By Anne Lamott.
Instructions on Writing and Life.
Photo by Hidden Hollows on Unsplash
I came across this book in my Bachelor of Arts Creative Writing online material, and was hooked from the first page. I read it in a few days, furiously making notes as I went, and feeling inspired, galvanised and entertained in equal parts. Anne is an American novelist, essayist and writing teacher, and reading up about her now I recognise how she is known for her candid, humorous reflections on writing, faith, motherhood and recovery from addiction. She writes with warmth, honesty and a willingness to reveal her own imperfections, and reading this book gave me practical and motivating advice not only about writing, but about living too.
You don’t have to want to be a writer to love this book – you need to be human, and interested in perseverance, forbearance, and patience with yourself, whilst you strive to do better – in any area. Well worth the read for the full perspective (and sheer reading pleasure) that it provides!
These are the notes I made for myself. I will revisit these in the future, but I will certainly read her book again too.
Part 1: Writing
Getting Started
Writing is a process, a ritual, a commitment – to yourself and to your craft.
Sit down, and write – aim for roughly the same time each day.
Start with your childhood, right from the beginning, and be highly descriptive. Write sequentially, as much as you can remember, including sight, sound, smells, touch and taste. Write truthfully and freely, write all the details you can remember, and invent some if you would like to.
Be prepared for many average-feeling and sounding sentences, but when you arrive again and review, look for a sentence, phrase or paragraph – or even a word, that stands out - and begin from there.
Students are distracted by being published, but writing is where it begins.
Writing gets us to start paying attention, helps us to soften, and can wake us up. Publishing doesn’t.
Be prepared for self-judgement, paranoia and hypochondria, and write anyway.
Short assignments
Feeling the enormity of the absence of a complete story can be numbifying.
Anne’s brother at age 10 had to do a report on birds for school that he had procrastinated on, and felt completely overwhelmed. Their fathers advice: Just take it bird by bird.
Begin with the description of a scene or a character or a situation – something small – without having to know the greater context.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night – you can only see as far as the headlights, but you are still going to make the trip
Breathe, and write a small descriptive piece. Paint a picture with words.
Shitty first drafts
All good writers write them. Drafts go from grades of shitty to good to terrific.
Very few writers know what they are doing until they have done it.
Just beginning – ignoring the voices of criticism in our heads and getting a full draft down, knowing that it will be average, and knowing that you will return to fix it up, remove sections, add new ones, polish it etc.
It is crazy to stop or worse, not even start, because the draft is shitty. It will be. The next one will be better.
Perfectionism
Self-protection from the perceived pain of imperfection, and the main obstacle between you and shitty first draft.
Playfulness, inventiveness, and lifeforce.
Writing needs to breathe and move.
Work on self-compassion. Perfectionism is inhibiting and constraining.
Begin regardless, and you will experience how wonderful perseverance feels.
School lunches
When I read this chapter I went down a memory lane of my own school lunches, and several weird and wonderful combinations created by my own mother.
The point: after a ramble, there is no way to know if any material is usable until you have it all down. So begin with something small, and by getting it all down.
It could be a sentence, a theme, a character or a setting – see what wonders across the page.
Then shape, edit, highlight or toss.
Polaroids
The picture, including all the props, develops by degrees. You do not need to see the full picture clearly to begin writing. Start with what you can see.
Immerse yourself in an experience, or research, or an outing and watch a piece of prose form throughout the experience that wasn’t clear before.
Character
This knowledge also emerges the way a Polaroid develops – it takes time for you to get to know your characters.
Each of our characters – like us – has an emotional acre that they get to tend, or not tend. What shape is their land in?
You are going to love/ hate some of your characters (they are often some facet of ourselves), and you are going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love.
Get to know them thoroughly – experiment with different traits, quirks and responses.
Let them take on a life of their own. Based on a model from real life, or a composite.
So who is this person? Show your readers. How do they feel, think, talk, survive.
What do they say and how do they say it? See if you can take dictation from them.
You won’t know your characters until weeks or months after you have started working with them.
Give minor characters a shot at being major characters, if they show you the inclination. Stay open to them, and listen. It’s that simple.
Plot
Plot grows out of character – if you keep focusing on who the people in your story are, something is bound to happen to them.
Be involved in your character’s lives, and keep asking – now what happens?
Worry mostly about characters – focus on them.
Finding out with each character cares most about in the world helps you to discover what is at stake, and creates tension.
Anne sits down each morning and reads the work from the day before, then imagines the characters and daydreams about them.
Plot starts to fall into place as you listen to your characters carefully, one day at a time.
John Gardner: ‘A writer is creating a dream into which he invites the reader, and that dream must be vivid and continuous.’
It helps to have someone to bounce material off – to spot the seams between the dreams.
Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The formula: set up, buildup, payoff. Movement is important!
If you don’t know your characters well, your plot will not make sense and you will lose the trust of the reader.
