Anne Lamott Teaches Unforgettable Writing | How I Write

Annie Lamotte is famous for writing Bird by Bird, which is one of the best books ever written about the craft. And in it she has this line where she says that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. And it's sentences like that which have made her such a muse for so many writers over the years.

Now beyond Bird by Bird, she's written more than twenty books, some novels, some memoirs, and then she just published a book with her husband, which has thirty six rules of the Now in this interview, we talked about the kinds of people that creatives should surround themselves with, why writer's block is a misnomer, and then later on, what she calls the very best writing prompt. As I was prepping for this conversation, one of the images that I got

was one time I was driving down to Monterey from San Francisco. It was like early. It was probably six, six fifteen in the morning. And it was so foggy that you could only see the headlights or the taillights of the car in front of And you just gotta follow that car and you can't see very far. And it reminded me of how you think about riding, which is you can just see a little bit in advance.

And you can follow that. You don't need to see the entire road, but if you can just see a little and you just go and go and go kind of take it bird by bird, eventually a book, a piece, whatever it is, begins to emerge. E.L. Doctorum, one of my favorite novelists, in a in a interview once, say that writing was like driving at night with the headlights on.

I added the fog when I started repeating it because people that aren't writers think that it comes to me and I sit down and or you and you just start writing. And it doesn't at all. It's pretty foggy. I might have an image I might have a theme. I might have something I really wanna talk about on paper and then I I can't

see how it's gonna turn out. I can't see where it's gonna end. I can't see what I'm gonna see along the way. But I've learned through habit that that's okay, that I can see the the set of headlights in front of me and thank God for that set of headlights. so that I can get from at least point A to point B. And when I get to point B, which might be two paragraphs later, it will inform me of where we might go next. Hm.

So then what do you think writer's block is when people talk about it? Well I wrote a lot about writer's block in Bird by Bird because I think it's a misnomer. You know, I I use the image that um if your wife has locked you out that your problem isn't with the door, you know, the problem is deeper than that. And with writer's block

I think it tends to be that you're empty. In fact, Isabelle Allende and I were doing a panel maybe thirty years ago and she was just confiding in me that she Isabella Allende had writer's block And and I said, I don't think you're blocked. I think you're really empty. You know, I think all the sand has has escaped from the burlap sack and what you need to do is fill up

Stop, get the pressure off of yourself and take some time and just fill up. You know, I wrote in Bird by Bird that I think there's this little ragbag guy in our center, the center of every writer or maybe every soul. And that our job is to go around and and pay attention and accumulate bits of fabric for the quilt, you know, and bits of thread and bits of dental floss and bits of tinsel and bits of

silk and bits of and and just to keep giving it to the ragbag guy. And then when we're ready, he or she will lift it to us and we start assembling the quilt of a essay or a novel or whatever we're working on, a memoir. Help me to weave a few things together in terms of your relationship with yourself as a writer. Cause I've picked up a few things. One is you got

what you call it, the rag the ragbag guy. The ragbag guy. Okay. So you got rag bag guy over here, the quilt that's all coming together and being empty, so trying to fill up through experiences and friends and and whatever else. And then on the other side, the aversion to writing and sort of the I gotta stay in my routine, sit down to write, all this to say, how do you know that you're not lying?

Ah, I just need to go accumulate more experiences and then it's month one, then it's year one, then it's year five. Let me interrupt you. It's not accumulating more experiences because that puts more pressure on you. It's about paying more better attention. I have a priest friend who actually just passed, an old man named Terry Ritchie, and he said the point is not to try harder, it's to resist less.

And so it's not about trying to get it to happen or or jiggle it out of the universe. It's about awareness. It's about um agreeing to just become awareness and to start noticing, to notice a certain color. That's all you need. I don't need the experience. I could describe your orchids. I could describe the slightly greenish yellow inside.

um the center of your orchid, you know, and then I could use that to describe somebody's eyes later. But I just notice it. The writer's job is to pay attention as life in at life as it tromps by. This is a little off the subject, but there was a priest named Father Dowling who helped the very neurotic Bill Wilson get A.A. off the ground in nineteen thirty-five. And he said to Bill, Sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses.

And I use that with all of my bird by bird writing workshops because it's about putting on a better pair of glasses and waking up, you know, eat hitting the snooze button and you start paying attention to people's faces, to people's eyes, to the landscape, to the sky, to the ground beneath you, and it's all what we meet

our writing self with is that we meet it halfway by p by noticing. And um and so I don't say you fill up with more experiences or more friends or anything like that. So you start just like really paying attention

And then um, you know, my husband wrote Neil Allen, who's the co-author of Good Writing, of course. His last book was called Um Better Days. Tame your inner critic. And he changed my life almost ten years ago on our first date when he taught me he said, Have you ever noticed a voice inside of you that discourages you with your writing or dis tells you keeps you small and

And I'm scared of trying to and I said, Have I ever? You know, I'm having it right now. I don't think I wore the right blouse. I have it all the time. I mean I'm almost seventy two. And um he taught me how to address it, which is to notice it and to say, Oh, it's you.

It's not truth. It's not the reality of my life as a writer. It's this old internalized voice from when I'm four and five. It it's it kept me alive when I was a little one because I didn't run out to the street or swim out too far, right? And Neil taught me to notice it and to say, oh, it's you.

Why don't you go to the library? Why don't you sit down right there and and and get a book to read and I've got work to do, but I'll come get you if I need an ethical con consultation or something. It's terrified, it's your super ego. Terrified of being killed and annihilated. But you say, no, no, you go to the library and read, I'll come get you as needed. And so that's the work I do in answer to your question because

Everything I need for every piece that I'm working on is really already there. I've always believed with my novels that the characters know who they are and what would happen naturally in their lives. and that I have to get out of the way so that they can tug on my sleeves and say, I wouldn't do that And one more thing, there's a th a rule in good writing about if it's literary, it's you can't use it. You know, if you're trying to sound literary, take it out.

But I am always trying to get my characters to say things that they really wouldn't say, but they're just so brilliant or ironic or funny or They'll h make people think I'm not a buzzkill or something like that. And I just have to take'em all out. Like Jessica Midford said, kill your little darlings. Mm-hmm. But you kill your little darlings in the second draft.

You know, you write a really terrible first draft and then you can apply these literary rules, but everything in you wants you to not write. And so the first thing I say to my bird by bird workshops is You gotta stop not writing, you know, and a lot of my workshops involve people explaining to me that they're going to start writing as soon as.

soon as their last child is out of the house, as soon as they move to the Russian river, as soon as they retire, and I say, you know what? That's fine. But if you're not writing now, you're not gonna write then. You know, i uh the thing inside of you, the inner critic, is telling you not to write. No one in your family is glad to hear you're working on a memoir, believe me. What was the line you said? You said the key is not too blank it's The key is not to try harder but to resist less.

