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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