Since my post today in The Garage is all about writing, I thought I'd share one of my favorite books on writing.

Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life has some the best tips on and insights into writing I've read. My own copy is filled with pencil marks and dog ears where she has said something that really struck a chord. Many of her words are with me every time I sit down to write and through her books and writing classes at UC Davis, are with hundreds of other writers as well. But here's the kicker -- her work about writing is so good, that you don't need to be a writer to appreciate what she has to say.

Faith, love, pain and grace all filter though her teachings. She tells her students on the first day of class that all good writing is about telling the truth about ourselves; about connecting honestly about who we are and she does. Although I got this following blurb from the book cover, it really says it all -- at some point in the book Lamott shifts from talking about the "life of the artist to the art of life."

Here's an excerpt:

From Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

By Anne Lamott

"Interviewers ask famous writers why they write and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashbery who answered 'Because I want to.' Flannery O'Connor answered, 'Because I'm good at it.' And when the occasional interviewer asks me, I quote them both. Then I add that other than writing, I am completely unemployable. But really, secretly when I'm not being smart-alecky, it's because I want to and I'm good at it.

I always mention a scene from the movie Chariots of Fire in which, as I remember it, the Scottish runner, Eric Liddell, who is the hero, is walking along with his missionary sister on a gorgeous heathery hillside in Scotland. She is nagging him to give up training for the Olympics and get  back to doing his missionary work at their church's mission in China. And he replies that he wants to go to China because he feels it is God's will for him, but that first he is going to train with all of his heart, because God also made him very, very fast.

So God made some of us fast in the area of working with words, and he gave us the gift of loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature. My students at the writing workshops have this gift of loving to read, and some of them are really fast, really good with words, and some of them aren't really fast and don't write all that well, but they still love good writing, and they just want to write. And I say, 'Hey! That is good enough for me. Come on down.'"