Copyright 1995 National Public Radio
NPR
SHOW: Weekend Edition - Sunday (NPR 10:00 am ET)
February 5, 1995
Transcript # 1109-8
TYPE: Interview
SECTION: Entertainment
LENGTH: 1790 words
HEADLINE: Author Anne LaMott Discusses Her
New Book
GUESTS: ANNE LaMOTT, Author
BYLINE: LIANE HANSEN
HIGHLIGHT:
The new book "Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and
Life," discusses the processes that most writers go through when
writing, their demons, and how they move beyond the demons to the finished
product.
BODY:
LIANE HANSEN, Host: Anne LaMott [sp] is a writer with four
novels under her belt. Her non-fiction book Operating Instructions, a
Journal of My Son's First Year, was a runaway best seller after it was
published in 1993. Her latest effort is also non-fiction. It's called Bird
By Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life. She joins us from the
studios in KQED in San Francisco.
Good morning, Anne.
ANNE LaMOTT, Author: Good morning.
LIANE HANSEN: Your title Bird by Bird comes from a story about your late
father, who was a writer. Tell us the story of the title.
ANNE LaMOTT: OK, glad to. When my brother John was 10 years old he has this
report on birds due that he'd had the entire semester to work on, and it was
due on the next day, on a Monday. And, of course, with classic LaMott study
habits he hadn't started it yet. And he was out at our cabin in Bolinas with
my dad and he had all of these books on birds and paper and pencil and
everything, but he was absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of material. And
my dad sat down with him and put his arm around him and said, 'Buddy, just
take it bird by bird.' And I thought that was one of the two great pieces of
writing advice I ever heard. Do you want to hear the other?
LIANE HANSEN: Yeah. What was the second?
ANNE LaMOTT: It's a wonderful line of E.L. Doctorow's that writing is like
driving a car at night with the headlights on where you can only see two or
three feet in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.
LIANE HANSEN: You talk about the process and what happens to a writer, and
you use yourself as an example when a writer sits down to try and write. And
you talk about your mental illnesses arriving at the desk like your sickest,
most secretive relatives, and they pull up the chairs in a semi-circle
around the computer and try to be quiet but you know they're there with
their weird, coppery breath leering at you behind your back, all the demons
that surround anyone who sits down to write.
ANNE LaMOTT: Yeah.
LIANE HANSEN: How would you advise people to deal with those demons?
ANNE LaMOTT: Well, I think you have to just wear them out by getting your
work done. And the two things that really help me the most are to take
really, really short assignments. I advise all of my students to buy
one-inch picture frames and just to bite off as much as they can see through
a one-inch picture frame. In other words, to do it fragment by fragment. And
the other thing is to let themselves write really awful first drafts, and
every single person I know writes really awful first drafts and these are
people who write books that sell millions of copies, but they don't sit down
like little court reporters and just type away all morning. They struggle
and they backtrack and they fall to pieces and they get a little tiny bit
angry and they start channeling Jeffrey Dahmer and then they're filled with
self-loathing, and they also have equal proportions of grandiosity, and it
becomes very loud and chaotic in there but they let themselves write really
bad first drafts.
I write first drafts that are so bad that I spend the rest of the day
worrying that I'm going to be killed before I can write a second draft, and
that people that are going over my papers will see this terrible first draft
and they'll think, 'Well, she killed herself because her mind was shot and
the well had run dry and she actually threw herself in front of that car
that landed that drove up on the sidewalk, and it was not an accident.' But
this is how people can get any work done at all, and I think when all is
said and done - I don't want to sound like a sneaker commercial - but you
just do it.
LIANE HANSEN: When do you find the time to write? Your son is now 5-1/2. Do
you have a set time that you sit down and write, no matter what, every day?
ANNE LaMOTT: Yes, I do. This was another thing my dad taught me, which was
that if sit down at the same time it trains your unconscious to kick in for
you. Before I had a child I used to have a lot more rigid rules about what I
had to have out of the way before I could sit down. For instance, it used to
be that I couldn't write if there were dishes in the sink. Now I could write
if there was a corpse in the sink because I've just had to train myself to
take the time that is available to me.
Now, that doesn't mean that I sit down and look like I'm transcribing from a
dictaphone. I sit down, I get up, I sit down, I start to worry about whether
or not I can still get orthodontia. I go and I look in the phone book for
orthodontists. I sit back down. I start to think about whether my mother's
OK. I go call her. I get a lot of aerobic exercise in the first 20 minutes
when I sit down, but I wear it down every day and I just stick it out no
matter what. I sort of hold a psychic gun to my head. And I also know that
if I sit there long enough something's going to happen.
