Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and

Second, remember that you should be able to identify each character by what he or she says. Each one must sound different from the others.

She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.

becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

Broccoli is so ridiculous that it works for me. A friend says that his intuition is his animal: “My animal thinks this,” he says, or “My animal hates that.” But whatever you come up with needs to suggest a voice that you are not trying to control.

“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

My Al-Anon friend told me about the frazzled, defeated wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn in the middle of the night. The wife kept dragging him in before dawn so that the neighbors wouldn’t see him, until finally an old black woman from the South came up to her one day after a meeting and said, “Honey? Leave him

Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”