Wow, what a beautiful. So when you're at the keyboard. How does that sentence manifest itself? How do you channel that idea? One of the rules in good writing is trust your boy. And I just also tr don't you just trust the process? If you sit down and you start riding, it's like getting in very cold water and you're in. You might as well paddle around for a minute. Yeah. So I paddled around for a minute and then I had this other image and then I got that and it was all terrible.

And by the time I'm done it's way too long. You know, it's a third too long. Then I go back and one of the rules in good writing is take out the boring stuff. I took out some of the overly long descriptions. I took out the parts that make me look good.

And and then I had a um a really workable second draft. Then I apply the rules, I take out the veries, I take out the actually's, I write stronger verbs, and all of a sudden I have Six hundred words, a couple of manuscript pages that was what I had been after all along, only if you asked me when I sat down, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. That's over and over and over again how I write. Tell me about the stronger verbs.

I have to say on our second date, Neil handed me this um list of his thirty four rules. That's the subtitle thirty-six ways to improve your sentences. But I added write the hard stuff, which you like. And I added take out the boring stuff, which I like. But um His first rule is use strong verbs so that you could you would say, um, guy w guy walk down the hall towards the kitchen, right? Not interesting. What if

What if guy stumbled down the hall? What if he staggered down the hall? What if guy army crawled down the hall? You know, you just over and over again keep finding a stronger verb. with your second draft, with the first draft, you know, in Bird by Bird I said there's three drafts. There's the child's draft, you're too young, but our pediatrician of

um in the fi pi fifties was um Doctor Spock, whose baby book sold something like twelve fi million copies. Our m our parents raised us on Doctor Spock. But at any rate, he said with two year olds you must be firm but friendly. And that's how I edit my first draft. I'm firm but friendly and I say, I like this. I like your description but we're gonna maybe use it somewhere else which is a nice way of saying, We're gonna cut it here.

And it's the adult draft and you take out and you fix and you find the stronger verb. In Bird by Bird I described as the dental draft, and you go tooth by tooth. You wiggle and jiggle, you floss. Some teeth might need a little attention. Some teeth are fine, you go on to the next one, and that's really what good writ good writing is the dental draft.

Yeah. I forgot the question. शरनाई I was Oh no, it was about verbs. It was about verbs. Yeah, yeah. Do you have any more to say on that? When I was a young writer I didn't know that everybody was using the thesaurus. And I thought that I was cheating. But it's a invaluable tool because first of all you get immersed in words and that's what's writing's all about. You know, you have to amass a kind of battered old toolbox.

if you're gonna get it anywhere with writing. We hope that good writing is c functions kind of as a toolbox, but a thesaurus just can't be beat. Well with the s the source I think of there's three categories of words. There's words that you know and words that and use. Yeah. Know and use is the first category. The second is

Don't know and don't use. Uh-huh. And those are the fancy words. Yeah. And then there's a middle category with the thesaurus that's really useful, which is words that you know but you don't use. And they were s kind of like subterranean and you're like, Ah, that was a good one and I just kinda plucked it. Like, say I'm writing about crying. Like I know the word wept. That's not a fancy word. No, no. But if for whatever reason Beautiful.

It's like yes, yes, yes, that's what I was looking for. And I think that implicit here is that the temptation with the the source is to try to sound literary and you're saying no. Right. In finding that middle category. Exactly. My dad was a writer and he taught me the habits of writing that you don't wait for inspiration. There's really no such thing. You sit down every day at the same time and you get your work done. If you you know, if you wanted to be a writer, you're going to be a writer

It's like you got one of the Willy Wonka golden tickets, you know, and y so you write as a debt of honor that you got maybe you're not gonna get published, maybe you are, no one knows. But you sit down and you write. One of the rules my dad was very strict about was that you used fifteen uh f uh five cent words, nickel words instead of twenty five cent words. N one of Neil's rules is that you just you don't use words we have to look up.

Shirley Jackson said a confused reader is an antagonistic reader and if I have to look up one of your words, I'm on to you, that you don't have confidence and and and I I may not if I've read two or three pages of your book in the bookstore and you're using words, I don't know, I'm gonna probably not buy the book.

Tell me more about observation because we're talking about sort of the external observation of just open your eyes and listen and observe. But then there's another kind of observation of just the friends that you surround yourself. with friends who are observant themselves, who have good lines, gr good observations. And then also who are funny.

Yeah, yeah. Well I've always said I said in Bird by Bird that you should get the most brilliant, fabulous friends you possibly can, but none of'em should be writers.'Cause if they say something really great, they're gonna wanna use it. But as I s as we started off saying, it's about paying attention. It's about being in the express line at Whole Foods and there's an old person in front of you and they first of all they've got like seventeen items.

and they're using coupons in the express line, right? And you have an opinion but you keep it to yourself'cause you were raised well, but the person behind you isn't and they're s muttering stuff. And you get that down.'Cause it's important, you know, and it's and you you may use it, you may not. Now in Bird by Bird, be this is before cell phones, I always had my students write carry a pen in their back pocket and an index card.

and then get home and take the index card out and add it to the pile and you may use it, you may not. I may not use that color green that's in the very center of your purple orchids. But I get it down on paper because just writing it It's makes it almost indelible, not when you're my age, but your age. And you in in writing it down on your notes in the phone is it functions the same way.

How did your relationship with God change your relationship with the inner critic, right?'Cause in so much of the way that you describe your relationship with him, it it's it's it's focused on grace and Forgiveness. Forgiveness and Well, I gotta say that Neil's list uh no Leal's Neil's work with uh um his clients and me on our second date changed my life'cause I'd never exactly had an image for it. And the work he does is

bringing your inner critic out and looking at it and seeing who it is. Um most people would identify a mother or a father's nagging or hectoring voice as saying, Why are you wasting your time writing? and mine was this really, really awful personality in New York City publishing from I've been in publishing for forty five years and he goes back that far and um but anyway so w as soon as I could see that voice

I could understand what uh I mean, I wouldn't say it's the devil or the enemy, but I would say it was the voice that thwarts me and that tells me I'm not that good. I'm not a New York City glitterati type, you know? And so, um all those years with me and God and and not knowing about the inner critic I would have I'd have to carry these two voices at once, you know, and I would I always would hear God just sort of gentling me like a horse, you know, and just saying it's

Really, this is really good. I like this. It's gonna be good and and I got you. I'm right here and and then I'd also hear this voice. It's like the you know, the cartoon with you've got the angel and the devil on each shoulder and um Everything has gotten a lot easier sin easier since I've been able to visualize the critic f of uh well at the time sixty-two years that have been telling me that what I was up to was really not gonna s work out in the end.

How do you visualize the critic? Do you have do you see the critic? Do you name the critic? You can read about it in Better Days, Neil's book. But the way we did it last night on stage actually You you've notice where it is. For most people it's in the head. For us types, it might be in your torso. But you bring it forward and you have it in your hand and you start to talk to it. You do both voices. I say to it, who hired you? And it usually says you did.