If you stay with your characters, care for them, get to know them better and better, you will come to know what the story is.
Climax – a major event where at least one of your people is profoundly changed (inevitable, amazing, ‘right’). Don’t aim at this too hard – let it evolve with your characters and arrive.
Alice Adams: Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending.
Dialogue
The pleasure of voyeurism – the characters do not know that we are listening.
Observe dialogue in the real world, and store things away.
Dialogue is a matter of ear.
What helps?
Sound your words – read them aloud.
Remember that you should be able to identify each character about what he or she says. Hear what your characters are saying over what you are saying.
Try putting two unsuitable or opposing characters together and see what happens.
Good dialogue gives us the sense that we are eavesdropping.
Spend time with characters, and they will start to sound more like themselves.
The writer needs to truly understand their characters in order to know what they will say, and how they will speak.
Do this by getting a little work done every day.
The nature of most good writing is that you find things as you go along. Then you go back and rewrite
You are just the typist, and a good typist listens well.
Set Design
Imagine yourself as the set designer for a play, or movie version of your story.
Think carefully about each room/scene and set the stage with your descriptions.
Reach out for help with accuracy, and research – immerse yourself in the detail.
False Starts
The painter who paints over his work with white every time he discovers what it is not, is closer to discovering what it is.
When you write – white out if you need to, and try again.
If you want to get to know your characters, you have to hang out with them long enough to know all the things that they aren’t.
You can see the underlying essence only once you have begun, and accumulated in earnest.
Plot Treatment
It is very rare to have an entire sense of your plot upfront – instead perhaps a temporary destination or just a scene as the climax.
You write towards it, regardless of whether it makes the final cut or not.
An image can keep you going but turn out to be all wrong – wait for the characters to come to you with their lines.
If your plot is not working, give it a little space and fresh air.
Anne talks about laying her manuscript out on the floor and re-ordering it, with placeholders and extra notes, and then beginning a third draft… which still failed. What was in her head did not translate to the page. So she wrote a ‘plot treatment’ - a description of what is going on in each chapter which helps to identify holes and clarify what needs to be conveyed.
How do you know when you are done?
You just do!
Something inside says it’s time to get onto the next thing.
There will always be more you can do but that is the voice of perfectionism.
Solving the various problems of your final draft is a little like putting an octopus to bed.
There is simply no steam left in the pressure cooker and it’s the very best you can do for now – you are done.
Part 2: The Writing Frame of Mind
Looking around
Learn to pay attention and communicate what you see going on around you.
Stand apart, and watch.
Your job is to see people as they really are, but you also have to work on knowing who you are in the most compassionate sense. Practice this!
Then you can recognise others who are really ‘living breathing people who are suffering like sons of bitches.’
Practice: keep bringing your mind back to what is there to be seen, and note it with reverence.
Presence and openness – there is ecstasy in paying attention.
Being engrossed in something is a powerful antidote for the overly rational mind.
The moral point of view
There needs to be something at the centre of the story about what you care passionately.
We feel morally certain of some things, and feel compelled to communicate them.
No need to fill the page with witticisms and shimmering insights.
Every human has something to cry about.
Let your deepest beliefs drive your writing, and they will stop your work from being contrived, and help you discover what drives your characters.
Let your reader see a moral compass at work.
Amidst chaos and evil there is a good part/ person that cannot be destroyed, which is reassuring. Perhaps they have to search deep within (this helps the reader connect).
To be a good writer you not only have to write a great deal but you also have to care.
Writers try to understand a little bit about life and pass it on.
Write about the things that are most important to you.
Broccoli
‘Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.’
Don’t doubt the little voice inside that is sometimes really telling you what is going on.
Don’t let only your rational mind guide you, and don’t give up – do not move away from your desk without really, really trying to listen and write.
Persevere. Coax your intuition. Stop trying to control your mind so much.
Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
Find a useful metaphor for your intuition – broccoli works for Anne.
‘Writing is about hypnotising yourself into believing yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotising yourself and going over the work coldly’.
Maybe, your broccoli will know what to do!
Radio Station KFKD
This is the single greatest obstacle to listening to broccoli – basically, your inner talk.
When you begin writing at your desk - in order to get quiet, first notice that the station is on.
Breathe!
Gently bring your mind back to your work.
During the course of your writing, as you get distracted by external and internal voices: close your eyes. Breathe. Begin again.
If you can quiet KFKD, then you can begin to hear your story.
Align yourself with the river of your story – you can be the straw.
Jealousy
Some writers will have huge, circumstantial luck, and it is especially hard if you know them.
It is just someone else’s turn.
What helps?
Getting older
Talking about it until the fever breaks
Using it as material
Live as if you are dying, and do not switch the small things.
Part 3: Help Along the Way
Index cards
In addition to your notebook, keep cards or paper close by for if you see something lovely, strange, worthwhile remembering.
