creative writing of bird

How to Describe Birds in Writing (17 Best Tips & Examples)

Let’s spread our creative wings together and explore the art of describing birds in our writing.

Here is how to describe birds in writing:

Describe birds in writing by focusing on their feathers, songs, movements, and behaviors. Use vivid words like “iridescent” or phrases like “wings slicing the air”. Employ sensory descriptions, symbolic meanings, and cultural contexts to bring avian characters to life in your narratives.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know to write about birds in your stories.

Types of Birds in Writing

Table of Contents

Birds, with their vast diversity and striking characteristics, offer a rich palette for writers to paint vibrant scenes and convey emotions.

From tiny, flitting hummingbirds to majestic eagles soaring high, each bird carries its own symbolism and narrative potential.

In this section, we’ll explore a variety of bird types, each with a brief description that captures their essence, providing a broad canvas for writers to draw inspiration from.

• Sparrows – Small and unassuming, sparrows symbolize simplicity and the joy found in everyday life.
• Eagles – Majestic and powerful, eagles are often used to depict freedom, strength, and a bird’s-eye perspective on life.
• Hummingbirds – Tiny and energetic, hummingbirds represent joy, agility, and the incredible beauty of small things.
• Owls – Mysterious and wise, owls often symbolize knowledge, the unseen, and the secrets of the night.
• Robins – Cheerful and common, robins are harbingers of spring and symbols of renewal and new beginnings.
• Peacocks – Vibrant and flamboyant, peacocks epitomize beauty, pride, and the splendor of nature.
• Crows – Intelligent and adaptable, crows often represent transformation, adaptability, and the mysteries of life.
• Pigeons – Ubiquitous and resilient, pigeons are seen as symbols of peace, love, and the persistence of life in urban landscapes.
• Swans – Graceful and elegant, swans are often used to represent love, purity, and the beauty of monogamy.
• Canaries – Bright and vocal, canaries symbolize happiness, the power of voice, and sometimes, a warning.
• Penguins – Endearing and unique, penguins represent adaptability, survival, and the joys of companionship.
• Flamingos – Striking and social, flamingos symbolize balance, community, and embracing one’s uniqueness.
• Parrots – Colorful and vocal, parrots often stand for communication, mimicry, and the vibrancy of the tropics.
• Vultures – Misunderstood scavengers, vultures symbolize cleansing, renewal, and the cycle of life.
• Doves – Gentle and serene, doves are universally recognized as emblems of peace, hope, and spiritual messengers.
• Hawks – Focused and fierce, hawks represent vision, power, and the ability to navigate life’s challenges.
• Seagulls – Noisy and free-spirited, seagulls embody the spirit of the sea, freedom, and a carefree lifestyle.
• Woodpeckers – Persistent and rhythmic, woodpeckers symbolize determination, opportunity, and the heartbeat of the forest.
• Cardinals – Vibrant and spirited, cardinals represent vitality, faith, and the beauty of year-round color.
• Blue Jays – Bold and vocal, blue jays symbolize assertiveness, intelligence, and the vibrancy of life.

17 Best Tips for Describing Birds in Writing

Describing birds in your writing can be a mesmerizing way to add depth, texture, and symbolism.

Whether it’s the delicate flutter of a sparrow or the majestic soar of an eagle, birds can bring a unique dimension to your narrative.

Here are 17 bird-themed tips to help you weave vivid avian imagery into your writing.

Each tip is explored in detail, offering you the tools to make your descriptions take flight.

1. Feathered Flourish – Focus on Feathers

Feathers define birds. When describing them, delve into their color, texture, and what they reveal about the bird’s persona.

For example, depicting a sparrow’s feathers could go beyond mere color.

You might say, “The sparrow’s feathers seemed brushed by twilight; each a small canvas capturing the soft glow of the setting sun.”

This not only paints a vivid picture but also introduces a sensory aspect.

It links the bird to the broader canvas of the natural world, allowing readers to feel the warmth, see the hues, and sense the bird’s place in the world.

This attention to detail can turn a simple description into an evocative image that stays with the reader.

2. Melodic Metaphors – Use Birdsong

Birdsong is more than a sound; it’s an emotion.

When describing it, use metaphors and similes to create an emotional connection.

Rather than saying a robin chirps, you might describe its song as “a melody rippling like a gentle brook, cutting through the quiet of dawn.”

This method transcends mere auditory description.

It paints a picture, sets a mood, and plunges the reader into a moment.

It’s about crafting a scene that’s almost palpable, using the bird’s song as a tool to transport the reader to that tranquil morning, where they can almost feel the coolness of the dawn and the serenity it brings.

3. Winged Whimsy – Capture Movement

A bird’s movement can be highly expressive.

Whether it’s an eagle’s dignified glide or a hummingbird’s frenetic dance, capturing this can add dynamism to your writing.

Consider a description like, “The hummingbird hovered in the air, its wings a blur, as if stitching the very fabric of time.”

This kind of imagery does more than describe movement.

It infuses the bird with a magical quality, making it a creature not just of feathers and flight but of wonder and fantasy.

