Anne Lamott Teaches Unforgettable Writing

ELI5/TLDR

Anne Lamott — author of Bird by Bird, now 71, with 21 books behind her — sits with David Perell and unpacks how to write better sentences. The short version: stop waiting for inspiration, write a terrible first draft, then cut anything that’s trying to sound literary. The longer version is gentler. Writing is not an act of effort but of attention. You don’t try harder; you resist less. You notice the slightly greenish-yellow inside an orchid, you eavesdrop in the express line at Whole Foods, you carry a pen because the world keeps offering things and most of us have stopped looking.

The Full Story

Driving in fog

Lamott opens with E.L. Doctorow’s line — that writing is like driving at night with the headlights on, you can only see a little ways ahead but you can make the whole journey that way. She added the fog herself. Non-writers, she says, imagine the work arrives whole and lands on the page. It doesn’t. You start with an image, a theme, a thing you want to say, and you can’t see two paragraphs ahead. You learn through habit that this is fine.

“I can see that 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.”

Writer’s block is the wrong word

She thinks the term is a misnomer. The problem isn’t with the door — it’s that you’ve been locked out for a reason. Mostly, blocked writers are empty. The sand has run out of the burlap sack. The fix is not to push harder but to fill back up.

She has two practical hacks for the stuck. First, skip ahead. You’re on page 37 and your two characters are face to face in a broken elevator and you don’t know what they say. Skip to page 50 where they walk off the elevator and the planes of their faces have shifted slightly. You don’t know how they got there yet. You’ll figure it out. Second, introduce a character out of nowhere — someone who recognizes both of them, who shakes the snow globe. The point: do something that wasn’t there at the moment of the block.

The rag bag guy

Inside every writer, Lamott says, is a small rag bag guy in your center. Your job is to wander around collecting bits — fabric, dental floss, tinsel, silk — and feed them to him. When you’re ready, he hands the bag back and you start sewing the quilt.

This is why “go get more experiences” is bad advice. It puts pressure on the wrong thing. The real instruction came from her late priest friend Terry Richie:

“The point is not to try harder. It’s to resist less.”

The work is paying attention. Better glasses. Father Dowling, the priest who helped Bill Wilson get AA off the ground in 1935, told Bill that sometimes I think heaven is just a new pair of glasses. Lamott uses the line in every workshop she gives.

The inner critic gets a name

Ten years ago, on a second date, Lamott’s now-husband Neil Allen taught her something that changed her life. He asked if she ever heard a voice inside that discouraged her writing, kept her small, scared her off the new thing. Of course she did. She was hearing it during the date.

His method: notice the voice, picture it, hold it in your hand, and talk to it. Lamott’s critic turned out to be an awful New York publishing personality — a very particular elitist white-male New Yorker type who never approved of her California-hippie register. Once she could see him, she could speak to him: Oh, it’s you. Thank you for keeping me alive when I was four. But why don’t you go to the library. I’ve got work to do.

The voice isn’t the devil. It’s a terrified five-year-old super-ego that kept you from running into the street. It earned its job. It can also be fired, gently.

Three drafts

In Bird by Bird Lamott named three drafts. The child’s draft, where you splash around in cold water and let it be terrible. The adult’s draft, where you cut firmly but kindly — I love this description, but maybe we’ll use it somewhere else (a polite way of saying we’ll cut it). And the dental draft, where you go tooth by tooth, wiggle and floss, fix what needs fixing, leave what’s fine.

The rules apply in the second draft, not the first. Take out the varies. Take out the actuallys. Find a stronger verb. Not he walked down the hall — he stumbled, he staggered, he army-crawled. The thesaurus, she says, is not cheating. She thought it was when she was young.

“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… A thesaurus just can’t be beat.”

Perell adds a useful frame: there are words you know and use, words you don’t know and don’t use (the fancy ones, leave them), and a middle category of words you know but don’t reach for. The thesaurus is for the third group. Wept is not fancy. It’s just buried.

Nickel words, not quarter words

Her father — also a writer — drilled into her that you use five-cent words instead of twenty-five-cent words. Neil’s rule: don’t use words the reader has to look up. Shirley Jackson said a confused reader is an antagonistic reader. If Lamott has to look up your word in the first three pages of a bookstore browse, she’s onto you. You don’t have confidence. She puts the book down.

