Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
The Writing Life: A Journey of Mastery and Self-Discovery
I’ve always been attracted to the writing life. I remember reading the classic on the subject when I was around 18 or 19, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
As with so many things we encounter too early in life, when we revisit them, we are stunned at how much we had missed. Surely, experience itself becomes priceless as we age.
Immediately upon rereading, I was struck by the sheer fact that I had mistaken the book for another by a woman named Anne—The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
I kept waiting for Lamott to get to the part where she cloistered herself in a library basement cubicle to finish a novel. Well, sorry to disappoint, but that’s a completely different book.
Lamott is as funny as a comedian and as neurotic as a schizophrenic.
It is the perfect combination to show you that not only has she reached the heights of her career, but she is perfectly at home with the engulfing abyss of self-doubt.
On top of all this, she is someone who is exceptionally spiritual and seems to allude to the fact that, like a lot of us creatives, she has struggled with addictive drinking or drug use in the past.
A Writer’s Path: Success, Doubt, and the Long Game
Here is a woman who found herself thrust into the spotlight of the publishing world at a young age and who has been lucky enough—or perhaps worked hard enough—to make writing her career.
She has not only published a vast amount of fiction and nonfiction but has also taught the craft of writing for a long time.
And this is the impetus of this book.
It is as if we are taking a writing workshop from her.
It’s like we are her student, asking her questions like:
- How does dialogue work?
- Where do our characters come from?
- What has writing taught you about living?
And it is this last point that I see as the most impactful lesson of the book—not only for a writer or an artist but for everyone who participates in this thing called life.
Her lessons, hard-won from the trenches of writing, are as applicable to life as they are to anyone who has stayed the course at one thing for a lifetime—the CEO of a company, the NFL Hall of Fame player, or the Zen master.
Whenever someone achieves a sort of mastery, the lessons they’ve learned are almost always applicable to everyday life, let alone success of any kind.
Every one of us battles struggles—whether creative struggles, marketplace battles, or the internal war against self-doubt.
But the chief exploration of her book is playing the long game of meaningful work.
At every step, she teaches how to start something big, stay consistent, and not lose heart.
Bird by Bird: The Power of Small Assignments
The title of the book comes from a childhood memory from Lamott, which appears early in the work in a chapter on “small assignments.”
Small assignments, for Lamott, are a method to disengage from the overwhelming entirety of a work and instead focus on just a single, manageable task.
She explains that when we sit down to write and stare at the blank page, we often become paralyzed by the enormity of our project.
The 1,000-page novel with a sweeping theme of female suffering throughout time or the memoir detailing generations of family heritage—it’s daunting.
Instead of writing, we suddenly find ourselves doing everything else—laundry, paying bills, reorganizing closets—anything to avoid beginning.
For Lamott, the key to overcoming this paralysis is the small assignment.
She keeps a 1-inch by 1-inch picture frame on her desk, reminding her to focus on the smallest possible detail.
If she’s writing a novel, she won’t attempt to draft an entire chapter or even a complex scene. Instead, she might simply describe the moment her protagonist steps onto the front porch.
That’s it. One paragraph.
Breaking Down Writing
The childhood memory she connects this idea of just beginning and focusing on one step at a time comes from when her brother was overwhelmed by a paper he needed to write on birds.
He had had a ton of time to work on it but put it off until the day before, and now sat surrounded by books on birds at the family table almost in tears by how overwhelmed he felt.
Finally, their dad came by and put his arm around him and told him to take it “bird by bird,” that he only needed to focus on one thing at a time rather than the entirety of the project.
It is easy to see how taking it bird by bird, or focusing on the small assignment, can help someone overcome the terror of writing a 300-page novel, but this idea, like anything in this book, has the potential to change anything in our lives.
Something that I’ve seen in my own life is when I fall out of the habit of lifting and start to put on weight and suddenly the prospect of getting the six-pack back seems overwhelming.
But when I just focus on getting my workout clothes on and getting to the gym and just doing one exercise, I find that because I’m there already involved in the activity, I can continue my workout.
Sometimes when I was selling door to door, I would just say: Knock on one door.
And after that was done, knock on one more.
By the time I hit the sixth or seventh door, I was in the mood to continue all through the day.
The key is to break down the big thing into the easily manageable small things, and then the small things start to add up over time into the big thing.
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Following Curiosity: Trusting That the Path Will Unfold
The idea of taking it bird by bird leads her into a reflection on a quote from E.L. Doctorow:
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
She has encountered an idea not only within herself but from her students and the culture at large—that writers have everything planned out when they sit down to write.
But for her, it is the act of sitting down to write and focusing on the small assignments that eventually reveals the larger picture of where the novel is going.
