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[truepenny]

I just figured something out.

Namely, why matociquala dislikes Bird by Bird so intensely.

Also why--even though I personally love that book, assigned it to my creative writing students one year, and do recommend it--I always talk about it in qualifiers.

Now, there are things I appreciate about it. I find Lamott extremely funny (which I seem to recall Bear does not), and when she talks about living with being a writer, she articulates things I needed to hear the first time I read BbB, and that I still need to hear from time to time. (In particular, the chapter on jealousy.) And there is one piece of her writing advice that I concur with whole-heartedly: the necessity of giving yourself permission to write a shitty first draft. Because otherwise, you will never write anything at all.

But.

What I realized this morning is that what irks Bear and bugs me is the reductive simplicity of Lamott's model for how writing works. We can sum it up in three tenets:

1. Writing is therapy.
2. Storytelling is straightforward.
3. Critical thinking is the writer's enemy.

I disagree with each of these.

Lamott is of the school that believes that all writing is autobiographical (BbB, like most how-to books on writing, does not admit the existence of spec fic), and all writing springs from childhood trauma--with "trauma" defined pretty loosely, but she does seem to believe that no one has a happy childhood. She talks about how to deal with it if you're uncomfortable writing about your trauma, or worried that you'll offend your family, but not how you deal with it if you really don't have any trauma to talk about.

Now, I don't deny that writing can be autobiographical, and I don't deny that what preoccupies us as writers is very likely to be rooted in what we were forced to be aware of as children, and there's certainly a level on which writing, as an action, is theraputic. But it isn't a one to one correspondence It isn't that simple.

Likewise with storytelling.

Or, at least, once you reach a certain point.

I wrote this morning, What I'd really like is something SIMPLE to work on, something where I could just write the story and get out of my own damn way. And then I stopped and thought and added, Unfortunately, I don't think I get to do that anymore.

And then I realized what was wrong with BbB. It's a book for beginning writers, and there wouldn't be anything in the world wrong with that if it were also a book which, when you've become a journeyman writer, you could go back to and build on. Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town (which I feel like I mention ridiculously often) is also a book for beginners, also an extremely simple book, and what's more, it's about poetry. But nevertheless, I have found its central insight to be one of those writing koans Bear talks about: I can come back to it again and again at different stages in my progress and process, and it doesn't lose its value. BbB's writing advice (except for the bit about the shitty first draft) ceases to be helpful once you learn to think about storytelling nonlinearly.

Or, to put it another way, once you learn to be aware of structure.

This is what I meant by "critical thinking" in tenet #3. Lamott talks about having to make the critical voices inside your head shut up so you can get some writing done, and, yeah, that part's true enough. But along with that, she seems to want to jettison the analytic voices. And that works fine, as I said, if you're a beginner and it's all about putting the words down and getting a story out when you're done.

But past a certain point, it's not that simple, and I actually feel a little betrayed that Lamott doesn't even gesture toward the idea that writing is more complicated than color-by-numbers.

Writing is hard. And it's not just hard emotionally (which Lamott practically sings paeans to); it's hard technically. The validation Lamott offers--no, you're not the only one who feels like a neurotic pink circus poodle barking at the moon--can be very valuable. It was for me when I first read BbB. But writing is a two-handed engine, and Lamott's book is only about one hand.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I actually used to read BbB not for reassurance that I wasn't the only one, but for reassurance that there were people out there far, far fruitbattier than me.

Now I have an lj.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Hee.

I always confuse Lamott with Natalie Goldberg, but I'm pretty sure it's the Lamott that actively annoyed me (as opposed to the Goldberg, which I'm neutral on) by really--romanticizing the neurotic bits. I mean, I don't deny that writing can be chock-full of neurotic bits. But I try not to get tooooo attached to them.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Goldberg actually annoys the living shit out of me by romanticizing the entire writing process in a particular hippy-dippy way that gets straight up my nose.

So Lamott, for me, was an incredible relief, because she admitted that writing was hard and ugly and did not make you a better person.

Truly, YMMV.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Ahhhhh. Maybe I do have them switched, then. I haven't touched either book in a few years.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

No, BbB is all about how your neuroses make you a better writer, so you should coddle them and bring them peppermint tea and wander around with your hands clapped to your forehead, because being crazy makes you write.

