Anne Lamott’s Top 13 Writing Tips
This past year I’ve been devouring advice books from fellow writers.
One of the best sources of advice I’ve found is Anne Lamott. Lamott is the type of writer who is easy to love and hard to emulate. She has written countless successful fiction and nonfiction books across topics as diverse as depression, faith, motherhood, and alcoholism.
Lamott is also the author of the writing advice book Bird by Bird, which is a wellspring of knowledge for writers across all genres.
Below are the top 13 lessons I learned from Bird by Bird.
1. Every life event is source material for your writing.
“One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material.” -Anne Lamott
I’ve seen this happen in my own life. When I started writing, I worried I would burn through all of my potential topics and be left with nothing else to write.
I was wrong.
Writing is like dipping your bucket into a well that gets more full with each bucketful you draw. There is an endless number of topics to write about. Once you start writing, you begin to see potential stories all around you.
2. Good writers help us understand life.
“This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.” -Anne Lamott
I recently heard a segment on NPR about comedian Brian Regan. The segment talked about how comedians have a gift for finding the humorous within the mundane. Comedians see the joke hidden within every ordinary life situation.
Brian Regan sees the humor of Little Leaguers wanting the game-ending snack (snow cones) more than they actually want to play in the game.
Jerry Seinfeld sees the humor in the fact that, according to most studies, people are more fearful of giving a eulogy (public speaking) than being in the casket.
Similar to comedians, good writers help their audiences see the world in a new way. They expose feelings and ideas that have always been there, under the surface, within their readers. Good writers help us understand life.
3. Write what you’ve been told not to write.
“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must (open the door)…You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. You can tell if they’re there because a small voice will say, ‘Oh, whoops, don’t say that, that’s a secret,’ or ‘That’s a bad word,’ or ‘Don’t tell anyone you jack off. They’ll all start doing it.’ So you have to breathe or pray or do therapy to send them away. Write as if your parents are dead.” -Anne Lamott
I’ll admit, I cringed typing the above words into this story, and these are not even my own words! Why? Because I know my parents read my work.
Nonetheless, this is a necessary lesson for each of us writers to learn.
We must bring our unvarnished selves to the blank page and speak the truth.
We must not cower under the weight of criticizing eyes.
We must write what we know we must write.
4. Publishing isn’t the payoff.
“I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part.” -Anne Lamott
It’s easy to get caught up in the output: publication, curation, stats, money, etc. But the output is not the payoff. The input is the payoff.
I often struggle to remember this when I write a piece I’m really proud of and it doesn’t perform well.
I also struggle to remember that output is not the payoff when I write a piece that generates tons of reads, comments, and claps.
Both sides of the coin — obscurity and success — blind us from the real reason we should be writing: to create something real, something tangible, something that breathes life into us and makes us proud.
5. Writing is a paradoxical act that weds self-doubt and ego.
“So I tell [my students] what it will be like for me at the desk the next morning when I sit down to work, with a few ideas and a lot of blank paper, with hideous conceit and low self-esteem in equal measure, fingers poised on the keyboard.” -Anne Lamott
It took me a long time to realize that writing is inherently an ego-driven activity. It takes massive cojones to think we have something to say that is worth another person’s reading time.
And yet, writing is also an act of extreme self-doubt. Every time I submit a story to a publication, I question whether it will prove worthy of acceptance.
In this way, writing is one of the most paradoxical acts we can perform.
Good writing is a strange cocktail of ego and self-doubt.
6. Each one of us has a story to tell.
“Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.” -Anne Lamott
I used to marvel when I met authors. I thought to myself, “That person had a story so interesting that they could fill an entire book.”
I don’t marvel anymore because I know I have a book inside of me too. So do you. Probably a hundred of them if you really wanted.
It’s not that I’ve lost any respect for the craft. On the contrary, I respect authors more now than I ever did before.
But now I know that writing a book is not an impossible task. Each of us has the potential to do it, but the vast majority of us will never make it a priority.
7. Writing is an act of self-discovery.
“You don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it.” -Anne Lamott
Sometimes we need to write in order to find out what we want to write.
It’s strange, but it’s true.
Writing is a process of discovery. Picking up a pen is like picking up a shovel and starting to dig in an open field. Who knows what we’ll find?
But if we put in the work, we’ll eventually unearth brilliance.
8. Writing is fueled by hard work rather than innate talent.
“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts…For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” -Anne Lamott
Lamott’s line about “shitty first drafts” has gotten a lot of airtime in the writing community. Many writers seem to use it as a rallying cry.
To me, this quote is a great reminder of the fact that authorship is not a land of “haves” and “have-nots.” The world population has not been divided into capable writers and hopeless wannabes.
If even the best writers in the world struggle to write beautiful prose, we know that writing is a learned craft — one in which we can all improve over time.
We earn the blessing of the Muse by putting in writing time — not by being born with a golden ink pen in our hand.
9. Just put something down on paper.
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.” -Anne Lamott
In college, I used to joke with friends that I was halfway done writing a paper as soon as I had typed my name at the top of the page.
Even back then, I recognized that there is magic in just getting the wheels turning.
Ideas are worth nothing until they’re turned into action. We must turn our thoughts into words. Only then can those words begin to form sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.
10. Show, don’t tell.
“One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t.” -Anne Lamott
I’ve heard the lesson “Show, don’t tell” from a dozen authors. Every time, it sinks into my skull a bit deeper. (My skull is thick.)
Honestly, I still struggle with this lesson. It’s as important in nonfiction as it is in fiction.
When I’m writing about why people should get off their cell phones or what causes companies to pass over internal candidates for promotions, I cannot simply state my argument and expect people to be convinced. I need to tell stories.
Stories, dialogue, and events are far more convincing than just stating that something is true.
11. Our work is the most important thing.
“[T]here is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive.” -Anne Lamott
I constantly stumble across stories online about how to build a following through social media, newsletters, etc.
But that stuff isn’t what really matters.
What matters is the work we produce. If the work is good enough, people will eventually find it, and those who do will be refreshed by our work.
12. Find a friendly but truthful critic.
“Almost every writer I’ve ever known has been able to find someone who could be both a friend and a critic.” -Anne Lamott
After writing, re-reading, and re-writing a story, I can no longer approach my work with objectivity. This is when I turn to my editor(s).
My brother and one of my best friends play this role for me, and I’m always appreciative of the edits they suggest. Whether it’s refining an argument, fixing a grammatical mistake, or adding stories to drive home a key point, their suggestions inevitably make my work better.
Rather than hiring someone to read your work, find a truthful friend who can offer honest, but fair criticism of what you’ve written.
13. Become a resourceful recycler.
“All the good stories out there are waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way. Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe.” -Anne Lamott
Sometimes I get frustrated when I stumble across a story online about a topic I’ve been planning to write about. It’s as if I unconsciously believe that no one has ever written about these topics.
What a stupid notion!
I now realize that even though thousands of people have written stories about commonplacing, impostor syndrome, and procrastination, no one has written about them from my perspective.
Each of us has an interesting perspective to shine upon any topic, and we can (and should) draw upon the work of our predecessors in order to tackle that topic.
Build upon what others have built.
If you haven’t read Bird by Bird yet, I strongly urge you to do so. It’s well worth the time. Until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed this digestible summary.
Happy writing!
