Write Pages of Nonsense! Make a Mess!

{This post is part of an ongoing series that chronicles my thoughts/reactions to a book about writing called Bird by Bird written by Anne Lamott}

Today Anne Lamott told me that perfectionism will ruin my writing. “Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up,” she said. As I read that line, I can imagine the redundant words, the poorly used punctuation, and the unnecessary adjectives having an embarrassingly loud party all over my manuscript. 

I know that I’m supposed to embrace the notion of writing “shitty first drafts” as Anne so poignantly puts it, but I still fear that the grammar police are going to show up before I get a chance to edit anything and I will get in huge trouble for the mess and the noise that my nonsensical sentences and poorly thought-through phrases are having. It comforts me to know that Kurt Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” If he, as a literary icon, felt like his first drafts were ridiculous, then certainly I, who can barely use Microsoft Word effectively, can be excused for having a few run-on sentences.

Perfectionism must be conquered, because to write, you must write. This means that even on days when you are convinced that you are the worst writer in the world, or if your mind is utterly blank, or if you have a to-do list a mile long and your phone keeps buzzing and distracting you, you write. It might all be garbage, but that is ok. Somewhere deep in the dirty, smelly pile of garbage you wrote that day, there might be a diamond. There could be one sentence, or one concept, or one character that is absolutely brilliant, and the next time you write, you delete all the garbage (and exhale with relief because you evaded the grammar police again) and start polishing that diamond.

In the next chapter, Anne provides an example of how writing pages and pages of nonsense can get you to something valuable, something you can actually use. She had her writing students write everything they could remember about their school lunches. Surprisingly, they have a lot to say. She did this exercise along with them and shared bits of what she wrote. At some point, amid ramblings about bologna and lettuce, she mentions that there was always a strange kid against the fence. This kid by the fence was at the bottom of the totem pole, and as long as he was there, the other children felt safe from becoming social outcasts. This proved to be a very thought-provoking concept, and in essence, the gold nugget for which she was dredging dirt. All the descriptions of sandwiches and carrot sticks got her to remember the kid at the fence and gave her a unique character to explore.

The following chapter was about creating great characters. When I was preparing for National Novel Writing Month, I did tons of research on character building, so this chapter was a bit more of a re-cap for me than entirely new information. However, I like that Anne spelled out some specific characteristics that make narrators likable and believable, as opposed to just abstractly saying that they need to be likable. She cautioned against specific faux-pas to avoid. Despite having some knowledge in the art character building, I still learned a lot.