Last night just
before I shut my eyes I read some lines from Anne Lamott’s bird by bird.
If you’re a
writer and you haven’t heard of bird by
bird then do yourself a favour and buy yourself a copy. You won’t regret it.
The subtitle of bird by bird is Some Instructions on Writing and Life, but
it’s so much more than this. Yesterday the writing hadn’t been going so well. I
don’t know if it was because it was a public holiday and there were
distractions, like sleeping in, and having The Loved One around, but the
writing wasn’t satisfying. I felt uninspired, a little lost, not sure if I was
going in the right direction. And then last night I read a small chapter called
Looking Around and found these lines,
which stopped me in my tracks and made me think. They made me re-evaluate where
I was up to, and why perhaps the day’s writing hadn’t gone so well. And, more importantly, why it
had seemed so joyless.
The lines were
these:
When what we see catches us off guard, and
when we write
it as
realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.
And, a little
higher up in the same paragraph:
Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain
of the natural
world...
I
put the lines together. I thought, Ah, that’s what I haven’t been doing today. I’ve
been writing without emotion or thought, without taking the time to look around
and describe what my character is looking at, and how and why the sun setting
in the trees as she drives home, for instance, might make an impression on her,
and what that impression is.
And
so this morning I will be backtracking, and rewriting what I wrote yesterday,
but this time with some purpose, and with Lamott’s words not far away.
As
a postscript, I think I got more out of that short chapter and those few lines than I would have if I
had sat down and read the whole book.
Sometimes
it’s a matter of focus.
And
sometimes one is blessed. You find exactly what you need when you need it.
* Anne Lamott, bird by bird
No comments:
Post a Comment