Descriptions like this elevate the bird from a mere creature to a symbol, a bearer of meaning, and an entity that transcends the ordinary.

4. Aerial Acrobatics – Highlight Flight Patterns

Flight patterns can reveal a lot about a bird’s nature and the mood of a scene.

For instance, describing an eagle’s flight can convey majesty and power.

You might write, “The eagle ascended with a regal ease, each wingbeat a testament to its dominion over the skies.”

This goes beyond the physical act of flying. It touches on the eagle’s symbolic power, portraying it as a ruler of its realm.

It’s about capturing the grace, the strength, and the sheer majesty of its flight.

Descriptions like these can elevate your narrative, turning a simple action into a powerful metaphor that reflects broader themes or emotions in your writing.

5. Nest Narratives – Describe Bird Habitats

Bird habitats can set the scene and context for your narrative.

Describing a nest, a tree hollow, or even a cliff ledge can add authenticity.

You could say, “The sparrow’s nest, a woven tapestry of twigs and leaves, cradled the tree’s nook, a testament to nature’s ingenuity.”

This type of description does more than just portray a physical location.

It gives insight into the bird’s life and survival.

It can create a sense of intimacy, pulling the reader closer to the bird’s world, and highlighting the intricate connections between creatures and their environments.

6. Beak Banter – Focus on Vocalizations and Calls

Bird calls and vocalizations can be very expressive.

Describing these can add auditory texture to your writing. For example, instead of just stating a crow cawed, you could write, “The crow’s call was a harsh caw, echoing like a laugh across the empty fields.”

This captures the nature of the sound and its impact on the setting.

It’s not just about what the sound is, but how it resonates with the environment and the characters.

It can set a mood, be it ominous, cheerful, or soothing.

The key is to use these sounds not just as background noise, but as active elements that contribute to the atmosphere of your scene.

7. Plumage Palette – Explore Colors and Patterns

The colors and patterns of a bird’s plumage can be striking.

Describing these can add visual vibrancy to your narrative.

Take a peacock for example. Instead of simply stating its feathers are colorful, try, “The peacock’s tail unfurled like a kaleidoscopic fan, each feather a vibrant brushstroke of nature’s palette.”

This kind of description paints a vivid picture.

It turns the bird into a living work of art, inviting readers to visualize not just the colors, but the beauty and intricacy of the patterns.

It’s about capturing the awe and wonder such a sight can evoke, making the reader pause and appreciate the natural splendor.

8. Avian Antics – Capture Characterful Behavior

Birds often display unique and characterful behaviors that can enliven your writing.

Describing these antics provides insight into their personalities.

For example, a raven solving a puzzle or a bowerbird decorating its nest demonstrates intelligence and resourcefulness.

Writing such as, “The raven, with a click of its beak, nudged the puzzle piece into place, its black eyes glinting with a hint of glee,” invites readers into the bird’s world.

It’s about painting a fuller picture, showcasing birds not just as animals but as beings with their quirks, habits, and intelligence.

By bringing these behaviors to the fore, you can add another layer to your narrative and engage your readers on a deeper level.

9. Sensory Symphony – Engage All Senses

Engaging all the senses can make your bird descriptions more immersive.

Describe not just how a bird looks, but how its feathers feel, how its movement sounds, or even how its habitat smells.

For instance, “The duck’s feathers were a tapestry of textures, from the silkiness of its undercoat to the oil-slicked toughness of its outer quills.”

By involving multiple senses, you can create a richer, multi-dimensional portrayal of birds.

It’s about giving the reader a sense as if they’re experiencing the bird’s presence firsthand, making the encounter with the bird more vivid and memorable.

10. Behavioral Beacon – Signal Seasonal Changes

Bird behaviors often change with the seasons, and this can be a poignant aspect to capture.

Migratory patterns, mating dances, or nesting can signal the passage of time in your story.

Describing these seasonal behaviors, like “With the first blush of spring, the robin returned, its song a cheerful herald of warmer days,” can add layers of depth to your setting.

It aligns the life of birds with the rhythm of the natural world, providing a backdrop that can reflect changes in your story or the internal states of your characters.

11. Symbolic Soaring – Use Birds as Symbols

Birds have rich symbolic meanings across cultures.

They can symbolize freedom, hope, or even foreboding. Integrate these symbols into your writing to add a layer of meaning.

For example, an owl in a story might not only be a background creature but also a symbol of wisdom or a harbinger of change.

“The owl perched silently above, its presence a solemn reminder of the wisdom that comes with age and experience,” illustrates how you can weave symbolism into your description.

This allows the bird to embody deeper themes and resonate with the reader on a symbolic level.

12. Dynamic Duos – Contrast with Characters

Use birds to create contrast or to mirror your characters’ journeys.

A caged bird can reflect a character’s own trapped situation or desire for freedom.

For example, “As she watched the caged finch flutter against the bars, its plight echoed her own sense of confinement.”

This approach does more than depict the bird; it uses the bird as a reflection of the character’s emotions and circumstances, offering a powerful emotional connection and a mirror to human experiences.

