Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Lamott reiterates the main points she wants her students to remember. This includes writing about your childhood and being conscious of the truth. She also recommends not fearing emotions, but instead fearing that you won’t get “your writing done” (226). Being vulnerable will improve your work.

She believes in writing out of vengeance. She suggests humorously that, when writing fictional versions of real people, it’s best to change enough details that the real people will not be able to sue you for libel. She also recommends including something the real person will be ashamed of so that they will be reluctant to claim that a character represents them. Lamott gives examples of changing the occupation, marital history, physical appearance, and other characteristics of people you know before turning them into characters. Lamott also excerpts the Sharon Olds poem “I Go Back to May 1937.” She compares writing, or generally making art, to building sandcastles—structures that will inevitably be washed away over time.

She returns to some of the key lessons from the book: the importance of “shitty first drafts,” sectioning out your writing workload into small writing tasks, looking through a one-inch picture frame, and allowing ideas to develop like Polaroid film.