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Bird by Bird
By Todd Nelson
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Anne Lamott, a peerless inspirer of good writing, tells the story of her brother, age 10, agonizing over his science report on birds. “He’d had three months to write [it]. It was due the next day,” she writes. “He was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper 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.’”*
We’ve all been there, either as the report writer, the parent, or the teacher trying to coach and coax the project to completion. I remember my daughter struggling with just such a report, an English assignment requiring her to go beyond a synopsis of the plot of April Morning, to delve deeper than a mere summary of the list of characters and their actions. She had to step outside of her reading and writing comfort zone.
A seventh grader, Hilary was in a fairly typical, bumpy transit from her competent, concrete summaries of the text to the sub-textual observations her teacher was training the class to do. The time had come in her growth as a reader and writer to explore the abstract sense of things, the figures in language. It was a painful struggle. It seemed to her like an unfair trick—words could be about something other than what they say. Go figure!
“I can’t interpret what happens.,” she moaned. “It just happens. There’s no interpretation. It’s about what it’s about. That’s all there is to it!”
The parallel scene in my own schooling was also seventh grade, working long and hard one night to make the usual time-honored book report poster by pasting a collage of magazine photos on oak tag. Summarize the plot, illustrate the trials and tribulations of the characters in The Outsiders, add a few photos clipped from the newspaper—voila! Done.
When Mr. Katz returned my dutiful work, his comment suggested that I needed to interpret the story, think about “the why” of the story; think about the writer’s motivation in telling the story. Apparently, the story meant something other than what it said. The writer had been saying one thing and meaning another. It was about more than it was about. Go figure.
But what a thrill I felt in the subsequent moment of revelation when the “inner meanings” became clear to me and I left behind the illustrated book report (with fancy cover and huge titles) forever. A writer actually has control over this stuff? A writer isn’t just recording the way it happened? The story is something imagined! I realized. I took a giant leap towards critical examination of the craft of assembling words in a particular order for a particular reason.
We’re accustomed, of course, to a world that is carelessly worded. “It’s about…” is a constant refrain, as if meaning were something obvious, declarative, visible, agreed upon. And what Hilary was encountering, as we all do at some point, is the opening of the mind’s eye to the more that’s there. I don’t think even she thought it was just “about” a book report in 7th grade. The transition takes time, timing, and patience, like anything learned.
What would Mr. Katz’s progress reports have said about me, I wonder? “In Language Arts, Todd is taking it ‘bird by bird.’” They’re probably still filed away somewhere in my mother’s archive, and still classified. Parent-teacher conferences? “Now, about his handwriting….” Some things haven’t changed.
Todd R. Nelson is Head of School at The School in Rose Valley (Pennsylvania).