Why did I hire you? Because you were afraid of looking bad. You're afraid of embarrassing yourself. When did I first hire you? Well, you're f five, you know, and you were starting kindergarten and you were already getting that toxic self consciousness. You start to talk to it and then eventually you say to it, I'd like to take over. And it's worried about you taking over because you might make a fool of yourself. We've all had embarrassments, we've all disgraced ourselves.

because I have a public life, it's happened for me with big audiences. But then I point out to my inner critic that it was supposedly in charge when that happened. I ask it if it can trust me to take over. No, it begrudgingly says maybe and I I ask it to go to the library'cause I'm in the middle of something. And I could picture this voice that only esteemed a certain kind of very, very elitist white male New York New Yorker writer and not a you know aging hippie California type.

you know, a hugger. So, um, when I heard that Almost ten years ago, it uh be being able to picture that voice that I had internalized as a very young writer. I sold my first book to Viking at twenty-five, you know, I'm gonna be seventy-two. I'd always, always heard that voice and seeing that face. And it was so wonderful to see it and to be able to say, oh, thank you for keeping me alive as a child. But I I won't be needing you right now. I'm in the middle of something. Mhm.

Tell me then about uh about dialogue, about learning to listen to how people speak and listening, observing, coming back to that, and then getting that translated onto the page. Because dialogue is it has to have a kernel of truth in writing, but it's also very different from how people actually speak on the bus or at a restaurant or in the park.

Mm-hmm. And dialogue is Poor or weak dialogue is the main reason I'm not gonna buy your book in the bookstore if I've read the first three pages of your book um during the audition. And if the dialogue is forced, Or if it's just too clipped and witty, I'm not i'm not interested. Yeah, and we don't talk that way. I mean, we always in in good writing and in bird by bird, I always say, you know, write a ton of dialogue and then take most of it out.

Um, read it out loud. Read what you've written out loud because you're gonna hear how artificial it sounds. People don't talk that way. People don't talk in clip perfect sentences. And we should know which character is speaking by the rhythm and their vocabulary Not by you saying um Andrea said and and you can never use other words for said. One of the whole rules in good writing is you can only say said. You can't say Um Andrea chuckled. Why would you do that given the verb?

Thing that we talked about earlier. Oh, because it's it because it's all so artificial and it just feels so sophomoric to because the author is trying to find substitutes for said. I would prefer patches of dialogue where there's no there's just quotation marks. There aren't he said, she said, he said, which would also be a drag. But if you start saying he chuckled, he enthused, he

He proclaimed, um, I should know by the verbs in your dialogue and the rhythm of the person's speech who's talking, and the condition in which they're talking. I can also describe what the person is doing with their hands and while they're talking or with their what happens with their mouth when they're talking, of course as long as I use a strong verb to describe that and no adja adverb. But um It's a dialogue's really tough. And in the old days I had all my students get Radio Shack um Record.

But but now it's on the phone, the voice memo. And if you read your dialogue. You'll just cringe when you hear the the the sentences that ring false, that ring like somebody who has had some time to to rewrite their sentences before Another way to do d to learn dialogue is to read the masters, you know, to sit at the feet of people who doctoral's great with dialogue. Nora Ephron's great with dialogue. What did you learn from them?

I just learned that you can make it really interesting without trying too hard. That you can have dialogue that's just a few sentences that make you laugh out loud. The way peop you know, like peop somebody might say, um, at the end of your soliloquy, they might say

Good to know. And you burst out laughing, you know? Or um or they look at you blankly and then they say, Whatever as a teenager might and or a teenager might say, No problem and um And so what I learned is that uh, you know, the the point of both Bur by Bird and Good Writing is that you can do anything.

If you can get away with it. If you don't lose me. And I I have read books that are almost entirely dug. Um Peter Matheson's brilliant book, Far Tartuga, is in Patois, you know, most of it, and it was It's like the the lingo or the dialect in New Orleans, say, that is just a mix of K Caribbean and Native American and it's complicated. And um and I would read it because of the brilliance of the people's heart.

and and and the plot that was unfolding. And but mostly because I'm an old person and I'm tired. I don't want to work. You know, I don't wanna work. I don't wanna uh dissect your dialogue. I don't wanna wait it out and see if you're gonna get to the point. I want you to get to the point. It's again a confused or a bored reader, is an antagonistic reader. And the thing is that long patches of dialogue. tend not to work. For me, Al Franken.

I love that word clipped. Clip dialogue. Yeah, explain that. Twick. There are writers that can get along with clip dialogue, but What does that mean? It means like snappy. It's like snappy. So if you have character It's a negative connotation, right?

Well if you have somebody that's snappy and they're warm and they're they're doing the the g they're they're doing good for the people around them and they're in a hurry and they're snappy, that's different. If it's somebody at a cocktail party who's just trying to impress you with their over education then it is tiresome. I remember this has nothing to do with anything but Updike, who I grew up on, who I really revered and learned dialogue from.

He uh he had tiny issues with women and so but putting that aside for a minute, but he said in one story that um, being at a cocktail party where people were talking at him, he felt like he was being pelted by tiny ping pong balls. I just love that and that's how snappy dialogue when it's not called for makes me feel. I feel pelted. How do you feel like Marin County or the state of California is washed over your life? I am just so entirely California. You are California. Just so California.

So the West Coast is infinitely less ironic. Infin like my husband was raised on the west on the East Coast. in Arlington and when he moved to the West Coast twenty years ago he was shocked by how kind of mellow the people tended to be. I mean infinitely less ironic.

and competitive. It's just the the the effect that California has on you. And the way that I write is something that has been troubling for East Coast reviewers. It's not how they're the right the writers that for whom they give their stamp of approval right. So d explain the differences in the actual writing quality between what you're doing and what you saw as East Coast. This sort of east coast approach.

Well take say Jonathan Francis for instance, who's very, very famous and really revered by the East Coast um critics. he writes in a way that is just very lofty, you know, beautiful sentences, but fancy words and and very, very erudite and um and complex and and I don't write that way. And um and that complexity is really loved by East Coast critics. Or um or let them. And there's you know, then there's lots of writers on the on the on the East Coast who don't write that way.

But um the way I write is w is like t say West Coast is brought again or the Beatniks, you know, or um just the San Francisco avant garde and um Evan Cannell. Well he writes more like an East he's St Louis, but um there's just a whole sensibility that's different because I think first of all the weather's warmer so we're not like in in a state of clenched and and clutch and um held breath as much as as uh people on the west east coast might be, but

Just a different sensibility. You know, we're not ancient. We we haven't been around that long. Been around for a hundred and fifty years instead of, you know, whatever it is, four hundred.

Yeah. I've been wanting to ask you this question the whole time but I have the book Help Thanks Wow here and we're talking about observation, opening your eyes, and it's like a prompt. It's like I've just been thinking to myself, how do you just get that sense of wow and restore that sense of wow? open your eyes to it because you realize that so much of our experience of the world and the day to day of life is quite myopic. Yeah. Claustrophobe. Definitely. Yeah, yeah.