Dialogue, said, said, said

If the dialogue is forced or too clipped or too witty in the first three pages, she’s also out. Real people don’t talk in clipped perfect sentences. Read your dialogue out loud — you’ll cringe at how artificial it sounds.

A rule she’s strict about: characters should be identifiable by rhythm and vocabulary, not by you telling us. And only ever use said. No Andrea chuckled. No he enthused, he proclaimed. The substitutes feel sophomoric — the author waving for attention. Better: long stretches of just quotation marks, or a description of what the speaker’s hands or mouth are doing, with a strong verb and no adverb.

The way to learn dialogue is to read the masters. Doctorow, Nora Ephron. And to record yourself — voice memos now, Radio Shack tape recorders in the old days.

Pay extra for funny

What Lamott looks for in the first three pages of any book: pleasing sentences, somebody who sounds human, some kind of trouble. She’ll pay extra if it’s funny. MFK Fisher, the food writer, said the whole job is to write one clean fresh sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then do it again.

She wants characters with something wrong with them. 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. The character has to feel real, has to be in some kind of predicament you can identify with, has to have something at stake. Meaning. Connection. The thing they could lose.

“Tell me a story. Make me care.”

That line came from her screenwriter friend Randy Mayem Singer (Mrs. Doubtfire). Seven words. Lamott uses it as a north star.

The Whole Foods test

Observation isn’t profound. It’s the express-line check-out where the old person in front of you has 17 items and is using coupons. You have an opinion but you’re well-raised so you keep it in. The person behind you isn’t well-raised. They mutter. You write down what they say, because it’s important. You may use it. You may not. Carry a pen and an index card. A phone now. Just write it down.

The same thing happened to her this trip. She and Neil ducked into an Irish tavern for breakfast, exhausted, sore-footed, dreading a media obligation. The bartender, a 60-year-old Irishman they could barely understand, made her start laughing. Laughter is carbonated holiness. Once you’re laughing, you’re back on sacred ground. By the end of breakfast he had pulled out a 24-hour AA chip and a six-month chip — he had just gotten clean. Wow. She used the encounter that morning in the piece she was writing.

There was a tree

Lamott offers what she calls the best writing prompt she knows. Her son runs a writing collective with 700 members called awriting.com (not thewritingroom.com — our mortal enemy). The prompt:

There was a tree.

That’s it. Tell me about that tree. Was it the one outside your window with the cherry blossoms not yet open. Was it the tree you fell out of in second grade and got the glamorous cast everyone wrote on. Was it the tree where you carved someone’s initials. Was it the tree where you buried your grandfather’s ashes and never bounced back. Four words and you have a month of writing.

She also offers Abigail Thomas’s prompt: Write down 10 things you’ve forgotten. Then write 10 things you remember. And Flannery O’Connor’s line: if you have survived your childhood, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life.

ABDCE

Forty years ago the short-story writer Alice Adams gave Lamott a formula and she has taught it to every student since. Action. Background. Development. Climax. Ending. Action: something happens early, we’re together in this room, are these people of any interest. Background: how we got here, what we hoped for. Development: a knock on the door, footsteps that aren’t yours. Climax: the moment all the minor chords crash. Doesn’t have to be a death — could be the death of an illusion, a prejudice. Ending: the pond you’ve been crossing on lily pads, you and the reader step out together.

A movie director, she says, lays lily pads across the pond for the viewer to land on. Each scene is one pad. You don’t bite off more than the viewer can follow. Orson Welles: you are creating a happy or sad movie depending on when you decide to end it.

The space between the notes

Miles Davis said write about the space between the notes. We are a talky species, Lamott says, always trying to capture meaning. But the silence is where it happens. You can convey years of aging in a paragraph break — the old dog’s muzzle has gone gray, the narrator’s hair has gone gray. You let the pause carry the weight.

In great novels, something happens and it stops you on a dime. Middlemarch. George takes the money the father has lent him to start his life with Mary, and he is going to the racetrack. You put the book down. Don’t go to the racetrack. He goes. He loses everything. The page break does the work.

