Bird by Birds Advice on Writing

Anne Lamont offers many pieces of to aspiring writers. Everything from "don't write for success" to how to deal with critics, but the one piece of advice I found to be the most important was when she addressed the topic of how to start. “Just start writing” As someone who has always had some sleight desire to try my hand at fiction writing, but lacking the experience to put together a long story this particular piece of advice had a huge impact on me. Don’t think you have experience, “just start writing”, not sue if it’s going to be any good, “just start writing”, don’t have the faintest clue what you want to write about, “just start writing”. Whenever I write I tend to try to get the perfect version of my work in the first go and as a result I will often spend a lot of time sitting at a computer screen until I have things worded just right. The idea of just writing, no matter how bad or unimportant the writing is was completely foreign. But as I experimented with the style I found it extremely helpful. As further explained in bird by bird if you just start writing you might write three paragraphs that are absolutely awful, but paragraphs 4-6 might turn out to be gold. The simple statement of just start writing is also extremely helpful in dealing with writers block. A bad case of writers block can be as aggravating as banging ones head against a wall. But if you just start writing, even if you write complete nonsense that has nothing to do with your paper, it suddenly becomes much easier to segway back into what you are trying to write about. After using this style of writing my papers have taken much less time without experiencing a significant drop in quality. If anything they have gotten better since I can now spend more time on the second half of the paper, which previously always had a rushed and unfinished feel to it. When I wrote the rough draft of my personal memoir required for my English class I felt it was is was by far more balanced then a lot of my previous works. I believe that by immediately starting to write a distinct style begins to appear in ones writing. The style of the writing in bird by bird has a good flow to it; its transitions are consistently natural and have provided appropriate segways to new topics. I believe that when an experienced writer gets out of a block by just writing, they become very experienced at making appropriate transitions from paragraph to paragraph. Even if every paragraph you create in this process ends up being cut from the final draft, a lot of time the transitions you created by free writing from paragraph to paragraph have a natural feel to them and can be used to great effect in the finished product. So in total I feel by following the simple 3 word piece of advice I am able to vastly improve the efficiency and timing of my writing