Well, you get that sense of wow, I think partly by deciding to be away be available for it. I mean, one of the great gifts of being a writer is that it can help you res get your curiosity restored. that, you know, they stopped grading for curiosity in first grade. And a lot of us put it away because it wasn't really encouraged. I mean, imagination and curiosity were encouraged. But really l be being good at long division was uh more of a value when we're coming out

deciding to be a writer and carrying an index card or in a pen with you or your phone, if you're gonna use notes means that you have decided you're gonna start paying attention again. So Yesterday morning my husband and I left our boutique apartment with the broken sink and we went out and and and my feet were really, really sore from the day before and um my knee was really sore. And I've and we had I had this media thing I didn't really want to do and we decided to stop into an Irish

um tavern to get the Irish breakfast, which was like a great price for a ton of food. We were sitting at it there was no one there, and the bartender came over, a very genial Irishman of about sixty, who we could barely understand. We thought he was punking us. And when when I s saw that I started laughing again. Well, you know, I said in

Help thanks while that laughter is carbonated holiness. I love that. Once you're laughing, you're you're back on sacred ground. And at that moment I decided to pay attention to this guy. It was at that moment like getting spritzed by a plant mystery. And so we just started talking and he got us everything and then um I asked for the Wi Fi and it happened to be one forty seven Guinness.

He started spelling Guinness for me two ans to it and I said, You know, I'm a sober alcoholic, I've been sober for decades. And um then I really remember how to spell Guinness believe me and he laughs. Well then Neil got up during our breakfast to go to the bathroom and the guy came over and he said Kind of so devoche, how long have you been sober? And I said, I'm coming up on forty years, and he said, Wow.

third great prayer and then he reached in his pocket and he pulled out a twenty four hour chip and a six months chip and he said, I just celebrated six months clean and sober and we both said, 'Cause that's a miracle for anyone, for me, for him. And all of a sudden I was on a h track B, which was A new pair of glasses, paying attention, and I use that story in the thing I described to you earlier in this piece I was writing this morning. And that's how it all works.

When you're opening a book, what are the things that you're really thinking about on the first page, the first few pages, the first sentence? What really matters to you? 哇 I'll I'll give a book three pages. Reader. Yes, in a bookstore that I'm auditioning. Usually it's because I've been reading good reviews about it, although there are almost no reviews anywhere anymore. But if you look around. Um Or somebody's told me that they loved it and I'll pick it up.

And I'll read the first few pages and I will be looking for somebody that is using that is writing really nice sentences. You know, M F. K. Fisher, the probably the world's greatest food writer said What you're doing as at as a writer is writing one clean, fresh sentence and putting a period at the end of it. And so I'll start to read.

And I'll see if the the if these sentences are pleasing to me and I'll read a little bit more and I'll see I'll just start noticing, oh, I like this. I want to get to the bottom of this paragraph. And here's the catch. I'm gonna turn the page. Then I'm gonna keep reading, Oh, I like this, I wanna go on and and like that. And the sentences are pleasing, they're not ostentatious, they're not show offy.

the pr you know, the Niels rule, if it's literary it isn't. If it's literary, I'm not gonna be interested in it. If it's really human and you know, ever since we got here on earth we we've love stories about ourselves, you know. The first storytellers are gathering people around the campfire.

They're telling people stories about their you know, their ancestry and what they make of it all and what the lightning means and what the water and and that's what I wanna read about still. I want people to hold up a mirror for me. Whether it's science fiction or takes place in ancient Egypt, I want it to be about the drama of humankind. And I you know, I'll pay extra if it's sort of funny, you know? And that's what I'm looking for in the first three pages of a book pleasing sentences.

Somebody with a story to tell.

My favorite quote, and there's some amazing quotes in this book in good writing. Yeah, yeah. Um, is something that my screenwriter friend Randy Mayhem Singer said. She wrote Mrs. Doubtfire and a bunch of other stuff. She said I think it's seven words tell me a story, make me care. How do you make people care?

Well, if you're writing a novel you have characters they wanna find out more about. They wanna find a character who you recognize as a real person. Maybe I mean maybe it's um Ignatius J. Riley in a Confederacy of dunce dunces who has nothing, nothing, nothing in common with me. But I recognize him as a really dear, messed up human like the rest of us, you know. If you don't have anything wrong with you, I'm not interested. If you don't have anything wrong with you

There's a zero chance I want to sit with you at the table, at the dinner table, no matter how brilliant and educated you are. And so you are um a person I recognize as one of us. And something's going on that makes me worried for the character, makes me care. The character I wrote about disallot in bird by bird. Um, there's something at stake, you know, the character has something to lose and we all have the same things to lose at stake. You know, what can we can lose our

Sense of meaning, we can lose our connection to other people. We can have a sense of loss that is feels like it's unsurvivable. So it's a character who feels real. And human? And who isn't a predicament that I can identify with where I'm pulling for'em and I want to find out what happens. That's how you make me care. Mm-hmm. The word desire came to mind. Like do they need to want something? That's a good question. I mean, usually what you want is the same thing that is at stake.

I want my son, who's thirty-seven, and my grandson, who's seventeen, to outlive me. That's basically at this stage of my life all I want. And um and so that's what's at stake. And so if I say that on the first second pa it's like Ibsen saying, if there's a gun in the first act, it really needs to go off at some point, right? So if I say in the first couple of pages, all I care about that my son and grandson survived me the it's a pulse. And we're gonna go, uh oh.

Talk to me about this relationship between you need to like your main character, but that doesn't need You don't need enough. They need to be perfect. Well, you know the great short story writer Ethan Kanan, who teaches at the Iowa Workshop now. He and I have been fighting about this for thirty five years now. He said the most important thing is that you have a likable character and um and that you never and I um I think that that is maybe true.

But you can have a really, really screwed up character. Um, totally self obsessed, but kind of pathetic in a way that you relate that I relate to. I was gonna say what we've been fighting about is he said, You should never write out of revenge and I always told my students, You need no other reason But that the kids who teach you in seventh and eighth grade should eat it, you know, when they see that Back at your man

Proof something to you. There you go. The big bully. I discovered that early on. Well also I discovered early on I started writing my first novel When my dad I when my dad got sick with brain cancer when I was twenty three, he said, I'm gonna write my version of this. Why don't you write my your version? We were a little family, my two brothers and dad Living in this little hippie town on the coast. This is 77. 1977. This is Bolinas. The Lanus, the surf town.

Yeah, surf to Hippie Town. And um what I discovered and what he taught me was that when you decide to be a writer, everything is grist for the mill. You know, every experience, every thought. You put it all down, you take out the boring stuff. But you I could use everything that happened, everything cruel that happened to me I could use. Now you have to worry a little bit about slander and libel. So I have to change w the person's hair color and their height.

Right. I have to make you a toe head who is only five foot three. And then you're not gonna recognize yourself or sue me. Because also you can't sue me because you're not recognizable to the public, right? But I can use all the cruel things you've said to me so far in this first hour um against you and her and um I can use direct quotes. But you can't sue me. So

That's how I started on understanding that people that had were behaving really badly were really inner they were kind of a recognizable enemy to everyone. People who put you down for whatever, for your values. for your looks, for your hair, f whatever. What was that? Line about childhood, like if you If you've gone through a childhood, you've enough to remain.

