If You’re Lost in the Forest, Let the Horse Find the Way Home
Trust your intuition and give your work the time it deserves
A boy sits at the kitchen table. He is close to tears, freaking out about a school report on birds that he has to hand in the following day. He had three months to work on it, but hasn’t done anything yet.
His father notices the boy’s despair, sits down next to him, puts his arm around his shoulders and says “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
This boy was Anne Lamott’s brother, and the story was the origin of the book title Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
It’s a wonderful read. At times it brought tears to my eyes and at other times it made me laugh out loud. Both things not many books have managed to do. It is full of excellent advice, not just for writers, wrapped in great story telling.
It’s a book about creativity and writing, but also about how to approach life in general.
The title of this article is a direct quote from the book, and it is a theme that Lamott brings up repeatedly: the idea that most of us have lost our intuition and need to reclaim it.
Focus and concentration are important, but what we want is gentle concentration. Apply too much focus and you risk blowing out the flames of inspiration.
We have to give up some control to our inner voice again, not trying to forcefully guide it but allow our intuition the space it needs to unfold and take us to new discoveries.
This particularly applies when we feel stuck. Instead of forcing a solution or idea and getting even more stuck, it’s often best to quiet down and let our unconscious mind find the way.
We need to reestablish trust in our intuition. Trust in our horses to find their way home.
“Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck. You’ll sit there going, ‘Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?’ But it is trying to tell you nicely ‘Shut up and go away!’”
— Anne Lamott
This is closely linked to Graham Wallas’s Four Stages of Productivity model in which Incubation, the process of letting ideas ferment in your mind without conscious effort or interference, plays a key role in the creative process.
For fiction writing Lamott recommends not to impose a plot on the characters but instead to focus on the characters themselves, their feelings and relationships, and naturally let the plot develop from that. Again, letting intuition guide the process.
Like a child we should try to constantly be in awe and get excited about the world around us. While Lamott specifically applies this to overcoming creative blocks in writing, it equally applies to many other aspects of life and even business. Great product design is often driven by a childlike curiosity and an intuition based approach of the designer.
“Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force.”
— Anne Lamott
As I have written about in The Art of Taking Action, perfectionism can paralyze us and hinder progress. Instead we should adopt a process-oriented mindset.
This is exactly what Lamott’s father advocated to her brother when he suggested to “just take it bird by bird”. One small step after another and eventually the whole will take shape by itself.
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
— E.L. Doctorow
Often we need to write a lot of useless stuff to arrive at that one paragraph that should actually survive the edit.
Even if we had to write six pages of nonsense before that good insight appears, those six pages were an important part of it and can set us up for a productive run.
The same holds in life and business. Often we need to do a lot of seemingly useless stuff and “waste time” before arriving at the thing that actually sees the light of day in the end or that we deem useful. But it was all a part of the process.
The one key to better writing, just like playing an instrument or anything else worth doing in life, is consistent practice, even if (or especially when) it sucks.
And it will suck at times.
But as the research of Anders Ericsson and many others who are studying expert performance has shown, that’s exactly when growth happens. What distinguishes top performers from others is that they have the persistence to keep going despite adversity.
As Lamott points out, all good writers write shitty first drafts.
I have previously ranted about the obsession of publishing as much as possible, and given the responses I received this seemed to resonate with many people here on Medium.
Writing a lot is good, it’s practice, the only way to get better. But that doesn’t mean all of it is actually worth publishing.
One key aspect of writing that seems to be almost entirely ignored, especially in times of 30 day writing challenges, is the art of editing. It’s a crucial part of the writing process that is extremely under-appreciated.
Without striving for perfection, every piece of writing (or any other project we are working on) that’s meant to see the light of day deserves some iteration. We owe it to our audience, but also to ourselves.
It can be a very gratifying process in itself. Lamott compares writing a first draft to watching a polaroid develop. You’re not supposed to know exactly what it’ll look like until it’s done. Seeing our work gradually take shape, and often a different shape than we initially expected or intended, can be immensely satisfying.
There is usually something that compels us to get started with a particular project. But many other details, maybe even the main idea, only appear later in the process. We have to give them the time and space to naturally emerge.
Besides giving our work the time it deserves and allowing our intuition to play a key part in the process, another critical component is generosity and honesty.
“Good writing is about telling the truth.”
— Anne Lamott
Learning to write is about learning to give. Everything. Always. If we are liberal with giving our best, more good things will come plentiful.
Seth Godin also stresses this in his book Linchpin. The true secret of great art, in any form that may take, is the giving of gifts. And those who give honestly and generously will usually be rewarded even more generously.
We should look inside ourselves and find our own voice and the unqiue things we have to share with the world, even if that means exploring some places we’d rather leave unexplored, and being vulnerable.
On a more practical note, if we do come across a good thought, we should always write it down as soon as possible. It’s a terrible feeling to have a great line or deep insight and then have it slip away, just remembering that it was there, but not what it was.
I’ve experienced this feeling many times, especially while writing my longer pieces that took several weeks of writing and editing. I’d come up with something in the middle of the night and the next morning I only remembered that I had an idea, but not what it was.
After a while I got into the habit of always taking notes, even if that means having to get out of bed. I know I can’t get any rest anyway until I get up and take a note of that line or particular way of explaining something that suddenly comes to my mind. Same thing on walks (where actually a lot of my good ideas come to me), I simply have to stop and take a quick note in my Evernote app.
Committing thoughts to writing is like a little exorcism. If I don’t do it those thoughts just keep bouncing around in my head and distract me from other things I’m working on or keep me awake at night. But once they are safely stored on a piece of paper (or a hard drive) my brain can relax and move on.
As pointed out, many of the concepts here apply not only to writing but also to life in general. However, I really do think everyone can benefit from becoming a (better) writer.
Lamott mentions a point that is very related to my own motivation:
“Becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.”
Reading more thoroughly and thinking more deeply about what I read was my own original motivation to start writing and still plays a big role in my writing.
Beyond that, writing is a great tool for organizing thoughts as well as uncovering new insights.
It’s also a good practice and testing ground for letting our intuition roam freely again, and sharing honestly and generously with the world.
And once we have gained some experience of doing it in writing, we can apply these ideas to all other aspects of our lives.