13. Rhythmic Renderings – Mimic Bird Movement in Prose

The rhythm of your prose can reflect the movement of birds.

Long, flowing sentences can mimic the graceful soaring of a swan, while short, choppy sentences can echo the flitting of a finch.

For instance, “The heron glided over the water—a slow, seamless waltz—its reflection a ghostly dance partner below.”

By mirroring the rhythm of bird movements in your sentence structure, you provide the reader with a literary echo of the bird’s physical grace.

This creates a harmonious reading experience that’s almost like watching the bird in motion.

14. Habitat Harmony – Align Descriptions with Environment

Birds are deeply connected to their habitats, and reflecting this in your descriptions can add authenticity.

Describe how a bird interacts with its environment, like a woodpecker tapping into a tree or a seagull wheeling over the ocean.

You might write, “The woodpecker drummed against the old oak, a staccato rhythm that seemed to breathe life into the forest.”

Such descriptions root the bird in its setting, giving a sense of place and showing the interconnectedness of nature’s tapestry.

15. Perspective Play – Vary Your Viewpoint

Changing your narrative perspective can offer a fresh angle on bird descriptions.

Describe a bird from far away, then up close, or even from the bird’s perspective. For example, “From afar, the hawk was a mere speck against the vast blue. Up close, every feather was a detail in a masterpiece of evolution.”

This technique can add depth and scale to your descriptions, offering a richer visual experience and drawing readers into the scene more effectively.

16. Emotional Echo – Reflect Mood through Birds

Birds can be used to echo the emotional landscape of your story.

A joyful scene might be accompanied by the lively chatter of sparrows, while a somber moment could be underscored by the solitary call of a crow.

Writing that “The crows’ solemn cries seemed to mourn the day’s end, as shadows gathered in the silence,” can tie the atmosphere closely to the narrative, using the birds to deepen the emotional impact of your scenes.

17. Cultural Context – Weave in Folklore and Myth

Birds often have a place in folklore and myth, and tapping into these stories can add a layer of richness to your writing.

Integrate cultural stories or myths about birds to give your descriptions a deeper resonance.

“The raven, long a harbinger of fate in local lore, watched from atop the church spire, its black eyes knowing.”

This not only gives your bird descriptions a more profound significance but also ties them to the cultural and historical context of your setting.

Check out this video about how to describe birds in writing:

30 Best Words to Describe a Bird in Writing

Here are 30 of the best words to talk about birds in writing.

• Plumage-rich
• Resplendent

Each of these words holds the power to conjure a specific image or feeling about birds.

Use them to craft descriptions with precision and emotion.

Moving beyond single words, crafting phrases that reflect the nuanced behaviors and attributes of birds can add an evocative layer to your writing.

30 Best Phrases to Describe a Bird in Writing

The following phrases blend imagery and emotion, ideal for enhancing your narratives with finely-tuned bird descriptions:

• Wings slicing the air
• Beak glistening at dawn
• Tail feathers fanning out like rays of the sun
• Eyes gleaming with intelligence
• Song piercing the morning haze
• Silhouette against the twilight sky
• Claws gripping the branch with silent authority
• Nest cradled in the crook of a tree
• Feathers ruffled by the whispering wind
• Shadow flitting across the ground
• Plumage blending with the autumn leaves
• Beating wings stirring the calm air
• Calls echoing in the forest canopy
• Flight cutting through the mist
• Dance of courtship, intricate and full of zeal
• Reflection skimming the surface of the lake
• Perched like a sentinel atop the old pine
• Darting through the underbrush
• A flash of color in the verdant meadow
• Aloft in the updraft, effortlessly suspended
• A symphony of calls at dusk
• The soft cooing at day’s end
• Feathers coated in the morning’s dew
• A swift chase over the water’s surface
• Migratory arc etched across the sky
• Preening meticulously, every feather an artifact
• The sudden stillness before the strike
• A solitary silhouette on a weathered fence post
• Inquisitive gaze from within the thicket
• The serene float on a tranquil pond

3 Examples of How to Describe Birds in Writing (in three Different Genres)

Let’s look at examples of how to describe birds in writing in different kinds of stories.

Fantasy Genre: The Enchanted Eagle

In the twilight-shrouded realm of Eldoria, the Great Eagle, guardian of the Whispering Woods, unfurled its shimmering wings. Each feather shimmered with ethereal light, casting prismatic glows against the gnarled branches of the ancient trees. With eyes like molten gold piercing through the dusk, the creature let out a call that sang of ancient magic and secrets untold. Its talons, relics of a bygone era, grasped the mystical Stone of Sight, which pulsed in harmony with its heartbeat. The Eagle soared upwards, the air around it alive with whispers of enchantment, its majestic form a silhouette against the canvas of the constellations.

Mystery Genre: The Clue of the Crimson Cardinal

Detective Lila Grey stood motionless, the crunch of the autumn leaves underfoot breaking the silence of the morning. Her gaze fixed on the flash of red that flitted above the crime scene—a cardinal, its vibrant plumage a stark contrast to the somber mood. The bird’s keen eyes seemed to scrutinize the area, darting from the body to the blood-stained note left behind. As it sang a trilling melody, Lila pondered if the cardinal was an unwitting witness to the misdeed. The way it circled, almost protectively, around the oak tree, hinted at a secret only this avian bystander knew.