That's Florida O'Connor. You know, she wrote a book, People Don't Read Enough and she said in it, If you've survived your childhood, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life. And it's really true. I mean it's the great prompt My son has a writing workshop uh a collective with seven hundred writers in it called a writing room dot com, not the writing room dot com, who are our mortal enemy. But at a writing room dot com they have a prompt every morning.

And often the prompt would be tell me a childhood memory, because then you are if I ask you to do that, you're gonna be able to write for a month. Because what you can do is sc and my my advice and I give a lot of talks there is make a list of every child in memory starting at your very first holiday, your very first experiences of nursery school.

you know, you're probably four. You might have a flicker of something from three, maybe a little bit from four, and then five you s it starts happening'cause you're in society then and you're on in the the blacktop, which is where e the where the this any sense of safety you might have had before ends and you cer you get these prompts. I'll tell you a prompt right now that and for your listeners.

That will could unleash a whole book for you. This is the big a writing room dot com prompt. There was a tree. There was a tree. Tell me about that tree. Is it from your childhood? Is it the tree in the cherry tree outside your window that is not in blossom but that is budding in bud? Is it the tree that w that you fell out of when you were in second grade where you got it cast?

which was incredibly cool because all the kids were jealous of it and they all wrote messages on you. Was it the tree where you carved someone's initials? Where is was it the tree where you buried your grandfather's ashes that you'd never have bounced ba you know? I mean the story of humanity begins with the tree. I instantly, the first thing I thought of I thought of Eden. What is it about trees that have this sense?

of like the tree of life. There's a sense of mysticism and possibility. Like what is it about trees that's so generative and filled with life? I think that somehow you could make a case for that the tree is every single thing about life that there is. Like birds are co more complicated. You know, I've had a couple of books with the with the word bird in them, um, Imperfect Birds and Bird by Bird.

Because if I've written that if um bird song were the only proof that there is an alternate reality or a deeper, richer reality, it would be fine it would be plenty for me. But a bird is a little bit esoteric. They're so trippy. You know, they're so trippy. Yeah, well they can't spring from dinosaurs and um But a tree. It is a tree of life. It is the individual branch and the individual apple and whatnot.

But it's also we have learned that it's that vast network of communication that one tree over there is feeling sickly and this tree over here me with my root structure, I can give you vitamins. I can give you food. And I do, because it's all part of the and that's not the human experience unless that you decide that that's what you're gonna be a part of now. Is that kind of interconnectedness, but that's what the tree is. And um

And I I really believe that if you st if you write down there was a tree period, you could write for days. Days. Mm-hmm.

Okay, well Abigail Thomas, who's written a book on memoir and and another book, Still Life at 80, she gave me a few of these great prompts. One was, write down ten things that you've forgotten. Then when you're done? Ten more? Tell me ten things you remember. I remember the smell of the cookies in my grandmother's kitchen. She was not a good cook, but the cookies smelled like love and they smelled like almond.

and they smelled like vanilla and they smelled like that my grandmother really, really wanted me to feel cherished and loved in her funky little kitchen. I remember the way the one grandmother used to put capers on everything and she was a decent cook and the way the other grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and would serve us food with mold when we went over to his to her. Tell me something that you wish you hadn't said. Oh

I don't even want to say some of the things I wish I hadn't said here, but s because I have a public life, some of the things I've said have haunted me. You know, that some of the things I've said have um gotten me cancelled at speaking engagement. Um, some of the things I've said to people wounded them. Some of the people things I said to my child. I just said in desperation, I said because I was at at the end of my rope, I wanna say that I'm forgiven. My son was a messhead and alcoholic.

grace of God and the sober men of San Francisco. He's got fourteen years clean and sober, but there were things I said during those bad years that I can't believe came out of my mouth. Every parent Every parent has said things they swore they would never say that their parents said to them and that when they found out they were going to be a parent swore they would never say. Ever. I will never say that. And they inevitably do.

Let's go back to writer's block because I suddenly remember I gave a talk at a writing room dot talk com that I think was useful. W um because I know a couple of um hacks Uh um one is to um Skip way ahead. That you're you're on page thirty seven of your book and you are blocked. You're where Isabella Yande was. You're trying to gather stuff for um the ragbag guy, the little Doctor Seuss character, and it's just not happening.

Skip ahead. Move on. You don't know what happens now. The person is face to face with somebody who hates them and they're in a broken elevator and you don't have a clue what happens. Skip ahead to page fifty. Where they're getting off the elevator and there's been a slight shift of the planes of the earth. There's a difference in their faces. There's a difference in their eyes. They're not shut down right now. They're not glaring. They have left the realm of glaring.

So you shift ahead from thirty seven, maybe you just shift ahead to page forty one. You don't know how they get there, but you know, they d end up walking off and there's They bump against each other. It's impossible to have imagined on thirty seven that people who hate each other in a broken elevator um can step off four or five or six or twenty pages later and they bump shoulders. How do you get I don't know.

Now my husband with his clients has this amazing tool he gives them that I don't know is the portal to freedom, you know? Are you gonna stay in that job? I don't know. You're supposed to know what you're gonna do next, what you're gonna is if you're gonna stay, if you're gonna go, if you're whatever He teaches the p people to say, I don't know. And your k you're as a writer can say, Oh, I don't know. How do you and I, who have loathed each other for it's gotta be thirty years now?

get off the elevator and we have small smiles on our face. How do we get I don't know. But I can pick it up. There. So you skip ahead. The other thing you do And this is the other thing I know about writer's block, is you suddenly introduce a character who out of the blue, who coming off the elevator, knows you both and is astonished that you are standing so close to each other after what happened on the black top when you were in fifth grade. And he had chosen Caroline over you.

for the ice skating par ice rink party. You introduce a character who knew you both. You introduce a character who also hates a person that you had formerly been hating when you the elev when you got on the elevator. Whatever. You introduce somebody new, you shake it. So what's the main point there? The point is that you introduced something that hadn't been there at the point where you were blocked.

that it's like a snow globe, you shake it up. That it's not the exact frozen uh landscape that had been in the snow globe, you shake it up. It's like there's a um chapter in Bird by Bird on Polaroids. And it talks about how'cause when I was coming up and when I wrote Bird by Bird, we took Polaroids. We didn't have phones, we didn't have

w I don't even think we had disposable cameras yet. But you've taken a picture of this scene. You know, there's a Perrier bottle leaned against the cl the um couch and there's the famous orchids with the green that and I take a picture of it. uh thinking that I'm t really taking a picture of you and I'm noticing this other stuff and then that's where you are with before the writer blo it and it's it's kind of blackish, greenish and it's developing. It's a Polaroid and it takes time to develop.

