Anne Lamott's Instructions on Writing

Notes to Nell:

I haven't gone back to remind myself what she wrote, but here from memory is what I took away from Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life:

1.) Write about everything you know; fill up your notebooks with every detail you can remember about everyone and everything in your life.

This helps with fluency and promotes daily writing practice. It helps you remember everything you care about; it helps you remember what you know; it helps you discover what you have been meaning to write about. You then have at your disposal reams of information, details you can use at whim as you are working. The result is like a cartoonist's art morgue, only with words and paragraphs rather than pictures. You can lift whole passages from yourself whenever you need them and plunk them down on the page without breaking stride.

2.) Create a window for yourself anytime you want to go further into something you are working on, and just work on it separately from the rest of the piece.

This helps you stay free in the creative process even as your piece begins to take shape. Sometime you want to explore something but you are not sure where or even if it belongs. You are afraid to go off on a tangent that will confuse you or bog you down. Just jump over onto another page and explore. Chances are it is related in ways you can't see now. Even if you don't use any of the actual writing the experience and knowledge you gain enriches your piece.

3.) Writing happens step by step even though you may conceive of your work as a whole and become overwhelmed wondering how you will actually make it to the end.

The title, Bird by Bird, refers to working step by step in a wonderful story she uses to illustrate this point.

Lamott helps you understand how to undertake the literal task of crafting your writing by encountering yourself and your art intuitively and with love.

Writing Practice

Notes to Nell:

To expand on what we discussed today at lunch (thanks for the great shrimp remoulade salad!):

First up: Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within and Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life for writing practice. Get the first for her simple and invaluable rules of writing practice; and the second for short essays on writing followed by a section called "Try this." It's basically the same as the first book, essays on writing, but with writing prompts for immediate use.

And while we are talking about Natalie G. check out her memoir Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, one of the most moving and deepest memoirs I have ever read. She structured it by telling stories about her teachers.

And don't forget the Susan Shapiro book, Five Men Who Broke My Heart, which is completely entertaining and funny and sad.

I mention these last two books because their initial impulse and structure are similar to yours: building a memoir around a list of important people in your life.