Romance Genre: The Dance of the Doves

Amidst the gentle hum of the garden party, two doves cooed softly, their gentle ballet a mirror to Eleanor and Thomas’s newfound love. The birds, with their silken white feathers, glided side by side, wings almost touching, embodying the tenderness shared between the two hearts below. As the pair nuzzled beak to beak, so too did Eleanor and Thomas lean in for their first, shy kiss, their audience of doves bearing witness to the silent promise of enduring affection. In the soft glow of dusk, the lovers and doves alike were wrapped in the warm embrace of a love as pure as the driven snow.

Final Thoughts: How to Describe Birds in Writing

With feathers unfurled and tales told, remember that the sky’s the limit when describing our avian friends in writing.

And if this flight of fancy has your creativity soaring, wing your way through our trove of articles for more literary inspiration.

Read This Next:

• How to Describe a Beach in Writing (21 Best Tips & Examples)
• How to Describe a Bed in Writing (10+ Tips and Examples)
• How to Describe a Train in Writing (30+ Words & Examples)
• How to Describe a Dog in Writing (100+ Examples)

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Research on Birds)

Search for creative inspiration

19,903 quotes, descriptions and writing prompts, 4,965 themes

bird - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing

• a childhood pet
• conservation
• hummingbird
• swooping bird

A little bird, in a bold cap of golden feathers, alights upon the blossomed twig.

It is as if each beat of the bird's wings forms part of a sonnet to the air.

The bird in flight gives its colours to the sky and yet leaves it as a fresh canvas, ever part of the onwards moment.

The bird has a bonny bright soul, a jocund spirit, that is so in keeping with the leaves that dance all around.

The bird comes in her earthy hued browns, that rich yet gentle shade that reminds me of the woodlands. She hops over the wands of grass as if she had springs in those delicate feet, as if the world was her trampoline and she moved to a sweet birdsong she was yet to sing.

High above them a bird flies on invisible strings, eyes trained on the grassland below. In those tall blades that flatten with each gust of wind is dinner, nesting materials or both. From so far below Tyler can't tell what species it is, though by the way it hovers his mind tips towards hawk. Against the sky, bluer than the previous days, it is a silhouette.

Amelia stands so still, eyes following the bird in flight. She watches as children do, with that look of love and awe. Her eyes stay with the bird, the beating wings capturing her mind in the most calming of ways, the same way soft waves on the beach do. It's as if she's in love with nature, with life itself, and I pray this life nurtures that sense in her, keeps her as whole as she was born.

A bird, regardless of its plumage, sings right to the soul of any blessed to hear.

Sign in or sign up for Descriptionar i

Sign up for descriptionar i, recover your descriptionar i password.

Keep track of your favorite writers on Descriptionari

We won't spam your account. Set your permissions during sign up or at any time afterward.

25 Writing Prompts About Birds

Ever watch a bird soar through the sky and think, “Man, I wish I could be that free?”

Well, maybe you can’t sprout wings yourself, but you can definitely capture that feeling of freedom – on paper!

Birds are fascinating creatures, from the tiniest hummingbird to the majestic eagle.

They’ve inspired artists and storytellers for centuries, and guess what?

They can inspire you too.

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting out, these bird-themed prompts are sure to spark your imagination and get those creative juices flowing.

So grab your notebook, settle in for a comfy writing session, and let’s take flight!

25 Writing Prompts about Birds

An unexpected friendship: Imagine a world where humans have the ability to understand and converse with birds. One day, a young girl befriends a rare bird species which leads her into a path of environmental activism. In your story, explore the development of this unique friendship and how it impacts the young girl’s life and the environment around her.

The silent city: In a bustling city that never sleeps, suddenly all the birds vanish. The once vibrant mornings are now eerily quiet, and people start to notice the absence of their feathered friends. Your task is to delve into the mystery of the disappearing birds and reveal the underlying reason behind this phenomenon.

Memoirs of a migratory bird: Write a story from the perspective of a migratory bird on its first journey across continents. Experience the challenges, the beauty of diverse landscapes, interactions with different species, and the instinctual drive to reach a destination. Your focus should be on the internal and external journey of this migratory bird and how it perceives the world.

The last song of the extinct bird: In a future where a specific bird species has gone extinct, scientists discover a way to recreate their song through pieced-together recordings. This song sparks an emotional reaction worldwide. Your narrative should revolve around the global impact of this last song and how it influences decisions related to conservation.

The Birdman: Consider a story about a lonely man known as the “Birdman” who has the uncanny ability to heal injured birds. His quiet life is upended when a corporation threatens his home, a sanctuary for his avian friends. Examine the struggle between the Birdman’s fight for his friends and the corporate world’s indifference to nature.

Bird-watcher’s discovery: A veteran bird-watcher in a small town stumbles upon a bird species never seen before. This discovery could potentially change the town’s quiet life and bring in scientists, media, and tourists. Your task is to tell the story of this sudden change and how the bird-watcher and townspeople react to it.