And all of a sudden I notice that there are a bunch of books under the couch that I hadn't even noticed, you know? And that actually I recognize one of them and I want to go get it. I don't. 'Cause I'm ca'cause I'm on the spot. But I reckon maybe it's my book. You had it there. Well you do have my books all around here, but I hadn't noticed at the point of writer's block, I thought I was taking a picture of you. What I'm taking a picture of is this coffee table book.

That my dad had, who's been dead for fifty years, nearly and that my I remember all of a sudden sitting with my dad and on the couch and we're listening to Thelonious Monk and he's playing Lulu's back in town and I hadn't remembered that song And now I can play it and I'd forgotten that Thelonious Monk's wife called him Melonius Thunk and it's all coming back based on something I hadn't known was interesting to me.

One of the things that I love to do and I'm I I I said this to a friend last weekend. He was like, Stop stop joshing me. I'm I'm telling you I do this all the time. I just go for a walk and I play I Uh-huh. And he's like, how do I find more writing ideas? And I go, walk down a block and just try to observe five things that you've never noticed about that block.

Look at the ornamentation on the lamppost. Look at the way that the trash can has some stickers on it. Look at the way that there's some trash towards the end of the block, but not in the middle of the block. Think about why do I like the staircases on this house more than the one on that house? And you just play I Spy and you just

try to notice as many different things. Try to surprise yourself or just try to notice something. Kind of like you're with a four year old. Yeah. And something about that awakens your eyes to the world and you begin to see all of these things that are s that were somehow under the register of consciousness, but we're always right there.

Hm. My husband said and I started my last book somehow. with this line that everything true and beautiful can be discovered on any ten minute walk. Whether you're in Fairfax and it's all trees and bloom or y we were just up Washington D C where every single cherry tree had gone into bloom for our arrival and here where things are a tiny bit behind but they're just starting to blossom just now and you can see the buds. We can see the buds on the fruit.

Right. You can just see the buds and you could stop and be blown away and then you all of a sudden remember the Aeneas Nin quote that the pain of staying in bud was suddenly too much and you decided to go ahead and see what it was like to bloom and all of a sudden the world is happening again for you. It's it's it's moving and it's exp showing itself to you. Leaf Shafak, who came on the show a few months ago, she said the world is pregnant in the spring.

Yeah. I love that one. Yeah, it's beautiful. Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way, she had a assignment in it which was called it might have been called The Writer's Day. Artist. The artist date And you you took your paper and your pen or your pencil somewhere consciously, intentionally, and you sat there and you captured it on paper and you scribbled. I used to teach my s uh grandsons ri um

classes, writing workshops beginning in uh kindergarten, you know, with poopy first drafts. And um but I'd also just hand them paper. and um and pencils and have'em sit there and I just have them make lines across the page. And I said, that's what writing is.

It's just making lines, but you're gonna learn to write words, you know, and descriptions and then all the aides and me and the teacher would come by and have them tell us their stories and we would write them for us. But I have them do ten minutes, they're just scribbling across the page.

And that's what the artist date is, that you either go to somewhere natural or you go to a cafe or you go to a cemetery or you go to a library you know, you you go outside and you pay attention and it is revealing itself to you all of life. You get it down on paper. That's what writing is. Do you have a favorite word?

I love the word meadow and I love the word glade because it suggests sanctuary and safety, a a ring of trees that you step uh a uh a meadow surrounded by trees that you step inside of that's a secret world. Hm. Do you have a favourite book? Serendipity. Oh Sarantupidia. I love that word. Something about the energy of what serendipity is is embodied in the way that that word is spelled. Mm-hmm. It's kinda like a onomonopoeia, but for how the word looks.

Yep. I love that word too. Yeah. I love the more girly words like meadow and glade. Yeah. Tell me about this idea of um kind of squinting. You have an idea that you're beginning to develop and you're kind of squinting at it and it's beginning to form in your head.

Mm-hmm. Well that was another thing I did with my grandson's classes through all those early grades, was I would tell them that if they close their eyes, there's a movie screen behind their eyes and they can look For a memory or a um imaginary

scene betwe you know, they are all in into superheroes and Pokemon and stuff. And I'd say you can see it on the screen behind your eye. And now when you open your eyes you can squint at it to bring it back, bring it into focus and then get it down on paper. If you can't write actually yet, tell us one of it one of us and we're gonna get it down on paper for you. So that's what it is, you squint to kind of bear down on it a little so that you can capture it more precisely.

It's funny I'll tell you one story from the first the kindergarten workshop. My grandson was all excited to get to bring his his nana in and show her off and I was like semi famous and they and the teacher got to hold up bird by bird and all that.

And I did my thing, poopy first drafts and bird by bird and and all of that, and I talked for about half an hour and had them do an exercise with the aides and the teacher and afterwards my grandson came up and he tugged on my sleeve and and he said in this kind of mafia voice, he said, Nana, that was terrible. And I said, What? And he said, You told us you could help us write a book, but you only taught us how to write one page. Hm. And I said, Honey, that's all I got.

But I can teach you how to write one page and it's back to what we were saying that if you get into that cold water you might as well splash around for a while and you warm up and you're in it, you might as well go for it. Yeah. Get a little bit more done than you were Agreeing to in the beginning. Mm-hmm. But also that's what a book is. It's just a page and then a page. Yeah. And a page. That's what life is. A day and a day and a day. Yeah. Behind an hour and an hour and an hour.

You were talking about movies. And I know you love movies. I do. How have movies informed your writing? Well, we said my entire life. You know, it I think that at least half of what I know about everything I learned from great movies. Starting at a early age. I mean when I was coming up in the fifties it was all Disney movies, most mostly animals movies, and a lot of which end with the mother being killed.

So I I was a very sensitive and frightened child to begin with and I and and um but movies have informed everything I know and they also taught me how you frame things. It starts somewhere. And that scene ends somewhere and a s um you get from A to B in one scene and that you don't bite off more than you can chew, you don't bite off more than the the f the viewer can follow. And Orson Wells said

you are creating a happy or sad movie depending on when you decide to end it, you know. And so I learned that you could end it where there's at a place where there's hope. you could end it and a lot of modern movies end where so ambivalently where you really don't know how people are gonna go on from what they've already been through, but they're together.

that's usually enough to to to give us um the belief that they're connected and they're gonna be s okay for now, which is all any of us ever have that we're okay for now. But movies and the choices directors make about what they show and what they don't show. You know, it's Miles Davis saying, right about the space between the notes.

The choices that directors make is um it just s I mean to watch great movies starting a hundred years ago would give any would-be writer all the information they need.

Talking about that Miles Davis quote, what does that mean to you? That's not clear to me. but actually the silence, you know, spiritually i it that it silence is where it all happens. Mm-hmm. And um and that we capture in words the silence. We can capture in words the moment

the momentousness of the moment with f a few very very cap very carefully chosen words. We can capture years of aging by describing when the next paragraph begins, that the old dog's muzzle has gone gray, or that the narrator's hair has gone gray, and we capture in quietness, in silence, with the momentousness of just being alive. And that's between the notes that we can hear.

