Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
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.
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.
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.
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
Vonnegut said, "When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
But by all means let someone else take a look at your work. It’s too hard always to have to be the executioner.
Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known.
If you’re having a bad day, you're going to crash and burn within half an hour. You'll give up, and maybe even get up, which is worse because a lot of us know that if we just sit there long enough, in whatever shape, we may end up being surprised.
You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side.
Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, of how much more open. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes on has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit.
[notice when kfcd is playing and then shut it off]
"A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded"
Here's the thing, though. I no longer think of it as block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.
The discouraging voices will hound you—"This is all piffle," they will say, and they may be right.
What you are doing may just be practice. But this is how you are going to get better, and there is no point in practicing if you don't finish.