When it comes to editing advice, nothing has helped me more than Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I blindly bought a second-hand copy in 1998 and burned through two highlighters before giving up—all of it was important. In 2018, I met Anne Lamott and was able to get it autographed. If there’s a house fire, I’m grabbing that book and the cats.
This year, all that good advice came home to roost, literally.
After decades of fighting fate, I have become a bird nerd. At the start of the pandemic, I picked up a feeder since I was writing at home 24/7. I don’t know if hobbies are more nurture or nature, but I got both barrels.
My grandfather, Henry Miller Stevenson, was a highly respected ornithologist and author of the hernia-inducing The Birdlife of Florida. Of the 970 pages, 259 are the bibliography. There are no pictures. He said that the people reading it already knew what the birds looked like. It took him twenty years to finish the book, and when he stood up to show the acceptance letter to his secretary, he dropped dead of a massive heart attack.
Kinda hoping that doesn’t run in the family.
My father, when he wasn’t teaching, preaching, or coaching, was an exceptional taxidermist. He never met a duck he didn’t love, dead or alive. I spent a lot of years sitting beside him at his taxidermy desk, watching him work and picking up enough to turn out my own wonky-looking wood ducks.
Herbert Stoddard, prominent conservationist and one-time taxidermist for the Field Museum in Chicago, was a family friend and mentor. Family lore says that after Herb taxidermied a wild turkey, one of the most difficult birds to mount, he swore he would never do one again, not even if the president asked. Shortly afterward, he got a call saying that a wild turkey had been killed by a stray golf ball at Augusta. The golfer? President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Sometimes you do what you have to do.
When I started my backyard experiment, the squirrels immediately discovered and demolished the bird feeder which led to the Great Squirrel Retribution of 2020. While the squirrels won many battles, they lost the war. That victory led to a backyard version of the Marshall Plan in which I added a squirrel station alongside the tube feeders, seed trays, and bird baths. The cats, usually so ungrateful, haven’t stopped thanking me.
Recently, some mourning doves (the McLovins) showed up, poking around on the ground, looking for table scraps knocked loose by the flash mob of chipping sparrows that appears without warning several times a day.
Mrs. McLovin looks like she’s had a close encounter with a woodchipper, or maybe she has avian cancer and is undergoing especially intense chemo. She looks like something that the cat dragged in—literally. For the sake of this illustration, let’s say she’s molting.
Molting looks awful and uncomfortable because it is. Everything is itchy in places you can’t scratch. Molting birds can be aggressive and irritable, feathered little Jekyll and Hydes. In her book Arnie the Darling Starling, Margarete Corbo described Arnie as “a brilliant orator suddenly reduced by a catastrophic accident to the gibberish of infancy.”
It’s no fun, and molting isn’t limited to birds. Lizards and lobsters do it too, and when snakes molt they get extra bitey. You’ve been warned. But the most difficult and dangerous molter is a writer.
For example, you’ve spent a year writing a book, and then you realize you need to change things. Things you felt were working just aren’t. It’s not fun to realize you were wrong. It’s even less fun when you hear it from an editor at a major publishing house. Sometimes that voice at the other end of the line is Dwight Eisenhower, and you do what you have to do.
A writer’s molt isn’t pleasant. You look awful, and you feel awful. It’s stressful to shed your skin. You have to grow these words yourself—you can’t just copy and paste any more than a bird can pick up shed feathers and glue them on. Along the way, you’re going to sulk and snap at your mate who’s perched next to you, looking absolutely spectacular at the peak of his own career.
But guess what? It’s natural and necessary. No one gets things right the first time. Anyone who says that you should is lying and probably deeply insecure. And even if the work was the best it could be at the time, it could be better now. The book will be stronger for it. You’ll learn things that will make the next edit—and there definitely will be one—go more smoothly. Like molting, you just have to get through the process, and that takes time.
You have to take things one day at a time, one word at a time. “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”