Yeah, th sports announcing is similar. I was watching the World Baseball classic recently and uh Venezuela's kind of this underdog, they win, and the announcer says something to the effect of the best in the world. Yeah. And then it's just complete silence from the announcers for the next two minutes or so and you're just hearing the crowds cheering and the ambient noise of the moment just speaks for itself. And I think of so many of my favorite moments in sports and

Very similar. It's three, four, five words and then ambient noise. Yeah, and often in novels, in great novels, something has happened and it stops you on a dime because you think, Oh no. And if the care like in Middle March, the I think the greatest novel ever written by George Elliott There are so many moments where uh character has made a decision to do something and you just stop in your traction, you think, Oh no. It's like George George who is in love with Mary. I think it's Mary Darcy.

he has proposed to her and the father has accepted'cause the daughter doesn't really get to the father has accepted. And George has kind of already lost everything. He's young. He's a young man full of life and he keeps betting on the horses. the father of Mary has lent him some money to help them get started. George has a good idea. He's gonna take the money, say it's a thousand dollars or pounds. What's he gonna do? He's gonna go to the racetrack and double it and you put down the book.

And you say don't go to the racetrack. And you don't almost don't want to go on. But maybe it's gonna work out this time so you pick the book back up. But there is a silence where you feel all of our longing, all of the young man's hope who's gonna marry his beloved. gonna make a little extra money and surprise her. But you're going, please don't go to go home. Go to the race go to go to Mary. Go to the river.

He goes to the racetrack and he loses everything. Well now what? I don't know. He doesn't know. The character doesn't know. No one knows. What are you gonna do? You better turn the page. I just had uh the writer and director of a movie called Train Dreams on. I cannot wait to see that movie. So good. It was just nominated for Best Picture. Yeah, yeah. And there's a really important line in that movie. Where

Things are going all right. They're going all right. Not great, but not terribly. And the narrator says, Little did he know that he would remember these days as some of the best and Yeah. And it's a really important line because the thing, capital T, capital T the thing doesn't happen for another ten, fifteen minutes. But that line when I was watching the movie for the first time, I just sank down in my chair.

And it was sort of like the gambling. And I said, oh no. Oh, oh no. Oh no. Um, that is the greatest moment in movies and in books where you just have to stop for a minute and catch your breath. Then tell me a story, make me care. You're pulling for things to sort out. My husband always says life tilts to the good, but it's until it does that you're holding your breath. John Lennon famously said that everything sorts out by the end and

And if it it hasn't sorted out, it's not the end. And I I live by that because for me, in the modern era, it sure hasn't sorted out for the good yet, but it will. John Lennon said, you know, and my husband said. But while you're waiting, that is the thrill of g of being a reader. Or being a movie watcher is the thrill Yeah. that everything could just turn to, you know what, maybe it's not going to. Maybe it's not going to. Mm-hmm.

How do you feel like movies have informed the way that you Well, they have told me what I need to know. Them a movie is about um the director is put is setting up lily pads across the pond for the viewer to land on. I need to know this much. I need to know this who these people are, how they're together. I need to get them then from here to there. I need to get them out of the city. I need to get them into Newark.

because that's where this catastrophe is gonna begin to unfold. But it isn't they've shown me, you know, the Wonderful short story writer was a friend of mine, Alice Adams, a New Yorker writer. She told her writing students this great formula that I I wrote about in Bird by Bird. It's A B D C E. And I think that is really the formula that uh a director might use. A is for action. Something has to happen kinda early on, either in the movie or the book.

in the first few pages that we're all together here in a small studio in the West Village and who are these people? Why are we all together right now? Are we of any interest at all? And then B is for the background. Well here is why we're together. Here is what we had hoped was gonna happen today. Um here is the background. That's what a director is gonna show you too, either through flashback or through the characters um telling each other, reminding each other of

What's gone before D is the development. The story starts to develop. We hear a knock downstairs on the door. So no one no one's supposed to be at the door. We're supposed to have this time together and and things start developing and she's their lily pads we're landing on. I hear footsteps uh on the stairs. Things are developing

They don't sound like yours because they have a high heel. They h they make a clunkier sound on the stairs. I don't recognize it. And I'm scared. So first what do I do? Well I hide. And then I hear shuff you know, A B D C E C is the climax. Things come to a head upstairs, outside the bathroom door. It's not Jack Nicholson in the shining with a hatchet trying to get through, but something is happening.

It's where all of the minor chords I've played so far crash into one another. It's the cymbal in the symphony orchestra. That's the climax. The climax means there has to be a killing of some sort. doesn't have to be a character. It doesn't have to be the a death of a character. It has to be the death of maybe the illusion that the character has lived with their whole life that has meant they never, ever, ever can break uh into full awakening, into full humanity here.

Or the the killing of a of a a yeah, of an il illusion or the killing of a prejudice. The kill could be the killing of a pre it's a killing outside the door at the top at the flight of the top of the flight. Stairs and and then E, A, B, D, C, E, E is the ending. There's that way that I take my readers or in a movie, the viewers out of the pond that they have s agreed to spend time with me on all along. And we get out together on the last page or in the last page.

No, but I've she told me this 40 years ago, and I just remember, and I be I've told every student I've ever had the ABDCE because it's a great formula. What makes for a good ending? A good ending for me, I can't stand if things add b end badly for the main character. I really can't. I'm sorry. Um what works out for me is that the ending it makes sense.

And that if I look back over the all the pages before, I I might have known. I should have I could have intuitively seen this coming, but there's a little bit of surprise where I smile. And I go, Yep, that's exactly right. That's really the only thing that could have happened. Mhm. And um Then people are set on their feet and I don't know what's gonna happen now, but I love spending three hundred pages with them every night for eight nights in a row.

I got to know these people and I pulled for them. I lost confidence in'em. They gave me they gave me faith in them again by making choices and decisions I didn't know they had in'em.

And they moved on just like in real life. You know what I'm thinking about? I'm thinking about how when you get into a story, whether it's a book, whether it's a movie, one of the things that you're doing is you're Surrendering to the author, to the artist. And I think a lot of what a good ending is is you've gotten to the end and there's been a lot of twists and a lot of turns, a lot of things that were unexpected.

And you say, That was worth it. I'm glad I did it. Thank you for knowing me better than I knew myself. Yeah. And there's times when I really feel kind of betrayed. I'll use a strong word, because I think it's warranted, where when I And with a body of work.

And I felt like they didn't honor my heart, they didn't honor my emotions, they didn't they didn't treat me right there. Mm-hmm. Um, and things can still be difficult and they treated me right. So that's not the point. But it's you get to the end and you say, You knew me better than I knew myself, and I'm glad I trusted you. Mm. Yeah, exactly. I could read you the ending of good writing because This is how I end every talk.

that I give about writing and about how we write and about who we are as writers. Um I do care that people write well. I do. Because of my starvation for truth and for the joy of reading, good writing has been my rock in salvation since my parents first read to me. Tonight when I crawl into bed a good book is waiting for me in which I will get lost. And found.

