Photo by Serge Le Strat on Unsplash
Some advice, despite its soundness, can be difficult to follow out of the writerly maze. Anne Lamott first tried to put writers on the right paths with her Bird by Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life, published in May 1994. It became such a go-to classic that it not only ran through countless printings but also was deemed deserving of a twenty-fifth anniversary edition.
In that vein Writer’s Digest republished in its 100th Anniversary issue (November/December 2020) Carroll Lachnit’s June 1996 article featuring an interview with Lamott. My copy of the original book is around, buried in the debris of my reading-and-writing life but a bloodhound with a nose for paper and ink probably couldn’t find it.
So as I continue to contemplate what to do with/about this blog, Lachnit’s old piece could not have arrived at a more fortuitous moment. It felt new again, though I do not know if Lachnit’s bullseye questions and Lamott’s ageless answers can rescue me and save the blog. But revisiting them cannot hurt.
In fact, the story behind the title, which might have baffled until a reader got into Lamott’s advice, is as perfect as it is poetic. She borrowed the advice that her father once gave her older brother when he was ten years old and struggling to write a school report on birds. He had procrastinated and, with the report, due the next day, felt the mess he had made of it pressing down and closing in on him. He, after all, had had three months to work on the assignment.
“We were at our family cabin in Bolinas,” Lamott wrote, “and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
The advice was so sound that Lamott followed it out of alcoholism and through her writing. She still offers it to students whom she tells “the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but not peace of mind.” Lamott “compares writing to climbing a mirror-smooth glacier.”
Writing a blog can be even harder and the rewards fewer. As a journalist, at least someone paid me for my writing. Even as an author, who managed business aspects poorly, a book occasionally found a buyer, though it is uncertain the person read it. Despite the good advice Lamott has given her students she has provided them an even sterner warning: “…I try to make sure they understand that writing, even getting good at it and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived.”
She also tells them something else. “I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.” And she gives them the best advice that she can, even if it sounds funny, which Lamott can be. She tells them, in effect, to take small bites. Don’t try to do “enormous stuff” but instead “so some tiny thing.” “I tell students,” she explained to Lachnit all those years ago, “to buy a 1-inch picture frame and bite off only as much as can be seen in that frame.” In a sense, that describes a blog’s framework.
Posts not pages. Plots not required. Perfection not necessary. “Perfectionism is the enemy of the people,” Lamott explains. “It makes it impossible to get anything down.” That is why she preaches “short assignments” and “shitty first drafts.” She says she was taught not to make mistakes, but it is OK if first drafts are full of them. Though blogs might be seen as first drafts, I try too hard for the perfection that is the enemy.
“Writing is about telling the truth and paying attention,” Lamott told Lachnit.
As a journalist for more than 40 years, truth was a part of my DNA. When I retired, after taking a buyout from the Akron Beacon Journal, I served Hiram, a small Northeast Ohio liberal arts college, as Director of College Relations, while also studying in its Masters of Interdisciplinary Relations program. I received my late-life masters degree after writing a capstone (master’s thesis) titled “Truth in Memoir” that drew upon creative nonfiction writing and philosophy.
When it came to Lamott’s “paying attention,” I learned, as most writers do, by reading, particularly the work of Jimmy Breslin, legendary New York City columnist. His example not only inspired me but also informed my work, from the sports to the editorial pages. In a collection of his columns that is badly worn from my love, there are two examples of Breslin’s attention—one after the fact, the other forethought no one else had.
Breslin was not in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, a day that will live in infamy (forgive me, FDR). A reader would have not known this was the meticulous piecing together of what happened in Parkland’s Memorial Hospital that day. “A Death in Emergency Room One” was an incomparable recreation of one of the worst moments in U.S. history. When Breslin finished—and then re-reported it and tried to file it again—he followed Kennedy’s remains to Washington and, there, found the next piece of this heartbreaking mosaic where no one else thought to look. Again reporting—Breslin’s signature—made his writing ring with truth.
He found Clifton Pollard, whom was interrupted eating Sunday breakfast by a call from his boss at Arlington National Cemetery. “Polly,” said Mazo Kawalchik, foreman of gravediggers, “could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning? I guess you know what it’s for.” When Pollard got to the cemetery, Kawalchik and John Metzler, cemetery superintendent met him with apologies for having to call him. “Oh, don’t say that,” he told his supervisors. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.”
Breslin went on to describe Pollard and the moment with the detail that only a man with the sharpest eye (and questions), the biggest heart, and the most stunning feel for plain, ordinary words could have. “One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the 35th President of this country,” he wrote, “was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”
Pollard could not attend the funeral/burial. He was “behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. “I tried to go over to see the grave,” he told Breslin. “But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn’t get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I’ll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it’s an honor.”
I looked for Clifton Pollards in everything I did to showcase their quiet contributions. I won’t need a gravedigger when the time comes. My wife and I have a columbarium in my beloved hometown of Nowata, Oklahoma, where our cremains will be placed for eternity. It’s probably just as well. I suspect there aren’t many Clifton Pollards left.
