Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott [brief]

A very pleasant book about the experience of being a writer.

Look: you will not learn to write by reading a book like this. You won't even improve as a writer. This book will only help your writing if it catalyses you into doing more writing, but it's more likely that reading a book like this is a displacement activity that you do instead of writing. To her credit, I think Lamott would agree with me on all this.

One thing I wonder about a lot is whether there's any way to get Deliberate Practice at writing that is, you know, 1% as fun as reading actually is. I've wanted to write (or to be a writer?, unclear which, and they're very different) for a really long time now, but I spend vanishingly little time actually writing, and even less of it honing my writing, which I understand intellectually is what I'd need to do.

I suspect that various of the social-writer-things (writing groups, writing retreats, writing workshops, expensive writing seminars) that I have long refused to do could (would?) help me out here, but I will presumably continue not to do them.