The advice I most strongly connected with in these first few chapters of “Bird by Bird” was that of its namesake, as discussed in the chapter “Short Assignments”. I especially found the analogy of a car driving a long journey at night and only being able to see a few feet ahead to be the best visualization of this lesson. Writing can be long and hard, and you can certainly get lost along the way, beautiful you take it in small portions, bit-by-bit, or as Lamott puts it, bird-by-bird, the whole process can become much more manageable. On the other hand, the advice that I had the most difficulty coming to terms with was that of the discussion in “Shitty First Drafts”, more specifically that you have to ooze out a terrible first attempt at writing before you can really get down to the good stuff. I may very well be a different sort of writer than Lamott, but I rarely write a shitty first draft, as I get my bad ideas out in a more focused planning stage, creating outlines and stuff until the skeleton of the story I want to write finally reveals itself. I am sure this technique is very helpful for some people, and could be something I turn to in an extreme case of writer’s block, but I find it a strange and unnecessary way of writing at the current moment.
What Lamott means is that a large number of people have at least thought at one time or another that legendary writers such as Shakespeare or Tolkein or Steinback were simply born to write and that fully-completed masterpieces instantly flowed out of their brains. Of course this is certainly not the reality, but it definitely is overwhelmingly and sometimes impossible to imagine how these great works of literature were created in the first place. My perception of how writers produce “polished products” is twofold, 1) they toil endlessly in solitary, tweaking their work until one more revision would make their hand fall off, and 2) they have other writers, editors or people they trust read, reflect and criticize their work, so as to find things they might have otherwise missed, and then they repeat these 2 steps over and over again until they finally believe their piece is as good as it can reasonably become.
As I discussed earlier, the namesake of the book definitely speaks to my process as a writer as I take my writing step-by-step, trudging along while also keeping the overall picture in the back of my mind. I would think that there are not too many other ways to go about doing so, but this idea certainly does connect with my own experience.
