Quieting the Dogs

I have a thousand other things that I’d rather be doing or rather should be doing at the moment. I want to check e-mail, surf the Net for maternity clothes, start the next Sunday-school calendar, work on the worship set. But the dogs are barking, as Anne Lamott puts it, and I’d better sit down and madly type away to begin to quiet them down.

It was rather ironic, I must say; I forcibly refused to take Operating Instructions with me camping last week. I have about several fingernails’ width of her book left to finish, but I simply could not bring it with me. It had given me nightmares (no, seriously) the week before, and I truly wanted a vacation, to get away from all the weights of late and to veg, if at all possible with little ones, in the glory of His creation – just didn’t seem to mix with Lamott. So I adamantly rebuffed the notion of bringing it with me.

Then, marvel of marvels, my brother, who first introduced me to her, brought Bird by Bird. Hilarious. It was an extra book, since he was reading another book by her I don’t recall at the moment, and observing that I was sitting near the fireless campfire with nothing in hand, he offered to dig out the spare tire for me. It seems I couldn’t escape her somehow.

Bird by Bird, however, was an altogether fresher perspective on Lamott, for me, than Operating Instructions. It’s the how-to of writing, really, and she comes at it with her usual wit and capacity for allusions, but she also filters it quite a bit to her audience, which appears to be students, at least that’s the way you feel when you are reading it -- like one of her students.

I didn’t get all the way through, but I read probably the first three chapters, and it was astoundingly practical. She speaks candidly about writing, offering jewels of wisdom from her own life experiences. Loved it.

One snippet she advises to her writers is to use your own life, with the gamut of experiences, occasions, escapades, and personalities you’ve banked throughout, as the ground for which to lay your work. She says we own our lives and what’s contained in them, and I thought that was profoundly comforting and practical all at the same time. No one has ever or will ever have lived our lives, and it goes unwritten, for the most part, unless we memorialize it for all of history. I don’t have to contend with someone else on the same exact topic because I have a barge load of unique, fresh, true-to-me-only stories, a warehouse, from which to glean.

She also says to take it bird by bird, hence the title of her book, a piece of advice her father gave her brother who was overwhelmed by a research paper he was writing on birds. She says as you sit to write, tell yourself you’re only going to write as much as can be contained in a very small frame. She actually has a one-and-a-half-by-three-inch frame with an ever-so-small picture in it – I think of a bird – in an effort to continually remind her to keep it brief, focusing on small chunks at a time -- a setting, the first glimpse into a character, a peculiar feeling or reaction to an event.

By about the third chapter, the last one I read, she also integrates the idea of writing a really bad first draft -- really, really bad. She says the idea is to get your thoughts, your first impressions, as sloppy as they come -- warts and all -- down on the paper; she calls this the down-draft. Then she says to go back over it and hammer the heck out of it [I’m paraphrasing here] -- shaping, removing, adding, molding – until a presentable piece takes form, the up-draft.

Oh, and one other thing I recall – she says to be faithful to write daily, taking relatively the same time of day to do this, in order to get the “dogs” to stop barking, the uncontrollable urge to put down on paper what’s going on inside your head. In order to do this, you often have to remove all the other paraphernalia -- voices and lists and such -- in order to make this happen.

So here I sit, trying to feed the dogs, put them at bay for a moment or two. I’m looking to my next writing assignment for tomorrow…something from my childhood, something I alone own.

And I’m thinking about buying her book.