Anne Lamott (1994). “Bird by bird . Some instructions on writing and life”. Anchorbooks. New York
[…]Write about the time you’re so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your choldhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognise his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material on 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.
If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, abd it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write towards vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act- truth is always subversive.
[…] Try not to feel sorry for yourselves, I say, when you find the going hard and lonely. You seem to want to write, so write. You didn’t have to sign up for this class. I didn’t chase you downand drag you by the hair back to my cave. You are lucky yo be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventivness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
[…] When I suggest however that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride they at first look at me with great hostility. […] One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. […] As a writer, one will have over the years many experiences that stimulate and nourish the spirit. These will be quiet and deep inside, however uncompanied by thunder or tremulous angels.
[…] Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a memerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information., and when you realize how artfully this has happened, you may actually put the book down and for a moment and davor it, just taste it.
[…] In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree, where you can built your nets and say “this is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong”.And the niche may be small and dark but at last you finally know what you’re doing. After 30 years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you’ve been avoiding all along-your wounds. This is very painful. It stops a lot of people early on who didn’t get into this for the pain. They got into it for the money and the fame. So they either quit or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making.
Don’t underestimate this gift for finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that to you help them get written, you'll’come to a secret feeling of honor. Being a writer is a part of noble tradition, as is being a musician- the last egalitarian and open association. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.
Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories, or novels, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would known what like was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town- still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? What you’ve written may help others , will be a small part of the solution.
enjoy reading? I hope I made you think.
xoxo
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