Inspired

The book Bird By Bird taught me a lot about writing. one thing that particularly inspired me and changed the way that I wrote was the examples she used for writing in detail. Back in high school I was never very good at being descriptive in my writing. It was hard for me to put what I was seeing or a scene on paper and make it feel right. When Anne Lamott talked about looking through a one inch picture frame and describing everything you can see and then moving the frame until you have the whole scene really helped me. I used it in my narrative and it worked very well for me. I could describe the scenes and get everything I wanted down on paper. The part about school lunches helped me with description. The way she could describe school lunches and make it flow so well it was a very good frame work for me writing my narrative, and setting scenes. I also like the part of the story from pages 154-157; she tells a story about a young writer who went to a writing conference and had his work evaluated by Lamott and others in a small group. One women really tore into him and Lamott tried to give him advice and said to just write it again and see where he got from there. This helped me because a lot of times when I write I think that my peice is bad and I just want to throw it away and start over but this helped me just reevaluate my work and work through it instead of scraping it and starting over. I really liked the poem at the end of the section it went

"Above me, wind does its best

to blow leaves off

the aspen tree a month too soon.

No use wind. All you succeed

in doing is making music, the noise

of failure growing beautiful"

I like this poem a lot it helped me realize the more I work at something the better that the end product will be and the failing and shitty first drafts are just a part of the process and they help me make a good final product.

The other part that helped me was the chapter"Someone to Read Your Drafts." I never used to show my writing to anyone or have anyone edit it for two reasons: I thought it was bad, and I didn't want people to see what I wrote. but after reading "Bird by Bird" I realized that other people are a very useful tool for improving my writing and seeing how my paper can improve. It also brings up things I didn't think of on my own. When we were doing the peer reviewing it showed me interesting places to use dialogue and a place to cut out extra things that were confusing and took away from the point of the story. Bird by bird really helped me with being descriptive and editing my work. It was a very good book that I will reference in the future when I need some writing advice.