God I hate that book. *g*

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Pfffft. Being crazy doesn't make me do _anything._

Except maybe lie on the floor curled into a ball.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Being crazy makes me write about being crazy and who cares about that?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, if you buy the WRITING=THERAPY idea, in the form that Lamott is not quite articulating it, then you can write IF AND ONLY IF you are crazy. So you'd damn well better coddle your neuroses.

I like the thing ursulav said better: Being sane is no excuse.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*heh*. well, "being crazy" does make me write, and i do write to some degree for therapy (at least that's how it started out), so i was obviously within her target audience. i say "was" because i figured all this stuff out long before she wrote her book. coddling some of my craziness was a good thing way back when i was hypercritical of everything about myself. now it would be indulgent, then it was survival. her book would have been great for me when i was 17, but it's a pep talk book, not a book about craft. once you've gotten past allowing yourself to write the shitty draft, it's really no longer applicable.

what bothers me is that she makes no room for people who're different, not even in the form of a simple signpost -- as if there were any advice on earth that ever worked for everyone. OneTrueWay advocates annoy the shit out of me.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

As buymeaclue says, "It's simple. It's just not easy."

And yeah. I sometimes write scenes that draw deeply on my own squids (there's a beating in TStM that took me a week to write and I still can't really read it.) but that's not therapy. That's picking scabs to get the blood on the page.

[secondsilk.livejournal.com]

Now that is a very interesting way of putting it.
Like "Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." and "Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

I think it is true that all writing is autobiographical. But not in a self conscious, "I'm telling this story" or even explicit way. It's just that we find the stories, characters, situations and relationships that we recognise.

Then you have to find the words to 'explain' them to someone else. So you have a crappy first draft, but then what do you do with it, and how do you make it a better second draft?

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

The "writing is therapy" crap seems to be one reason why I am unable to read much modern American fiction that falls into the "literary" genre. We leave "memoirs" whether Frey or others, out of the picture as well--a memoir written by someone who's led a rich, full, and possibly even scandalous life is one thing, but those "memoirs" written by people who have things to get off their chest--quit peeling that grape, Beulah, and bring me a Bromo-seltzer. Permission to commit mayhem, ma'am? Or at least deny all those neuroses their peppermint tea ration for the month?

As for the "X is simple" thing? I have been working on a piece of embroidery done entirely in chain stitch, with a design that is basic, simple geometric shapes. Pretty simple, really. Did you know that when you do a piece entirely in one stitch like that that it's obvious from across the freakin' room if the stitches aren't pretty close to all the same size? The closer you get to it (and this goes on a garment, so people will see it pretty closely) the more obvious it is if the stitches vary in length by an eighth of an inch. I got yer simple here, Missy Writing-advice-lady, and yer damn simple tells me the simpler it is the harder it gets.

In closing, "drives me whippy thick banana shakes" is a phrase that warms the cockles of my crabby heart.

Also, that virgin book better be an illuminating and entertaining study of cultural and social history and not a walk through ANYBODY'S garden of neuroses or I'm gonna feel like my money was wasted.

Yet one more thought: If we raise enough money, can we arrange a tag-team arm-wrestling match between matociquala and misia vs. Lamott & Goldberg? Trash-talking will be mandatory.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not like he couldn't use some serious, insightful analysis. *ahem*

Well, OK, then we could have a double feature, with the second part being you v. bear, and lots of side bets in the first part of the card on whether the loser falls out of her chair when her arm gets pushed over. Obviously, the side bets in the second part would be over long it would take before you all got the giggles, and who got them first.

the bird...

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

I can't say I'm a fan of the book since I've only glanced at it in passing and didn't feel motivated by what I did read. However, I do think that writing emerges from issues the writer is still interested in and working on or what Lamott appears to identify as unprocessed wounding. What we experience influences and informs our viewpoint on so many levels that it would be difficult to untangle these influences sufficiently to write without them. I have actually taken analysis classes where we were charged to identify specific psychological features the writer may have been or was dealing with at the time a piece was written. This is part of developing a profiling skill set. It actually becomes easier to develop such profiles by reading several pieces by a writer written around the same time frame.

Regarding critical thinking. Some people are simply built that way. Some people approach everything from an analysis position, including their writing. Again, not having read her book in detail, perhaps she meant directing critical feedback toward ongoing work. I've certainly known some writers who beat on their creations with an ugly stick frequently getting mired down in block so thick that very little emerges and their vitrole (sp) becomes self-fulfilling.

