Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block

every form of mental illness … surfaces, leaping out of water like trout: the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias.…

after two sentences you begin to worry about complete financial collapse, what it will be like to live in a car.…

you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock.

For Lamott, writing is a high-stakes struggle with personal demons. She devotes entire chapters to perfectionism, jealousy, and writer’s block. But she also encourages writers to write no matter what, and to learn to regularly excrete “shitty first drafts”—another phrase that has entered the popular lexicon. (Ever committed to memorable metaphor, Lamott compares a productive writing day to having amoebic dysentery!)

She’s irreverent, but she’s reverent too, in the style of a hippie aunt. There’s a mystical quality to a lot of her advice—so much so that she jokes about seeming too “California” or “Cosmica Rama.” She approvingly cites the Dalai Lama, Rumi, Wendell Berry, Ram Dass, Tibetan nuns, her Presbyterian pastor, and a Catholic priest named Tom. The flip side of writing misery, it turns out, is occasional writing-induced ecstasy produced by committing to daily writing as a devotional practice. At one point she says, “You don’t have to believe in God, but it’s easier if you do.” She turns “Trust the process” into an entire philosophy of life.

Readers of many religious persuasions—or none—have appreciated the spiritual aspects of the book. One commenter on Goodreads describes it as their “new bible.” Another says, “I pull it off the shelf now and then and read whatever page I land on—and always find my way back to my own writing.” When I asked the writer Pooja Makhijani about Bird by Bird, she said, “I love the self-help-y/religious nature of the book, especially because I’m not particularly religious in the conventional sense, but find a sense of comfort and awe from reading and writing. I know what it feels like to be in a flow state while writing, which feels otherworldly in nature; every time I sit down to write, I’m chasing that high.”