The Avian Rebellion: In a dystopian world where humans have become overly dependent on advanced technology, birds suddenly begin to exhibit unusual intelligence and seem to be rebelling against human activities. Craft a narrative around these events, shedding light on the consequences of our reliance on technology and the birds’ fight for survival.

The message carrier: A story set during the time of war where all modern communication methods are inaccessible. A soldier, stranded behind enemy lines, relies on a trained carrier pigeon to deliver a message that could save thousands of lives. Your narrative should focus on the incredible journey of this bird and the suspense around whether it will successfully deliver the message.

The Bird Whistleblower : Picture a corporate employee who, on her daily park visits, starts communicating with a bird. This bird reveals to her secrets about illegal corporate activities harming the environment. Craft a narrative surrounding how she becomes an unlikely whistleblower, using the information given by her avian informant.

The Unheard Chirps : A child has the extraordinary ability to hear frequencies of sound that others can’t. One day, he starts hearing the faint chirps of a bird species thought to be silent. Your task is to elaborate on how this child’s ability affects his life and could potentially rewrite ornithological books.

The Secret Language of Birds : In a world where every bird species speaks a unique and sophisticated language, one scientist makes it her life’s work to understand and document these languages. Your story should explore her arduous journey of learning and the profound knowledge she gains from these feathered creatures.

The Bird that Saw the Future : A mystical bird in a small rural community is believed to possess the power to foresee the future. Its peculiar behaviors and routines are interpreted as omens. Your narrative should focus on how the bird’s predictions influence the behaviors and beliefs of the community.

The Lost Parrot : A parrot who has traveled with a nomadic tribe for generations goes missing. The tribe believes that their fortunes are tied to the parrot and embark on a journey to find it. Write a story about this extraordinary journey, illustrating the deep connection between the tribe and the bird.

The Cursed Crow : A series of unfortunate events befall a town, seemingly triggered by the arrival of a solitary crow. The townsfolk are quick to label the crow as cursed, but a wise old woman suspects there’s more to the story. Explore the truth behind the “cursed crow” and the town’s superstitious beliefs.

The Bird Photographer’s Dilemma : An award-winning wildlife photographer is on a mission to capture the perfect shot of a rare bird. However, she must face the moral dilemma of prioritizing the bird’s welfare over achieving her goal. Your task is to delve into this dilemma and the consequences of her decision.

The Swallow’s Nest : A swallow builds its nest every year in the eaves of an old, abandoned house. When the house is slated for demolition, a young boy takes it upon himself to save the bird’s home. Write about the boy’s campaign to save the swallow’s nest and the impact of his actions on his community.

The Bird of Paradise : In a remote tropical island, a rare bird of paradise is believed to possess magical healing properties. A pharmaceutical company learns about this and tries to capture the bird for its research. Your story should focus on the local community’s effort to protect this sacred bird and their homeland from exploitation.

Bird’s Eye View : An adventure-loving bird has the unique ability to transmit what it sees to a young girl’s dreams, giving her an exciting view of the world from the skies. However, one day, the bird witnesses a crime. Your story should focus on how the girl uses these dream-visions to solve the crime.

The Hummingbird’s Garden : A hummingbird finds a once-lush garden now dying due to negligence. The bird decides to rejuvenate the garden and rally other creatures in this effort. Your story should narrate the challenges the hummingbird faces and how this mission brings the garden’s inhabitants together.

The Falconer’s Legacy : The last falconer in a rural village is eager to pass on his legacy to the new generation. However, he struggles to convince the young people about the importance of this ancient practice in the age of technology. Craft a narrative highlighting the falconer’s struggle to preserve tradition in a rapidly changing world.

Echo the Mockingbird : A mockingbird named Echo has the uncanny ability to mimic any sound it hears. One day, Echo starts mimicking the whispered secrets of the townsfolk, leading to chaos. Your task is to narrate this humorous and chaotic scenario, while also unraveling the deeper impacts of uncovered secrets.

The Owl’s Wisdom : An old owl is regarded as the wise elder in a forest community. When a natural disaster threatens their home, the owl must use its wisdom to lead them to safety. Your story should focus on the owl’s leadership and the various animal characters’ roles in this crisis.

The Last Flamingo : In a world ravaged by climate change, a single flamingo’s appearance in a northern city becomes a global sensation. Write a narrative about the various interpretations and reactions this event evokes, underscoring the urgent issue of climate change.

The Phoenix Rising : A small, fire-ravaged town adopts the mythical Phoenix as a symbol of their resilience. A mysterious, fiery bird’s appearance just as the town is rebuilding sparks hope among the residents. Your story should encapsulate the power of hope and symbolism in the face of adversity.

The Peacock’s Pride : A proud peacock, known for its splendid display, loses its vibrant feathers due to an illness. Write a tale about the peacock’s journey of overcoming its vanity, rediscovering its worth beyond physical beauty, and inspiring others in its community.

