In a box of discard books in the library I found Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I probably had a copy at home but even if I had a dozen I still couldn’t leave this book in discards any more than I could walk past my son begging on the street.
This particular copy had been underlined by another reader. As I soak up page after page, I feel like I am reading over a friend’s shoulder, simultaneously seeing and feeling each word, laughing together at Anne’s humor when she describes the poem she wrote in grade two about John Glenn that had many, many verses.
“It was like one of the old English ballads my mother taught us to sing while she played the piano. Each song had thirty or forty verse, which would leave my male relatives flattened to our couches and armchairs as if by centrifugal force, staring unblinking up at the ceiling.”
I and my unseen fellow reader nod at her wisdom as we read. I think it’s her wisdom that makes this book so special. I feel like I’ve scaled a high, rugged mountain to the perch of a great guru. “O great guru,” I say, breathless both from the exertion of the climb and the anticipation of the nugget of truth I hope to receive. “What is the meaning of writing? Why does it call from my soul?”
Anne replies, “It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore, you exist.”
I know it’s truth because she has just shared with me her pain at being a misfit in her society.
She says good writing is about telling the truth. Yet that is the hardest thing to do. It’s easier to fall back on clichés, shortcuts, or simply ignore the emotion that reaches down my throat and grabs my gut because I know it will hurt to wring that emotion free and get it on the paper. And when I do it will seem but a shadow of the real.
Sometimes you find the words, she says and I find encouragement and challenge in that.
She goes on to warn they will only appear if I show up at the keyboard and write a lot of dreck until I find the good stuff.
So I will show up again and again to try and find words that express what my heart knows, sometimes, even, if I can forget my own importance and get out of the way, my heart will share what it knows without my help.
Anne says, “This is how it works for me: I sit down in the morning….then I wool-gather, staring at the blank page or off into space…in a trancelike state, until words bounce around together and form a sentence. Then I do the mental work of getting it down on paper, because I’m the designated typist, and I’m also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time—but she knows gold when she sees it.”
That’s my dream. To find the gold. But how do you take an idea, some imaginary characters and create for them a satisfying journey? It looks easy but what I see in my head, how I hear my characters and watch them act and react falls flat on the paper. Where are the words that paint the picture? How can I make it dance and vibrate like it does in my head?
There’s so much to learn and learn and learn. The more I learn, the more I see there is to know and understand about the whole process. It’s gone from simply writing down a story to thinking about Aristotle’s 3 act structure, the mythical Hero’s Journey, enneagram types, scene and sequel, motivational-reaction units, yada, yada. The mechanical stuff is great but the challenge is still to find a way to combine it with the creative part of story telling.
Some say lock the internal editor away until the first draft is done. But no one has told me how. Besides, I appreciate that annoying little voice that whispers, ‘You really think she’d do that?’ It keeps me from chasing down paths in the wrong direction.
So I simply do it as best I can. Never quite satisfied. Knowing I haven’t told the story as well as I wanted to. But there is something that gives me courage—I am not alone. Many artists (writers too) share the same frustration. In fact, Leonardo da Vinci said on his deathbed, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not achieve the quality it should have.”
It’s nice to know I’m at least in good company.
