"Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose."

"I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s 'Politics and the English Language,' with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s 'Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,' which advised me to 'avoid slovenliness of form' and 'eschew surplusage.'"

Writes Briallen Hopper, in "DOES IT HOLD UP?/Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block/Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace 'shitty first drafts.' But there’s more to the creative process" (TNR).

ADDED: Here's the full text of "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Sample: "In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick."

"I used to seek remarkable sites, events and people. Now I notice more supposedly unremarkable moments..."

"... which as it turns out are why we are here.... Dew, stars, Neal’s apricot tea roses — variations on a theme of sparkle.... On any unremarkable day, there will be a number of what Neal and I call Alzheimer-y moments, more and more — some funny, some scary.... The fear of missing out has lessened greatly. In its place, we have the fear of being pressured into gatherings we don’t want to go to. Luckily, at 65, along with your Social Security check, you earn the courage to beg off: 'It sounds lovely, but I have other plans,' those plans being to stay in, eat popcorn and settle into the current TV binge. Saying no to things that deplete or bore us becomes an essential skill. To me, nothing is more wonderful than to crawl between the sheets again, with a book and the cat, and to say our prayer: 'Oh, well.'..."

Writes Anne Lamott in "Living for the unremarkable moments/Age grants us permission to be curious about every ordinary day" (WaPo).

It was nice to run across that right after seeing these 2 articles: 1. "Popular tourist spot is 'total chaos' with cars stuck in 4-hour traffic jam: 'Horrific experience'" (NY Post)("The people who work in the Fairy Pools car park have said visitors say it’s like a warzone driving there"), and 2. "Was This the Summer European Tourism Reached a Breaking Point?/Overwhelmed destinations made high-season visitors the targets of a major tourism backlash" (NYT)("Protesters staging hunger strikes against tourism developments. Local officials threatening to cut off water to illegal vacation rentals. Residents spraying tourists with water pistols").

"To a great degree, in older age, ambition falls away. Such a relief. Appreciation and surprise bloom many mornings: Yay — I like it here."

"We more easily accept the world as is, even as we doggedly keep trying to save it, like aging Smurfs.... I’m not loving the cognitive decline, which can be so scary at the time but (for me, in the early throes) still ends up being sort of funny.... We finally realize we can’t save or fix or rescue anyone, even and especially those we most love. We stop rushing to people’s sides like arthritic St. Bernards with kegs of brandy strapped around our necks. We’ve learned that we cannot reshape their lives, get in there swinging and carry their pain for them. Now? We mostly listen. Sometimes, we lay some money on them. We are lighter than we’ve ever been...."

Writes Anne Lamott, in "Gentle is the joy that comes with age/It turns out the point of life is gratitude. And gratitude is joy" (WaPo)(free-access link/the illustration is especially nice, especially if you like cats used to express a pleasant way of life for someone who is no longer doggedly trying to save the world).

Lamott is only 70. Is she really in "cognitive decline" — the "early throes"? 

"We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss..."

"... staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed."

Writes Anne Lamott, in "Age is giving me the two best gifts: Softness and illumination" (WaPo).

The pastor's remark calls to mind Percy Shelley's "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats":

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife....

As for Snagglepuss... I'm old enough to get the reference, and I thought it would be easy to find a YouTube clip of the ham-actor lion on stage overdoing a death scene. I began to suspect that YouTube was censoring death. I don't know. I did find this collection of bad actors dying:

ADDED: Maybe Snagglepuss is an up-to-date reference. I see that he was reenvisioned in 2018 by DC Comics as a gay playwright in "The Snagglepuss Chronicles: The Need to Enter Stage Right":

Things maybe not said by Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr.

I'd like to be more of a good sport about this column by Anne Lamott, "Age makes the miracles easier to see." But it begins with a quote and it ends with a quote ascribed to a monumental man and, in both cases, I don't think the man is the source of the quote.

Maybe if I were older, I'd "see" some essential truth in ascribing this to Albert Einstein...

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

... and this to Martin Luther King Jr....

"Don’t let them get you to hate them."

These lines sound less like something the man would say than like something that would get passed around on the internet by people who like what it says and extra-like it because of the grand name that got attached to it.

The Einstein "quote" is discussed at Skeptical Esoterica:

"The perfectionism that had run me ragged and has kept me scared and wired my whole life has abated...."

