Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

This has virtually no practical advice about writing. It’s really just a series of random essays about the intellectual and emotional toll that being a writer takes on you.

I had wanted to read this book for a long time. It was published back in 1995 when I was in college, and I remember someone (a professor?) gushing about it back then. I had always meant to pick up a copy.

The title comes from a moment when the author’s brother was stressing out about a school project in which we had to catalog birds. His Dad told him to just sit down and take it “bird by bird.”

And that’s a big theme of the book. Writing is not magic. It’s just pecking away at keys on a keyboard until you put enough words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages together to say something worth hearing.

This is hard. Not hard physically, but hard mentally. Writing is emotionally painful, sometimes for the subjects we write about, but often for the general pain of creating. There’s frustation in knowing what we want to achieve but having to get through a wall of words to make it happen and having to reconcile that with the larger idea of making time – or even making a living – from doing it.

Clearly, the author is a great writer. Outside of this booik, she’s written several novels, and other books about faith and parenthood.

The book is never boring, often very funny, but in no way is it a practical manual for anything. Take it for what it is – a form of therapy to help you get through the emotional, mental, and spiritual labyrinth of trying to be good at writing.

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