Anne Lamott is one of my favourite writers and the author of my favourite book on writing, Bird by Bird.

What I love about Lamott is her forgiving, generous spirit.  She is the proponent of the shitty first draft; it doesn’t need to be good, it just has to be written.  She understands that 90%  of writing is getting over yourself and your fear.  she is wise and smart and funny and whenever I read or listen to something she has to say I feel like putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Recently I listened to a seminar on writing Lamott gave back in the 90s entitled Word by Word.  Here are a few quotes from it:

On plotting:

You don’t try to impose order on it.  You don’t try to make it come out the way that would be most convenient if it did because then you’re not capturing life. Life does not ever come out the way way that would be most convenient for us.

These characters should not serve as pawns for some plot that occurred to you one night when you were sitting around drinking beer with your best friend that you thought Michelle Pfeiffer would be perfect for the lead.

Don’t worry about plot so much.  Worry about character.  Worry about who these people are.  Let what they say and do and how they carry themselves reveal who they are.  And by revealing who they are, that’s going to reveal who we are… who you are.  Be involved in them.  Be involved in their lives and who that are.  And then just keep asking yourself “now what happens?” because the development of relationship is plot.

On stakes:

There’s this one other terrible fly in the ointment besides needing to get the writing done every day, you do need tension.  You do need to get people to turn the page.  I hate that, but it’s true.  The way you do that… is you keep asking yourself “what’s at stake here?  What do these people stand to lose?  What is the most unbearable intolerable thing that they can imagine happening?” For those of us that are parents, it’s obvious. It’s  something happening to your child.  So once you set up that a parent’s life and focus and whole reason for being is tied up with his child or her child or his wife or her husband or whatever you’ve got some tension because you start thinking “oh god, no.  Don’t let the bad thing happen.” But without bad things happeneing there’s no story.

We want to see our own lives reflected in the stuff that we’re reading.  We want to see people who have had the bad thing happen and who have lived to tell.  We want to see stories of redemption.  We want to see stories where people get something that is life changing and that causes them to have an awakening, that causes chapter two to being their lives… We want to see the dramas of humankind acted out in these characters.

On protecting characters:

We have had so much to lose and have lost so much and [our characters] need to too.  It’s very tempting to protect your characters.  To not let anything bad happen to them.  And if you do, we’re probably not going to turn the page.  That’s the terrible news.