Memory can fail, and you don’t want to lose those images – they are material.
Tools like these help you to start thinking like a writer.
If you are stuck or lost – refer to them to get writing again.
Calling around
It’s a wonderful and rare experience when the right person asks you to tell them everything you know about something… when you actually do you know the information.
Figure out who has the information you need, and give them a call.
Embrace tracking down the facts, using people you know.
Writing groups
A safe place to show up for feedback, encouragement and benevolent pressure.
Helpful when you need a peptalk.
A group you learn to trust.
Honest, and generous.
Helpful for empathy and affirmation and sometimes advice.
It’s about listening to each other’s work and helping each other keep at it.
Someone to read your drafts
A trusting relationship – look carefully and find the person you need.
Consider finding someone who would not mind reading your drafts and marking them up with useful suggestions.
Criticism can be very hard to take but if you trust the person you can take their feedback on board.
Don’t fear the work that results from feedback.
When someone reliable gives you good feedback you get a sense of your works effect on people, and this helps to approach your final draft
Sometimes it’s just fine tuning, and sometimes it’s a whole character rethink.
Letters
When you are stuck, try telling a part of a characters history in the form of a letter.
Address it to her family member or friend, and explain to them that you are going to tell them part of your story. Then write it – even up to novella length. Then use it as plot treatment for a novel.
Shifts the perspective and changes the pressure.
Dear X, I want to tell you about…
Like a Polaroid, your essay will emerge, clear and bright, full of smells and sounds, and full of feeling.
Writer block
Inevitable – immobilising and debilitating – the fear that you will never write again.
Writers are like vacuum cleaners – we are mirrors, parrots, writers – this can lead to impostor syndrome.
Accept your reality: You are not in a productive creative period – and so you free yourself to begin filling up again.
Just get one page of anything written, and let things go like that.
To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. There are big, round hours to fill – with reading, the beach, walks, nature, visits. These will begin filling you back up with observations, flavours, ideas, visions, memories.
Keep it simple, and be present.
All the good stories are out there waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way – your angle/ perspective/ style is unique.
‘Everything you need is in your head and memories, and all that your senses provide, in all that you’ve seen and thought and absorbed.’
Do your 300 words, and then go for a walk.
Part 4: Publication – and Other Reasons to Write
Writing a present
There is something to be said for painting portraits in words of the people we have loved, for trying to express the moments that change and deepen us.
Anne wrote for her father and her best friend, as carefully and soulfully as she could, which is how she wishes she could write for all time.
Finding your voice
Borrowing another writer’s style is like a prop that you use for a while until you have to give it back.
It is hard to find your own voice, and tempting to use someone else’s… good for practice, but your rendition will not ring true, and your readers may be suspicious.
We write to expose the unexposed. Go through the forbidden door – your job is to see what is behind it. Unacknowledged truth keeps you and your characters hidden from full view.
Go through the door, take it all in, and speak in your own voice.
Giving
If you give to the work before you freely, there will always be more.
You’re helping your work coming into being, and so you have to keep giving it, even if it behaves badly and ignores you.
Give to writing, but also, give to others through your writing.
You wouldn’t be a writer if reading and books hadn’t enriched your soul in some way. So, write a book back to an author whose books you love to read, and make it as good as you can.
Your writing can help your readers be braver, better than they are, open to the world again.
Publication
Being published does not necessarily change your life or solve your problems.
It’s a long, often agonising buildup, and the festivities are over quickly.
The main point: It’s different for everyone, and not what you expect.
Regardless of if or how you are published, you have to sit down again and face the blank page.
Return to writing long and hard and do not stop to admire yourself too much.
Satisfaction lies more in being a writer, who gets some work done most days, then it is in being published/ or acknowledged.
Quotation from the movie Cool Runnings: ‘If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.’
The world can’t give us serenity, but it also can’t take it away.
Part 5: The Last Class
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious and writing from a place of truth – your reader may recognise their own truth in reading yours.
Try to write in a directly emotional way.
If something inside you is real, it will be interesting, to yourself and to others. Tell the truth as you understand it.
If necessary, disguise characters carefully in order to use them in your work. When in doubt, give them a tiny little penis!
Try not to feel sorry for yourself when they’re going gets hard and lonely.
This life of reading, writing and corresponding is the loveliest one possible.
Writing is spiritually invigorating, intellectually quickening, challenging and delighting, agonising and commitment-requiring, and enlightening.
Writing with discipline brings a feeling of liberation.
You can build your niche, like a woodpecker.
Being a writer is being part of a noble tradition, and holds a secret feeling of honour.
You get to engage and satisfying work, and have something to pour yourself into.
When I finished this book on my kindle, I immediately ordered myself a hard copy, and resolved to remember and live Anne’s following words: ‘Regardless of what happens, write with everything you have, daily if possible, and for the rest of your life.’