Neil will be there too, also lost lost in a book, and we will be in peace. Suddenly one of us will exclaim I mean say, because Rule four says stick with said. Listen to this, and then we'll read a sentence or description to each other and shake our heads at how fine it is. You are fully capable of creating good sentences too, with practice, guidance, an editor or writing partner, and dedication to the craft. Trust me on this, but better yet, trust yourself. You've got this.

Why do you want to end with that? Because I think it's the most important thing, um, in this book is that everyone can get to be a better and better writer. It's like learning to do anything, whether that's piano or or t or pickleball. That you you know, with piano you don't start off wanting to botch the farmer in the Dell. You want to play Brahms, but you have to be willing to b be able to botch the Farmer in the Dell. The cheese stands alone, you know.

little by little you can work your way up to botching your favorite Beatles song to In My Life and it's terrible at first and then it gets better and better. Then you could play it for somebody and they go, Wow You did it, that was beautiful. And then you work your way up very slowly through Chopin to Whoever. And that's what writing is like. You start off and it's way, way, way too long and a lot of it is gonna end up getting cut or cut on the cutting room floor.

But you're doing it. You're doing it every day. You're a writer now and you're and you're pursuing the writer's life and you're

sitting at the feet of the masters and you're reading all of the writers at work in the Paris Review series. You're writing you're reading all of those once a week and you are corresponding with other writers and you're sharing your work with another writer who you found and they're sharing their work with you and you're helping each other get better and better and you're trying h slightly harder things and slightly harder things.

You're learning to take a little criticism and you're sticking to the fact that it's your work and you're the final arbiter of of it and you're doing it like the Nike ad. You just do it. You stop not writing. Stop not writing.

How did you deal with criticism, Thrawn? your life. I hate criticism. I am so in the wrong business, but it has always hurt me. always. Like the first review the first reviews I got were for this book I wrote about my father's illness, a novel called Hard Laughter. And the first reviews I got, and this is in the nineteen eighty, I arri arrive by mail from my agent, their Publishers Weekly in Kirkus, and they're terrible. The reviews. The terrible reviews.

And um luckily I'm still drinking at the time. But they both say that whatever meager charms the book possessed were harmed by the writer's show off the overkill and that Yeah, that'll make you tip them. And that made me tip the bottle and it also rings through the chamber of my mind. I no longer after that was show was doing show off the overkill of trying to be funny, started editing myself in a much, much different way.

But I have gotten criticized every book and you know this good writing is my twenty first book. And you know, now there are no reviews, so you hardly have to worry about the bad reviews. Now you just worry about neglect. But um The criticism's very hard for me to take. Now Neil and I for ten years have been editing each other and we have a policy that you edit edit with a sandwich with a sandwich form, which is

you come over to where the other person is and you said, I I love this. This is gonna be great. I don't think your lead works. I actually don't think the first couple paragraphs work. But at the very bottom of page one, when that l paragraph starts, that's where you ha hook me in. I don't think the ending works. all endings are way before the ending you've presented. They're

with a p an essay there may be a page and a half earlier, with a book, they could be thirteen pages earlier. But sometimes Neil's come in, he's been in a hurry and he started with exactly what's wrong with it, what I need to fix. And some once or twice I've cried and then he he goes, Oh, I'm so sorry, I really love it. It's just the the beginning is just so confused and I really think you're just clearing your throat those first two graphs and

Take'em out, trust me. And um and criticism is you know what it's like. It it hurts a little bit, but one of the the um rules in good writing is trust good editors, you know, worship good editors. Worship a good writing partner because they're saving you from yourself, mm-hmm, from your blind spots, from your You know, your weird little habits that you think are so charming that no offense really aren't. Have there been times when you've

When you've overreacted to criticism. And so there was a c critic who came in, they said this and you said, Oh my goodness, they're right and then you found that you had actually lost the sense of yourself in the process. Oh yeah. And basically had to integrate that criticism into your craft to say, you know what, people will criticize me for that, but that's who I am. That's that's who I want to be. Yeah, absolutely. I mean I could give you twenty examples of very, very important.

critic cr uh book reviews that were really devastating. Like I got one, this is ten not quite ten years ago, for a book. It might have been the book on either hope or mercy. It was Hallelujah anyway. And it was this essays on spirituality and it was very human, it was very funny. really loved. It was a huge bestseller and the cr and the reviewer in the Chicago Tribune said, um that the book made her feel like she was in the backyard with one of the Kardashians. Cool. That's strange.

And I wanted to write back, but you don't get to, that no one had ever heard of her or was likely to, right? But I couldn't do that because you don't get to respond to reviews. But I've gotten review and but then that made me think, wait a minute and then I thought, um, the way I write is the way I wanna write and you can tell because what I'm publishing You know, and by and by the time I've written something it's gone through so many washes, three or four drops from me.

the editorial response, me making those changes, going back to the editor, doing another round of edit, Well, you ever feel like the writing gets over edited? Not no, I'm just desperately grateful. Desperately grateful for ever I have a great editor at at my house and um you know then you go through the copy editor and and the copy editor may have be have have tiny control issues. and um be marking stuff. Like for I'll tell you one example.

I wrote a book called Joe Jones, my second novel. And in it it takes place at a cafe, a broken down dive really on the Petaluma River. And two teenagers say at the cash register I'm gonna have to pay you like in total dimes. Well, that was a line I had heard and scribbled down. I said to them, Wait one second and I wrote it down. Now that's a beautiful line,'cause that's rhythm and blues. Right?

I'm gonna have to pay you like in total dimes. Now the copy editor read it and cr and ch and cross it out and added, I'm gonna pay you totally in dimes. And I had to go back and say, No, this here this sentence is I'm gonna pay you like in total dime. So yeah, so yeah, you know, uh but m for the most part I am d desperately grateful for uh my editors. Yeah.

Yeah. Um a word that you use a lot is is reverence. And we were talking about wow a little bit before, but can you explain what reverence? Why you use that word? Well, reverence is about um agreeing to be un awakened, you know, and to stop hitting the snooze button and to keep asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be? Well it hurts to be fully alive. It means you d have taken off some of your armor.

and you're willing to be real and human with people, which you certainly were not raised to be. You were raised to be impressive and to do well and for every to try to get everybody with any amount of power or say to b to like you and to grade you and to and to move you up the ranks, right? And so to agree to be fully reverent to be fully alive means that you are stepping into the realm of reverence, of breath. of the moment of real, of being, of your own beingness.

and the world, as you quoted the other writer, being pregnant right now for you. New life. Pregnancy is about new life. We've gone through the death. We've gone through the death in the winter. And it means that, wow we're back I can take off some of these heavy clothes metaphorically and be here. I'm seeing the word porous. Yeah, we're gonna be port we're gonna be permeable. We're gonna take off the armor.

Yeah. But the key point I think of what you were saying is A certain willingness to be hurt. A certain willingness to be hurt in the interest of the great gift of being here as fully alive and as fully human as we can manage. Yeah. Thank you, Annie. Thank you.