Founder and Chief Content Curator @ Digital Phrases

I'm a writer, words are my superpower, and storytelling is my kryptonite.

by Joe Bunting | 46 comments

Start Your Story TODAY! We’re teaching a new LIVE workshop this week to help you start your next book. Learn more and sign up here.

The window in my living room opens out to a wide field that ends in a line of trees. The birds live in the trees and in the mornings they fly out over the field.

There's something about birds.

Sometimes you see a yellow one or a blue one. Mostly, though, they are shades of white and brown. I watch as two white birds chase each other, loop around, and fly out of my view.

Some people spend hours and days watching birds. I imagine it sharpens their senses. Their eyes learn to pick out flashes of movement in the overwhelming green of the canopy. Their ears learn the distinct song of each bird.

I, however, am content to watch the field from my living room window, and if a bird flies through my view, so be it.

Bunting is what you do in baseball (as I have heard all my life). It is that red, white, and blue half-circle of fabric they put up to play patriotic. It is also a family of birds.

My instinct tells me birds feel like hope and joy and a oneness with nature that I've experienced only a few times. They are also synonymous for my soul.

And once, I wrote about a bird in a story and was shocked at how much the bird, my “character,” moved me. Just now, a yellow bird flew the whole length of my window.

What do birds mean to you?

PRACTICE Birds can add a touch of detail that lights up your writing with life. Practice writing about birds. If it would help, go outside with a notebook and a pen and look for them. They're everywhere. As you describe them, think about what they communicate subconsciously. Write for fifteen minutes . Post your “bird watching” in the comments.

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

46 Comments

I adore birds. I have a feeder on my back deck just outside my dining room window. It attracts blue jays, wrens, cardinals, titmouses, chickadees, and gold finches. Watching them fly in to grab a nibble then fly away is a delight. Sometimes they take a rest on the crook that holds the feeder and spend a few moments primping and preening in the sun. There is something soothing and fulfilling about watching them. I think of their evolutionary orgin and enjoy the notion that I have dinosaurs on my back deck.

Dinosaurs on your deck? What a wild idea.

I adore birds. I have a feeder on my back deck just outside my dining room window. It attracts blue jays, wrens, cardinals, titmouses, chickadees, and gold finches. Watching them fly in to grab a nibble then fly away is a delight. Sometimes they take a rest on the crook that holds the feeder and spend a few moments primping and preening in the sun. There is something soothing and fulfilling about watching them. I think of their evolutionalry orgin and enjoy the notion that I have dinosaurs on my back deck.

I love how birds just do their thing. All day long. Yesterday it was windy and when I left I saw three large birds, likely hawks, who were just playing in the gusts of wind. They hung in the sky with their wings open, nearly motionless, and then suddenly one would dive towards the earth, only to pull back up at the last second and loop around and join his friends again in the wind currents. All of this activity and it seemed effortless. He must have taken 3 flaps with his wings. Beautiful.

Mmm… that sounds beautiful.

Joe! Your blog is great. I’m going to start doing the exercises and posting what I write. Sooo here’s the one from today!

It’s about 10:30am  and I’m sitting at a picnic table on Gainesville college’s campus looking for birds. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with birds for some time now. They annoy me at 7am and at the beach, but they are beautiful to watch. 

In a way, I feel as though I can identify with birds. Baby birds hatch and stay in the nest for a while getting loved on and fed by mom. Then when she feels they are ready, she pushes them out of the nest so they can learn to fly. Some birds begin flying right away while others take a little while to adjust to the wind, altitude, being without mom, etc. I feel like one of those birds that struggles to fly. I’ve taken a few nose dives at the ground and managed to not break my neck when I crash. I’m starting to feel the wind blow a little bit stronger, which makes me feel like it’s time for me to take a swan dive out of the nest again. I’m scared and I’m anxious but it’s about time I step, or rather, fall into the world. 

I go to just about every home Auburn football game. Auburn has a big bird rehabilitation center at the university and every home game they have one of the eagles, either the golden eagle or the bald eagle, fly around the field to pump up the fans and the players. That’s always my favorite part of the game. The raw beauty and power of raptors is intense. These birds soar like it’s the easiest thing on the planet. Maybe that’s why as humans we absolutely had to figure out how to fly. It gives you a sense of freedom.

The eagles that fly  at Auburn represent numerous things to me- strength, speed, beauty, freedom, and grace to name a few. It amazes me to see these huge birds flying among 86,000+ people with wingspans of six feet, three inch talons and a sharp beak that could seriously injure a person and yet they soar around, spot the dead rat their handler is flinging around and dive to catch it, all to the screaming of the thousands of fans. The fans may not realize it, but the eagles have the freedom to fly up and out of the stadium at any time. 

If the eagles fly off, they probably won’t return. Why can’t I be less like a baby bird and more like an eagle?

It’s suzie by the way haha. Hope this wasn’t too long.

Hey Suzie! Thank you so much for practicing. You’re great.

My favorite paragraphs are the last three, especially the parts where you describe the eagle soaring over the football stadium. I would have loved to see more about what you were seeing as you sat at that picnic table bench (weren’t you cold?).

