Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird mixes writing craft with life advice and earns a 3/4 brilliant rating. The book teaches well and encourages writers, but repeats itself and dwells in angst. Pair it with Blake Snyder's Save the Cat for a cheap MFA alternative.
Righty-o, 1-minute book review. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It's, uh, instructions on writing and life. Right, verdict: brilliant to bollocks. I'm going to give this a full, uh, 3/4 brilliant. 3/4 brilliance. It's a good book, like, I really enjoyed it. Listen, read it because there's a funny story on the back and it's in the book. It's great. So it is really, it's a craft book, how to write. Some of the attitudinal things towards writing, it also applies to life. Uh, it just waffles a bit. It's not the, the pace of the book overall. It's just some of her expressions, they're repetitive. She goes on about a lot of angst and stuff like that. Obviously, you know. She deals with that stuff. That's all right, but I need to know that once, maybe twice. I don't need to know it 4 or 5 times. But in terms of the instruction on writing and the encouragement to writers and some of those things to look at, I think it's very, very much worth the read. Between this and Save the Cat, if you wanted to take yourself to an MFA without a $60,000 bill and a whole lot of people in purple hair and cat ears, then those 2 books are essential to understanding what it is to write overall. And, you know, Save the Cat, I think you could just about apply to everything. Like, even if you're writing a biography or a memoir, it's to be able to take some of those nuances in there and tell people and keep them engaged. So anyway, those 2. So Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, 3/4 brilliant.