LIANE HANSEN: So, those notes you were writing to yourself, these little
jottings, the journal that you kept, and also didn't your agent insist that
you write letters to her just to keep writing during that time?
ANNE LaMOTT: She did. My agent was Abby Thomas [sp] at the time and when she
found out I had a journal she said, 'Well, why don't you type some of it up
and send it to me,' and so I did. And I was getting back these real
tear-stained notes, these sort of weepy notes, and I knew I was onto
something at that point. And I- so I just plowed ahead.
I also had sort of been given the permission by my father always to tell the
truth, and writing is about telling the truth. It's about learning to pay
attention, but more than anything else it's about learning to tell the
truth. And in this little journal, which I didn't write for publication, I
just put down how I really felt, which was that I didn't feel like Melanie
in Gone With the Wind, you know, I felt like Squeaky Fromme with PMS about
half the time.
And I really had thought that having a child would be more like having a
cat, and I would find myself just apoplectic with exhaustion and desperation
and fear and I'd feel like picking Sam up the ankle and swinging him over my
head like a bolo, and I thought other mothers can't feel this, and then it
turned out that a lot of them did, that we didn't act on it but we felt it.
I've always really loved that line of Toni Morrison's that the function of
freedom is to free someone else, and I eventually started to think this
would be a real gift to let other single mothers know that it's OK to have
really awful thoughts and that there are ways to process them and to get
help and to get the comfort one needs so that we don't have to act on them.
So, that was really a guiding force in writing - I can't think of the name
of the book - Operating Instructions.
LIANE HANSEN: Operating Instructions, yeah, your journal became- do you
still feel like people who may end up calling you up and saying, 'You, you
wrote a novel? Go back. Go work for the phone company.'
ANNE LaMOTT: No, I'm always convinced this is going to happen. I'm always
convinced that the phone is going to ring and that the voice of- I'm not
sure, it might be like Newt Gingrich's wife or something is going to call me
and say, 'The jig is up and we've gotten you a job at beauty college. We
think you'd make a good manicurist although your own nails look like hell,
and you start Monday and you should try to find some decent clothes before
then.'
LIANE HANSEN: Do you still call up bookstores, kind of disguise your name
and your voice and see if your book is there?
ANNE LaMOTT: Not as much as I used to. What I used to do when books come out
is I would call bookstores and I'd plug my nose and I'd say, 'Do you have
Anne LaMott's new book? I think that's LaMont. No, wait, tt.' And I always
knew that they were covering the receiver with their hands and saying to
each other, 'It's her again.' And now I only do it a little bit.
LIANE HANSEN: You write, when famous people are asked why they write you
give two answers. One is the poet John Asbury who says, 'Because I want to,'
and Flannery O'Connor, 'because I can.' And you say you want to use a
combination of those in answer to the question why you write. But what I'm
interested in is why is writing so important to you and maybe phrase the
question to you that your writing students ask you, why does their writing
matter?
ANNE LaMOTT: Can I just read the answer to that from the book?
LIANE HANSEN: Please.
ANNE LaMOTT: OK. This is the very last paragraph which is what I read- what
I tell them in the last five minutes of the very last class of each session
when they ask, why does our writing matter, again. 'Because of the spirit,'
I say, 'because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of
isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life. They feed the
soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose
and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our
buoyancy is restored. We're given a shot at dancing with, or least clapping
along with, the absurdity of life instead of being squashed by it over and
over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You
can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits
of the people who are together on that ship.'
LIANE HANSEN: It's a perfect answer. Your last books, or this book, Bird by
Bird is non-fiction; Operating Instructions is non-fiction. It's now out in
paperback. Do you think you're going to return to the novel? Are working on
something now?
ANNE LaMOTT: Yeah, I'm about halfway through a sequel to my second novel,
which was called Rosie. And it's funny because I'm right where all of my
writing students are, I'm doing a really, really awful first draft. I'm
worrying that I'll die before I rewrite it.
LIANE HANSEN: Anne LaMott. Her book in stores now is called Bird by Bird,
Some Instructions on Writing and Life. She's also the author of Operating
Instructions, A Journal of My Son's First Year, which is out in paperback.
She, as you heard, is working on a novel, and joined us from the studios of
KQED in San Francisco.
Thanks a lot, Anne.
ANNE LaMOTT: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.
The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, although
the text has been checked against an audio track, in order to meet rigid
distribution and transmission deadlines, it may not have been proofread
against tape.
LOAD-DATE: February 6, 1995