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Monday, December 27, 2004
Cuizon: Writing small is writing
By Erma Cuizon
Bird by Bird
SINCE the SSD main paper is a different venue for my column, which for years was published in the Weekend magazine, perhaps I could give a background of the name, for the beginning of the year and since someone has asked.
Most readers, after the first column came out in the magazine, found the name strange; friends would mention the column but not its name. Some referred to it as “bird” with a quick laugh. Only few could guess why I chose the name. Others thought I was kidding. And fewer knew or have read the book after which the column has been named. This will be the second time I explain it.
For the reason of strangeness, and more that I don’t know, readers will never forget the name of this column. The new readers would be curious. That’s a good enough reason to stick to the name.
“Bird by Bird” is the title of a book on writing by American author Anne Lamott, essayist and fictionist, and I borrowed it for my column. In my interpretation of the book as a whole, Lamott is saying that if you want to be a writer, write, begin now, even if you have to begin small. Writing doesn’t have to be about something sensational or big. It should only mean something to you and there might be those who think with you or disagree, this is incidental. Lamott writes of “less weighty concerns,” says a review of her works, such as, humorously, “unfirm thighs, difficult hair and retail therapy.”
At the back of the book, where the blurbs are, is a quotation from Lamott. She tells a story about her brother, then a grader, who was assigned to report to class about birds. “We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he (the brother) was at the kitchen table close to tears surrounded by binding papers and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”
Lamott writes, “If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal.”
I know the world won’t stop turning for what I write in a humble column. I’m just expressing myself as I do in my fiction, with a sense of myself wherever I am, as long as I write. I could call the column Bit by Bit or in Cebuano, ginagmay, nothing hugely great, just bits. I’d write about a sneeze in the middle of traffic. Not necessarily about the Christmas vision, its intangibles or Christmas songs, nor about the nation’s fate 50 years from now.
In the cover of Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” are the pictures of a couple of birds, a cock and an egg about to hatch. After the title, the book promises “Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” (Emc@sunstar.com.ph)
(December 27, 2004 issue)
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