I really enjoy reading the advice Lamott gives in Bird by Bird. In the first chapter I read for class, “School Lunches”, I appreciated how Lamott’s message was to just get something, anything, onto the page. Her Polaroid metaphor helped me understand just how important the act of writing for the sake of writing is. You can never find out the true focus of a story or an idea if you don’t write it out. It seems like obvious advice, but I think all writers struggle with a little bit of a god complex. We think we’ll have the answers to all of our problems when it concerns writing, but in actuality, we have to mess up and write page after page of shitty first drafts. The second chapter, “Character”, was really enjoyable for me. I also love coming up with characters. Beyond prose and description and plot devices, characterization is probably my favorite aspect of writing. Creating characters is, essentially, creating a person that may or may not exist. Lamott tells us that characters take on certain aspects of yourself or people that you know, and that you’ll either love or hate them for it. I understand that. In one of my current projects, I’m writing a first-person narrative, a character named “Abel”. Personally, I’ve grown to hate Abel. This could just be because I get frustrated with the idea of perfectionism and the crippling self-doubt in the project, but I find Abel to be selfish, rude, and deceitful at some points. However, I didn’t set out to write Abel as a selfish, rude, or deceitful person at all. He was supposed to be quiet, kind, a little self-deprecating at times, but overall, he was just a regular person. This, I feel, is what Lamott means when she writes, “Just don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them” (pg. 53). You’ll never truly know your characters without a first draft, and as much as I dislike Abel, he’s also funny, and mournful, and trying his best within circumstances out of his control. None of these characteristics would’ve been discovered without writing and spewing words out onto a page.