Sandwich edits

Lamott and Neil have edited each other for ten years. The rule is sandwich form. You come over and say I love this, this is going to be great. I don’t think your lead works — actually I think you’re clearing your throat for two paragraphs and the real opening is at the bottom of page one. The ending is also too late, probably 13 pages back. But this is going to be great. Bread, filling, bread.

When Neil has been in a hurry and skipped the bread, she’s cried. Worship a good editor, she says. They are saving you from your blind spots and from the weird little habits you think are charming.

Reverence

Toward the end Perell asks why she keeps using the word reverence. Lamott:

“Reverence is about agreeing to be awakened, you know, and to stop hitting the snooze button and to keep asking yourself, how alive am I willing to be?”

It hurts to be fully alive. It means taking off some of your armor. We were not raised for this — we were raised to be impressive, to do well, to get the people with power over us to like us. Reverence is the other thing. It’s choosing porousness. The willingness to be hurt, in the interest of being here.

Key Takeaways

Try less, resist less. The work is paying attention, not pushing harder.
Writer’s block usually means you’re empty. Fill up. Stop. The fix is upstream.
Two unblock hacks: skip ahead to a later scene you don’t yet understand, or introduce a brand-new character who knows your existing ones.
The rag bag guy. Carry a pen. Collect scraps. Trust that they’ll assemble.
Name the inner critic. Visualize him. Hold him in your hand. Send him to the library.
Three drafts. Child’s draft (terrible, fast), adult draft (cut firmly but kindly), dental draft (tooth by tooth).
Stronger verbs in the second draft. Not walked — stumbled, staggered, army-crawled.
Nickel words over quarter words. A confused reader is an antagonistic reader.
Only said in dialogue. No chuckled, enthused, proclaimed. Show character through rhythm, vocabulary, what their hands are doing.
Read dialogue out loud. You’ll hear the artifice.
If it’s literary, take it out. Trying to sound literary is the tell.
Take out the boring stuff. Take out the parts that make you look good.
Tell me a story. Make me care. Seven words. Memorize them.
The character needs something wrong with them. Perfection is uninteresting. Predicament is interesting.
Something at stake in the first few pages. If you mention the gun, it has to go off.
The Whole Foods test. Eavesdrop. Write down what people actually say.
The best writing prompt: There was a tree. Also: write 10 things you’ve forgotten, then 10 you remember.
ABDCE structure. Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending.
The climax doesn’t need a corpse. It can be the death of an illusion.
Write about the space between the notes. Silence carries the weight.
Sandwich edits. Bread, criticism, bread.
Worship good editors. They save you from yourself.

Claude’s Take

Lamott has been doing this for fifty years and it shows. The interview is short on novelty — most of what she says is in Bird by Bird, written in 1994 — but long on calibration. The advice is the kind you’ve heard in pieces and then it lands differently in her voice, because she still sounds like she’s figuring it out at 71.

Two things make this worth your time over the umpteenth podcast about craft. The first is the inner-critic exercise, which is psychologically more sophisticated than most writing advice. The frame — the voice kept you alive at five, thank it, then send it elsewhere — is closer to good therapy than to a productivity hack, and it’s hard to argue with thirty years of empirical results from her workshops. The second is the texture of her reading test. Three pages. Pleasing sentences. Nickel words. Dialogue you can hear. Trouble you recognize. It’s not a checklist; it’s a calibration tool. You can run any draft you’ve written through it.

The BS check: she occasionally drifts into California sermon mode — carbonated holiness, agreeing to be awakened — and if you’re allergic to that register you’ll wince. But she’s earned it. The talk about reverence at the end is not vague self-help. It’s a description of a writerly stance: porousness, willingness to be hurt, refusal to live behind armor. Anyone trying to write anything honest needs some version of this.

The single best thing in here is the prompt. There was a tree. It bypasses every defense.

Score: 9/10. The interviewer is good — Perell knows the work, knows when to shut up, occasionally adds a real observation (the I-spy walk, the Train Dreams line). Useful both for people who write and for people who just want to read better. Bird by Bird belongs on every shelf this hits.