Bird by Bird - Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

“Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” Mel Brooks

I love Mel Brooks. What a great line. Anne Lamott must like him too, because she brings up this interesting point in her book on writing and life, Bird by Bird, an ode to anyone who struggles with one or the other, or both, period. It’s easy to lose our inner broccoli. As children we have it in spades. We’re born with no inhibitions, no preconceived notions as to what’s good and what’s not good. Like with broccoli for instance, we automatically assume it tastes great, after all it’s such a pretty bright green even if it does look like the bush next to the front porch.

The loud voice in our little head is open to new ideas like a sponge, something we adults sometimes call truth. For children, truth is like water vapor in a room on a humid day, it spreads to every corner of the empty space. As adults we gather that water like a fierce unforgiving rain cloud. Then we stomp it into the corner with our boot, and turn up our nose and say, “I wouldn’t eat that, it tastes like a tree,” or “You don’t need to know that,” or “Because I said so, that’s why,” until the loud voice becomes softer, a sound wave headed away from us, until eventually we hear nothing at all.

Welcome to adulthood.

“So,” she says, “try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.”
What good advice. This whole book is full of it. I laughed and cried at the same time. A child of hippy parents, Lamott is very philosophical and wise. She’s experienced a lot of sadness in her life. What she says rings true, sometimes in a painful, even funny way, if that’s possible. Doesn’t everyone know someone like that? Someone who has had deeply moving and sad experiences in their life, usually revolving around death, and who somehow come out shiny on the other side of the abyss? These are the people who hold the magnifying glass a little closer to our eyes and say again, “You’re missing it. Look and see.”

If you’re looking for writing advice, you should read this book. If you’re the kind of person who never dots their i’s or crosses their t’s because you’re in such a hurry, you should read this book. If sometimes you feel like a “treadmark on the underpants of life,” you should read this book. Because according to Lamont, “You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on the ship.”

I liked having her for a shipmate for 236 pages. It made my daily walk to the plank that much easier. 4 stars

The evil twin word quiz -

For 5 embarrassing grammatical mistakes in writing, see here. I dare someone to give this test a try. Anyone 100%?

How Fiction Works by James Wood

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.

In How Fiction Works, the critic James Wood tries “to be mindful of the common reader” and reduce what Joyce calls, “true scholastic stink” to bearable levels. Like an art critic would break down the elements of artistic style, from drawing to painting, to penciling in the appropriate amount of shade, Wood reveals aspects about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character, etc? Old questions indeed but like he says in this book, he means to answer them differently, by asking a critic’s questions and offering a writer’s answers.

This being one of the only books I’ve ever read of this type, I found it short and readable, yet supremely condescending at the same time. I imagined Wood more than once in a cardboard-colored tweed jacket with a pipe tucked supremely in the corner of his mouth, whilst sitting in the orange upholstered wing chair amongst his vast library of Chekhov, Joyce, Nabokov, just to name a few. Like the guy who used to do those Mobile Masterpiece introductions. I felt snobby and the need to adopt an English accent while reading it.

But still, he made me take a deeper look, at words themselves, at characters, at the art of the effective metaphor. I learned the how’s and why’s of why New York garbage men call maggots, “disco rice,” why Marilynne Robison called a grave a “weedy little mortality patch,” and Katherine Manfield’s “grandmother saying her prayers like someone rummaging through tissue paper.”

He is particularly obsessed of a certain kind of visual simile and metaphor that describes fire, calling them “tremendously successful.”

Lawrence, seeing a fire in a grate, writes of it as “that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney” (Sea and Sardinia). Hardy describes a “scarlet handful of fire” in Gabriel Oaks cottage in Far from the Madding Crowd. Bellow has this sentence in his story A Silver Dish: “The blue flames fluttered like a school of fish in the coal fire.”

It’s not hard to tell, this is obviously a man in love with words, and an attentive lover he is. He made me question what I’m looking for in a book. Why am I reading? I want to escape. I want answers to life’s questions. I want to learn something new. I am like he, a woman in search of “that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit’s house to it’s foundation.”

Did this book “shake habit’s house” for me? Absolutely. If you're looking to be intellectually dazzled and increase your knowledge even a tiny bit, I highly recommend reading this. Now if only a movie would've been included like on Mobile Masterpiece. Then it would've been perfect. 4 stars