Anne Lamott's Good Writing

I read recently in a review of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott, that she said that the very first thing she tells new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.

I was thinking about first words when I came across this review, because at the time I was preparing for a writing workshop that I had been asked to teach with a group of teens. I hadn't conducted a teen writing workshop, for several years and was feeling a bit uneasy. I had written at the top of my notebook page, "Writing is about painting pictures with words." That was about as far as I had gotten with my preparatory notes.

It was a familiar, comfortable group of words for me. I'd been using the image to open workshops for years for children through adults. I think I first used the sentence in a classroom of dyslexic pre-teens who were convinced that because they could not spell, could in fact barely read, that they could not write. It was an image they could grasp and in which they could find hope. We can all describe, paint pictures with words and if our image is not as finely crafted as that of other's or satisfying to our own ear, we can work it over.

I love Lamott's Bird by Bird and the truth of the statement "...good writing is about telling the truth." I'm not sure I would open my next teen workshop with it, however. I'm not sure truth gives teens much hope. But, I have been placing it at the top of my own pages of images for the last couple of months.
Copyright © 2007 by Martie LaCasse