It was our last night in San Antonio and we were enjoying a delicious dinner on the patio of our hotel, right on the river in the middle of the city. It was hot. Now that’s an understatement. It was over 100 degrees at 5:30 in the evening. But we convinced the waiter to leave the door open so that the AC blew out and around us as we enjoyed the evening light by the water.

There were about a dozen mallard ducks paddling in the water just across the pathway from us, doing their duck thing. Diving and ruffling the water off their feathers, pecking at each other, occasionally waddling up onto the shore.

All of a sudden, a large gray flying creature whooshed down to the edge of the dirt, hovering over the river, dipping his head in for a drink every so often. As he rose back to a sitting position, I whispered to my husband, “I think that’s an owl. Can I possibly be right?” Owls aren’t known for being out and about before nightfall. Owls aren’t known for sitting on the ground. Owls aren’t known for hanging out with ducks.

But, sure enough, it was an owl.

And the ducks were alarmed, quickly moving away from where this bird of prey was getting his evening libation. I had my camera, but not my big lens, so I zeroed in as much as I could with the wide angle, and snapped off four shots, one of which showed him with his big, owl face looking at the camera, while his body faced squarely in the opposite direction. Owls have always fascinated me with their swivel like ability to move their heads. And, of course, their ability to grind up and regurgitate small living creatures, leaving a ‘tell’ of white debris in their wake.

But this owl was not interested in capturing dinner. I think maybe he was hot – and he needed a drink. He hung around for a good 15 minutes, flying up into a tree across the river where we could no longer see him. But lots of other people did! Over the course of those minutes, a small crowd of ‘fans’ gathered, snapping away with their cell phones. Our surprise visitor had created a small sensation along the riverwalk. And we enjoyed getting a glimpse.

(You can catch your own glimpse of this amazing creature here (You’ll need to scroll to the bottom of the post for this picture: http://drgtjustwondering.blogspot.com/2011/09/shifting-gearsmoving-towards-retreat.html )

I love this story. I remember reading about it on your blog a little while ago. Your writing style is good because I can see it, I can see the river and the ducks and the patio and the owl in the tree. I’m sure your writing voice sounds just like you telling a story over dinner.

This is a quick bird one … while riding home on the commuter train last week.

A flash of bright Yellow Cuts the vertical of the rain

An oriole Singing To the percussion of the rain

Technical fault three minute stop Interlude on the six o’clock train

Through three degrees of separation – windowpane, wind, wheels clattering

The even song Whistling Onward the train through monsoon rain

This is good. I don’t really know if you’re talking about a bird that looks like lightning, or if the lightning allowed you to see the bird, or if the lightning reminded you of a bird. And that might be okay.

This poem works as an interesting metaphor, something beautiful in the midst of a day filled with rain and delays on the train, beauty in the middle of darkness. I like it.

Were you intentionally trying to rhyme the last line of the longer stanzas? I’m not sure if you need it. Rhyme is really hard to use in modern poetry. Most of the time it makes the poem look amateur and hokey. I don’t think your poem is hokey, but you have to be careful.

Thanx for the comment. Not trying to rhyme the longer stanza’s … just came out that way… but you’re right. They need some work. Anyway, it was just a quick one. I stick them in a draft box and re-polish them when I’m stuck with the novel.

It’s funny how these things happen. You posted a revised version on your blog right?

Frolicking through nature I spot a passerby A tiny red fox, cunning and sly.

Climbing the rocks a soft eagles cry he’s running away…

Power terror…

beauty…

Goodbye Mr.Fox A valiant fight But today You lose to this supreme, mighty bird of prey.

I meant to put an extra line between ” a valiant fight” and “but today,” because, well, it just sounds a little awkward at the end like that.

I loved this! This was an amazing poem.

I loved this exercise because the book I have coming out in November is called, “In Everything, Birds.” It contains 75 poems that some how, some way have birds in them, maybe only 6 times as the actual theme.

the birds crept in twilight padding on the wet grass.

I lay with my head on the concrete staring at them.

The red robins were my favorite because they always seemed to turn toward me and stare. Something about being stared at with their beedy eyes, while their chests heaved up and down. But in that time they would sometimes look for a minute or more, just staring. Sometimes it hopped closer to me.

Eventually it would turn away, pounding its beak into the clay soil and ripping out grass til its prey wiggled wildly in its beak. Then it’d jump then let out its wings and flap them as it would go up and up till it swooped into a thick tree where it disappeared.

I see other birds too sometimes. But they never look at me. Just stay for their breakfast bugs and then off to the tree to chit chat with their friends across the block.

Now there are no birds in the yard. But there is a whipering chatter, quiet but fervent, like whispers during church. Just the empty grass, and the empty plants, and empty trees. Not even the bees are up to make their entrance. The sky is a chilly blue. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to watching for these birds who could care less about me. But here I am. Listening to their singing. They have started singing. They are so excited. They can feel the rush of dawn coming. They know the time for their eggs to hatch is coming. And soon they will have have helpless little babies clinging to their nests, which they will feed, and they will love. That is nature. Everyone loves their babies.

