Reading About Writing

I hope you’ll pardon my recent lack of writing, as I’ve been too busy reading. But, the result of that reading may be more writing.
I’ve just re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, subtitled Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It’s a book that every writer — and by that I mean every blogger — should read, set aside for a while, then read again.

Ms. Lamott shares her experiences as a joyfully neurotic, engagingly insecure and intimidatingly competent writer in such a way as to make you think that, just possibly, you are not certifiably insane for ever thinking that you have what it takes to also be a writer.

Her lessons are directly applicable to blogging because — face it — bloggers are writers, and we face most of the same challenges and insecurities as novelists and other “real” writers, except for the part that has to do with earning a living therefrom. We can be every bit as paranoid and schizo as a published treeware author.

Take this passage, for example, where she explains to her class the challenge of facing a blank piece of paper (or screen) each morning:

So I tell them what it will be like for me at the desk the next morning when I sit down to work, with a few ideas and a lot of blank paper, with hideous conceit and low self-esteem in equal measure, fingers poised on the keyboard. I tell them they’ll want to be really good right off, and they may not be, but they might be good someday if they just keep the faith and keep practicing. And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they’d want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing brings with it so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together. When they are working on their books or stories, their heads will spin with ideas and invention. They’ll see the world through new eyes. Everything they see and hear and learn will become grist for the mill. At cocktail parties or in line at the post office, they will be gleaning small moments and overheard expressions: they’ll sneak away to scribble these things down. They will have days at the desk of frantic boredom, of angry hopelessness, of wanting to quit forever, and there will be days when it feels like they have caught and are riding a wave.

If you blog, and you haven’t experienced most or all of what she describes above, then you’re not trying very hard.

Bird by Bird (and, by the way, the title itself comes from an excellent lesson about writing) won’t hand you a laundry list of things to do and then you’ll be a good or great writer. But it will tell give you ideas that you can take and mold and use to become a better writer. And it will also remind you of the price that must be paid, something I always want to overlook or put off until I’ve got enough in the account to cover the bill.

I think Anne will tell you that it doesn’t work that way. The price for writing is always payable in advance.