Letters
- Sometimes, writers get super stuck. One of Lamott's tips for getting unstuck is to try telling part of your story, or part of a character's life, as a letter.
- You can pretend you're writing to friends or to a kid, maybe to your own child if you've got one or a niece or nephew.
- Lamott gives some pretty convincing examples of people in her classes who got started this way.
- Then, Lamott admits that she used this technique when she got completely paralyzed trying to write an essay about her Giants fandom. An editor had asked her to write the piece, and she got panicky from all the pressure. She thought about trying to tell her son, Sam, about her fandom, but she was still kind of stuck. So, she asked a bunch of other sports fans what they recalled and then she started writing to Sam.
- It worked. Lamott explains at length all the things she remembered and how she told Sam about them. She even got to a great conclusion because she wrote it all up as a letter.