Anne Lamott's Interesting Book Reflection

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird was an interesting story to read.  The part that sticks out the most for me would be her advice to tell writers to always keep writing and make sure you write it down.  For most, as I recall from the book, we have voice in our heads that dictates to us of what we should write, and it also tells us what to not write.  Lamott’s advice of just pushing through all of your writing, and then revising it later, really helped me in a way that I will later use in my writings.  Her stance on saying that it is okay to write a “shitty first draft”  really opened my eyes of not just writing what is right on paper, one sentence at a time, but put it all on paper first, and then reorganize later so nothing is lost.  What I liked most about Lamott’s book, was her writing style.  Although at times she could be slow and drawn out, she makes the reading fun and enjoyable for any mature reader with some jokes here and there.

Another thing that Bird by Bird has taught me is to know the purpose of writing.  Sometimes, it might just be for a dull scientific paper, but Lamott has taught me that casual writing is also important too.  She says that writing is because of the spirit and heart, which gave me the idea that when one writes, it should not only be for finishing a homework assignment, but also give your writing nurture, and take time to write it.  I really liked in the end, where she gave her class advice of how to make up a story.  She told her class about writing about someone, and also lie for most of the time, such as having a friend who had a priest, and the friend wanted to write about how bad he was.  Lamott’s suggestion was to emphasize some points and then she added something to protect the writer as a joke, such as writing that he had a small you know what.

I like how Anne Lamott can smoothly change from being funny to also being serious at the same time.  She tells the reader her life experiences, even the sad ones that really make an impact on the reader.  For example, the one baby that died, and Lamott talked about it on the radio.  Or another one would be the story where a boy needed a night to think about donating blood, and that the innocence of the boy was that he thought he had to die to save his younger sister’s life, and he still agreed to it the next day.  I felt that that was the most affective part in the book to bring the reader’s emotions into play.  Lamott was then able to smoothly bring the reader back to casual reading afterwards, and I feel like it was a well-executed skill Lamott has.

Another part that I liked in the book was the chapter of the Polaroid.  Her analogy was clever saying how you don’t really know what exactly what your writing will be yet, but you will slowly see it develop as you write.  This really helped me in the process of my writing, and I feel that I will use this process in my writings from now on.  Thanks to Anne Lamott’s book of Bird by Bird, I feel that I have already become a better writer.