"By 60, I didn’t care nearly as much what people thought of me, mostly.... I have no idea of the process that released some of that clench and self-consciousness, except that by a certain age some people beloved to me had died. And then you seriously get real about how short and precious life is.... Some weeks, it feels as though there is a sniper in the trees, picking off people we have loved for years.... I do live in my heart more, which is hard in its own ways, but the blessing is that the yammer in my head is quieter, the endless questioning: What am I supposed to be doing? Is this the right thing? What do you think of that? What does he think of that?... I laugh gently more often at darling confused me’s spaced-outed ness, although I’m often glad no one was around to witness my lapses...."

Writes Anne Lamott, in "It’s good to remember: We are all on borrowed time" (WaPo).

My excerpt reflects my taste. Go to the link if you'd like more of an old woman's poking fun at her physical flaws and her son's joking about taking away her car keys. That did not appeal to me, but I can tell by the style of the writing that Lamott knows her readers.

"'Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,' said Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, her book about writing."

"'It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life . . .' But it’s not a choice, really. I am sure that whatever stopped Harper Lee from writing a second book, she’d have preferred the impediment not to be there. And Salinger, in that pitiful late-snatched photograph, didn’t look like a man who was enjoying his royalty checks and a few rounds of golf. Nor could the problem have been resolved by stern self-admonishment and a determination to let things go next time around. Any perfectionist needs to stop being who they are, and that’s hard. I understand Prince and Dickens better than I understand the perfectionists."

Writes Nick Hornby, in "Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius" (Amazon).

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."

Said the writer Anne Lamott.

Quoted in the top-rated comment at "She wrote a novel with her cheating ex as a villain. Is he stuck in this role?" (WaPo)(a man cheated on his wife, left her when the girlfriend got pregnant, and regrets it while explaining that he "needed to feel something other than grief and sadness" after the first wife had a late-term miscarriage). 

The commenter continues: 

So suck it up, LW. You did what you did. Instead of letting it destroy her she took her pain and turned it into a survival guide that is helping others feel less alone. Yes, some folks probably know it's about you. You'll have to suck that up too. I'm pretty sure that's what you're mostly worried about, or you would have been around with your apologies a long time ago.

I don't completely agree with Anne Lamott, though if I had something I truly wanted to write and publish, I would rely on her statement to give me courage. But the truth is that no one can behave well enough to save them from the fate of looking bad in someone's novel! The novelist might be a victim, but I think most novelists are not victims. They are observers, often highly judgmental, and they're inclined to develop their raw material into the most interesting and amusing and agonizing form, not to treat everyone fairly. Yes, you "own" the raw material you gathered from others, and no one can stop you from applying the brutal force of your creativity to what you've got there, but don't imagine that these people deserve it all because they weren't good enough!

That said, the letter writer in that WaPo column sounds perfectly awful, and I'm willing to believe that he deserved it. You know, he owns what happened to him, including the fate of becoming somebody else's fictional character. He's free to justify himself to the hilt and destroy the first wife by whipping up his own novel. Maybe she should have "behaved better." But I'm thinking it would probably be a better novel if he dragged himself through the mud. 

ADDED: I hope WaPo made sure the letter was really from the ex-husband of the novelist. It makes him look so bad that I'm imagining one of his enemies sending that letter in as a way to draw attention to the book and lock him into the interpretation that the character in the book is really him.

"Help, Thanks, Wow."

Prayer, distilled by Anne Lamott.

"I'm doing fairly well for a grandmother who had a monkey tangled up in her hair last month on a ghat in Varanasi at sunset."

"Back home again now, I can report that in the midst of the zap that is India, with its heartbreaking, gorgeous, hallucinatory, dazzling, kaleidoscopic, mind-blowing grandeur and loud reality -- a place where having a monkey's hand trapped in your dreadlocks is pretty par for the course -- I came to three decisions about my own country."

I didn't know Americans were still trekking to India to learn about themselves and attain enlightenment and so forth, but let's see what 3 things Ann Lamott figured out. It's not: 1. India does not exist for the purpose of providing psychedelic experiences to Baby Boomers, 2. White ladies should not affect dreadlocks, and 3. I have had it with these motherfucking monkeys in my motherfucking hair.

It's:

1. "If the people on the streets of India can keep their humor and good nature, I can keep mine."

2. "[F]orgive John Edwards."

3. "I am going to trust this guy Obama."

I kid you not. Those are the 3 things Anne Lamott discovered in India, and I am definitely — without even going to India — keeping my sense of humor about that.