I do think it helps a writer to be temporarily in love with their darlings, as if they were in a new relationship and the only thing that existed was the love and the stars and the world gone rosy...etc. Getting the yeast to the page first seems to be the critical first step. After eight or ten revisions you earn the right to be over it and perhaps that's necessary too in order to move on to the next temporary love affair.

I have no clue what she means about storytelling - the skeleton is relatively easy to understand but in my experience it gets more complicated the longer I do it - so we are probably in full agreement on that one.

[cammykitty.livejournal.com]

Totally agree. I own that book and enjoy it too, but it's more like sitting down with your friend/therapist and talking about your writing problems. BbB and Writing Down the Bones have their place as the shot of adrenalin, you can do it books, but they aren't about craft. At all.

Vision of Bear reading Lamott's "All New People" just derailed my thoughts. Paperback book. Cover and pages bent back to somewhere within the first twenty pages. Grunt, readjust in comfy chair, grunt. Turn page. Two sentences. Arm action. Paperback book dents wall.

There are tons of writing books for the beginning writer, but finding one that helps at the intermediate or advanced stages can be difficult. If you have any recommendations, I'll track them all down, even if I have to sneeze in a bookseller's basement to do so.

[elsue.livejournal.com]

My sister raved about Bird by Bird (she's a major Lamott fan), so I picked it up. Started out taking all sorts of notes, feeling energized by the ideas. After a while, started feeling like, well, we've been here. Then I'd notice, repeatedly, that a paragraph would describe something and be immediately followed by an overwritten paragraph that said the exact same thing. My thought: "She doesn't know how to kill her darlings."

When I found, in the last signature, that half the pages were printed so lightly they couldn't be read, I was happy to return the book without finishing.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

You've just identified my problem with damn near every adult-level non-spec-fic writer's workshop I've ever heard of.

[jewelweed.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what I found wrong with so many poetry workshops I took part in, and why so many contempory poets drive me batshit.

I've become almost anti-autobiography as a response to this. This of course sent me straight inot the arms of speculative fiction.

[peneli.livejournal.com]

The only good poetry workshop I ever was involved in was a Creative Writing course in college, in which the professor at one point informed us: "You are not supposed to be the hero of your poem, you are the villain."

[menin-aeide.livejournal.com]

So, can you recommend any good books on writing which focus more on craft rather than motivation (or alternatively, on the intermediate/advanced rather than on the beginner level)?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

John Gardner's On Becoming A Novelist. Which is a book about observing.

I hear good things about King's book, but have not read it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I thought King's book was a lovely description of his life and his writing and how the two work together and how he writes. I would not describe it as what you might call useful to anyone not Stephen King.

But, one person's meat being another person's poison, you can take my opinion for exactly what it's worth.

[larryhammer]

Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin

---L.

[secondsilk.livejournal.com]

The only book I've really read on writing prose was David Mamet's Three Uses of the Knife.
I marked it for stuff to use in my political theory essays. It's not really on craft, per se, but on Drama, why we like it, what it does, how it works. You can get a lot out of it in terms of the structure of a story and keeping things engaging.

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

"the necessity of giving yourself permission to write a shitty first draft. Because otherwise, you will never write anything at all."

this was a great post and most personally felt. thank you.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the book and don't plan to, so I can't comment on it. But...

Writing isn't hard for me. It just is, well, there. Sometimes, it's hard to get started or to write a particular scene, especially if it's action, ack. But the act of writing? Not hard for me. It's a release, therapy, and for me, not autobiographical. The therapy comes from getting to do mean things to characters and giving them lots of angst, pushing emotional buttons. It's kinda fun, actually.

Revising is a bit hard. Some is easy, the stuff I can do as I go. Sitting down to revise a ms, which is where I am with my draft, that's hard because it's the big picture and I tend to focus on bits at a time, which comes from writing as I go, I guess.

I might not like what I've written, but as with anything, including my day job, which I basically love, it has aspects that are harder than others, but overall, it's just something I do, something that comes easily, something for me, akin to breathing.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life? I much prefer it to Bird By Bird. I don't know how much of this is because I suspect Lamott would drive me up the wall in person.

[nannypockets.livejournal.com]

Dorothea Brande's book is good, the premise being that you have to sit down and write. I haven't read any of the other books mentioned. I've always found writing to be extremely hard work and very messy.