Book Summary: Bird By Bird
Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird is a guide for writing and life. Full of honest advice and personal stories that will help you to become a better writer.
Related Book Summaries:
Book Summary: The War Of Art – Steven Pressfield
The Pomodoro Technique – Francesco Cirillo
Quotes:
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
Bird By Bird Book Summary Notes:
- Becoming a great writer begins by writing about everything that happens to and around you. Begin by relaxing and observing throughout your day, learn to pay attention.
- The best writing is often about telling the truth, the daily observations you collect will help you with this.
- Honesty is a large part of finding yourself as a writer. Your ‘voice’ as a writer includes the stories you tell but also how you tell those stories.
- Discovering your voice as a writer will often mean confronting uncomfortable emotions and experiences. So long as you are honest about them, facing them and telling their stories can be a powerful part of your story telling journey.
- You need to believe in yourself and your writing, even when you feel like it’s terrible. Time and practice are the friends of any skill you wish to acquire and writing is no different. Just remember that some days will be easier than others and that’s ok. What matters most is that you showed up and put in work.
- Establish a daily routine. The worlds best writers all follow strict routines, what that routine is though, is completely up to you. Some people prefer morning writing routines and others night time ones. A book called Daily Rituals is great for showing examples of the daily routines of many famous writers.
- The most important part of a daily writing habit is simply developing the discipline, the ability to show up to the same writing space everyday and put in work.
- Every writer has one thing in common, shitty first drafts. All books and articles are the result of many, increasingly better drafts. It’s important as a writer to accept the reality of a terrible first draft, it’s where everyone starts but it doesn’t foreshadow how your work will be when it’s finished.
- Even if writers block happens to strike while your trying to put pen to paper, just make sure to embrace both the concept of the shitty first draft and the daily discipline of writing to get at least a small amount written everyday.
