My Thoughts on Two Chapters from "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott's

After reading a few chapters of Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” I felt like I should write a reflection on the content of those chapters. The first of the two chapters I read was “Perfectionism,” which is basically about how trying to be perfect is actually harming a person’s ability to do anything such as writing since mistakes need to be made in order to improve. That chapter strongly believes that this idea of being perfect should be forgotten as it stated, “the bottom is that if you want to write, you get to, but you probably won’t be able to get very far if you don’t start trying to get over your perfectionism.” This idea represented by the chapter is something I can agree with as a person needs to learn from their failures in order to avoid making the same mistakes in the next attempt. Without that experience of failure, then no one would be able to improve themselves or even have the desire to seek improvement. There is this quote that supports this idea which states, “we need to make mistakes in order to find out who we are and why we are here - and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.”

Then there is the next chapter which is titled “Looking Around,” which is about developing a more open mind when it comes to writing. From what I understand, this chapter goes into great detail about how writers should avoid being narrow minded or they run the risk of their writing lacking any interest for others to read. An example of this comes from the chapter as stated, “all the images of violence and chaos and danger that cops represent.” This quote shows how some people associate cops with the idea of being violent or dangerous, probably due to some news articles about cop violence. In any case, the chapter attempts to tell the reader that they should be stuff such as stereotypes or narrow mindedness when it comes to writing.

Both of these chapters from Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” talked about ways to improve a person’s writing ability which I believe can actually help some people improve.