She talks about writing about school lunches and how, eventually, from writing about school lunches, a kid on the playground over by the fence is actually what the story is really about.
And that it’s not about him, but the girl behind the fence by him. She says that only by revisiting the writing and seeing that, of the four pages she wrote, the only interesting thing was the one paragraph on page three—that that is what the novel is supposed to be about.
However, and this goes back to her quoting Doctorow, she couldn’t see this when she sat down. So writing becomes a process of discovery for her.
It becomes a sort of meditation where she discovers what the unconscious really wants to say to the world, and she really has no idea where it will lead.
But she has learned over her lifetime that she can trust where it will go.
It reminds me of the story of Lee Child, the guy who started the Reacher franchise.
He had lost his job and thought, I’m going to be a writer, and just sat down with no plan and started writing.
And that was how he wrote all of the books until his brother took over the series. And it’s how his brother works.
We do not need to figure everything out.
Despite what culture will tell you, you do not need a ten-year plan—you just need to do what excites you and trust in the unseen that you will get to your goal.
If you have the goal of earning six figures a year, perhaps it’s not from what you’re doing right now for a career, but the fact that you enjoy posting videos on Instagram about working out, organizing your clothes, or using your bullet journal.
Follow what excites you, and you will be astounded at the results.
You do not need to have everything planned out.
If this strikes a chord in you—the hunger to sharpen, to evolve—explore Poetics of Self-Mastery. It’s for those done with distraction, ready to confront the quiet disciplines that forge identity. No hacks. No hype. Just the art of becoming who you were meant to be.
Read Poetics of Self-Mastery (Why You’re Still Stuck)
The Myth of Arrival: Why Achievement Won’t Bring Fulfillment
It seems to me that life can be about a lot of different things, but one thing that is a common element among people who are content is that they have fun—they enjoy life.
There is a certain amount of trust that if they follow what excites them, they will arrive at an exciting place.
And that is what Lamott reminds us to do.
Trust that you will be taken care of, even if you do not know the plan for how this will happen.
I think, at its core, that idea is what this book is about—that we can have a goal, but the journey is what is really important.
She is almost continually reflecting on the fact that her students, as well as herself, hold this idea that once they get published, then they will be happy.
She says she held this idea with her first published work, as well as her second, and her third, and her fourth, and so on.
And yet, not one of these times did she feel fulfilled.
And yet, there are times when she is writing where she feels as if she’s meant to do nothing else—where she feels completely at peace and contented with the world, where all the pressures of life fall away.
She describes being a writer as being Sisyphus but with financial problems.
I think, much like Sisyphus, if you focus on the fact that when you get the boulder to the top of the hill it will only fall down again, you are going to have a pretty miserable life.
But if you can focus on the actual joy of the physicality of the process, it might be an amazing life. Who knows?
But for Lamott, the journey is the actual destination.
Loving the Process: The Key to Mastery and Success
She says that we delude ourselves into thinking that achieving a goal will bring any sort of meaning to our lives or make us feel worthy and whole.
When, in reality, it is the very process itself that brings the meaning.
I have a mentor who is fond of saying that he who loves to walk will walk farther than he who loves the destination.
Meaning, if we can fall in love with the actual process of whatever we are doing, we will achieve so much more than the person who simply has a goal.
Someone who loves writing will inevitably write more than someone who simply wants to publish a book. And because they are in love with the process, they will inevitably end up writing a lot more.
And because of this, their skill set will improve, and the tipping point of success—or publication, in this example—will come as a natural byproduct.
It is the same with any endeavor we engage in.
The person who loves to lift weights will eventually build a better body than the person who simply wants to get ripped.
I saw it time and again in my old career.
The person who simply fell in love with knocking on someone’s door and making a friend made so much more money than the person who wanted to be the number one salesperson in the office when I managed door-to-door sales offices.
It is one of the secrets to success that we see in the world—fall in love with the journey, and you will go farther than the person who simply wants to get somewhere.
Grace, Patience, and Trusting the Process
But Lamott reminds us that this is like so much of life—where our mind can play tricks on us and our motivation can ebb and flow.
Maybe our goal is to get published, but if we can allow ourselves to wake up and listen, we will find the fulfillment of the goal in the act itself.
Maybe what will get us to the gym is the goal of getting washboard abs, but we can wake up and get the fulfillment of the act itself.
We are constantly battling this stuff in our minds, and it is okay to miss the fulfillment of the journey itself by focusing on the goal—because we will inevitably, through doing the thing, get the joy of doing the thing.
Lamott reminds us to give ourselves grace in living.
She reminds us to focus on the small details, to take things bird by bird.
And she reminds us to trust that everything will work itself out if we only follow what excites us.
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