelling. You simply have to find out what happens next, and this is how you want your reader to feel.

• You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?

• They commit only acts of atrocity and sociopathology, and they say terribly evil things, and then we get to ritually kill them. ... You can’t write down your intellectual understanding of a hero or villain and expect us to be engaged. You probably have got to find these characters within the community of people who live in your heart. ... You really can do it, really can find these people inside you and learn to hear what they have to say.

• Can you describe a really lovely living room in as much detail as possible?” And then you can ask what smells your friend remembers, in the living room and kitchen, and what the light was like, and what various rooms sounded like or what their silences felt like.

• Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong. ... I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent ... it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality

Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else”

• To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.”

• be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother. ... Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

• At best, they will say that the story would work better if you rewrote it in the past tense, unless it is already in the past tense, in which case they will suggest the present, or that you should try writing in the first person or, if it is in the first person, in the third. At worst, they will suggest that you have no visible talent whatsoever and should not bother writing anything ever again, even your name.

• I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. ... Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children.

• Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

• You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.