Their singing, like small hymnals, like children running. I want to feel excited too, I want to sing out just because I am alive and sun is coming. I am almost annoyed to be witnessing their divine faith.

Being a frail bird is accepting death can snatch you up any night, so morning is a celebration always. I poke my finger into the dirt, slowly pull a blade of grass from out the dirt. Its long root lay flat in my hand. I toss it aside, it lay lost forgotten to god as it will dry and wither away.

My plants will appreciate that though, kill a few blades of grass, make some more room for their roots to flourish.

http://writeitonmywall.wordpress.com/

Beautiful piece of prose. Great descriptions and use of language. There is so much beautiful color within this piece. The flow is rather smooth. As I was reading this, I felt like I was a participant in the experience. I like the way you take your readers on a beautiful, captivating journey through the use of the spoken word. A lovely piece of writing all around.

“Hey Kristi, do you want to go outside now?” I say. Of course, she doesn’t reply. How could she? She has cerebral palsy and has had it ever since she was born nine years ago. Of course, she understands us, my husband Max, our youngest, Daphne, who’s seven, and I, but we can only understand her through vain attempts to ask her ‘yes blink once’ and ‘no blink twice’ questions repeatedly until we get what she wants to say. She blinks twice. (No) “Come on Kristi, the weather’s perfect!” I say. “Yeah, come ON Kristi!” asks Daphne. Kristi blinks twice, her grey eyes (she gets those from Max) dull and uninterested. “Well, I don’t care whether you want to or not, but you are going to go outside and get a breath of fresh air for once, instead of being cooped up inside all the time!” I say determined. Kristi blinks once but stares at me icily, which is her way rolling her eyes and saying “Fine.” I push her wheelchair with Daphne chattering about her day happily and carefully roll it down the steps of our porch. We walk like this until we reach the park. Usually it’s filled with happy toddlers and fussy moms, but today the new amusement park is open, and we didn’t want to make Kristi feel bad because she can’t go on any rides, so we decided to stay home. We sit on the grass for a little while in silence until Daphne pulls my arm excitedly. “Look Mommy!” she says, cheeks flushed red with delight, “It’s a canary!”

I turned my head to Daphne’s chubby finger and there it was, a canary, hopping closer and closer to us, cocking its head curiously. I look at Kristi as she sits, her eyes, shining, focused on the slowly advancing bird. “Oh Mommy, can we feed it?” Daphne asks, in a, I admit, slightly whiny tone. “Oh dang,” I mutter, careful to omit any swear words teachers might later ask in a condescending tone where Daphne could have learned it because she certainly didn’t learn it at home, right? “I forgot to bring food, I’m sorry sweetie.” “Aw man,” Daphne sighs, and I can see the disappointment on Kristi’s face. It seems the canary does too, and as its beady eyes scan Kristi’s face, it hops forward and tilts its head almost sympathetically. Then, suddenly, the canary flutters suddenly upward towards Kristi’s hand, which is resting on the arm of her chair. We all hold our breaths, and Kristi stays so still she doesn’t even blink. Then the canary starts hopping around Kristi’s wheelchair, her arms, and on her head. It then promptly flies away, but not before it delivers a mini white slimy bomb on my head, which sends Daphne rolling on the floor and Kristi cracking the smallest smile. But as I watch the canary fly away, I’m not mad, but thankful that it was kind enough to make my Kristi’s day.

*please comment on my story and how to make it better **P.S. this is not a true story (well, maybe it is for someone else)

Prompt #9: Birds Usually Gather Where Lots Of People Are Around By Kiki Stamatiou a. k. a. Joanna Maharis

Birds are generally found in a group where there are lots of people around, such as a parking lot. On many occasions when I go to one of my local Walmart stores with my aunt, and my grandmother, we see lots of birds near our or hovering nearby. Generally, they are looking for food.

We often saw many of the birds when we used to go to fast food places years ago. I remember sitting in our car in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant, and my aunt would toss out some French fries onto the ground near her car.

Several little birds swarmed around aiming to get even a piece of the French fries.

My aunt got out of our car, walked around in the parking lot, scattering the pieces of French fries to be sure many of the birds could enjoy them, instead of having them fight over the fries.

Upon leaving the parking lot of the fast food place, we stopped off at one of our local Walmarts where there were other birds nearby. We had some French fries left, so my aunt tossed them out to the birds who swarmed around them and nibbled on them.

I enjoy watching the little sparrows prance about when they’d walk. I remember remarking to my aunt how cute I thought they were. I got out of the car, and took pictures of them with my cell phone. My aunt used her Smart phone to take pictures of the birds.

Birds are such gentle little creatures. I couldn’t help but fall in love with them. I’ve always loved birds since I was a small child.

During my high school and college years, my family had a parrot my dad named Mr. Alex. We taught it to speak Greek, in addition to speaking English. I taught it some Spanish, because I was studying the language during my junior and senior years of high school. Mr. Alex was a nice form of company. He enjoyed listening to music from our stereo, while I helped my mother with the housework. In particular, he liked the music of New Kids On The Block.

We often placed his cage in our living room. He sat on top of it when we’d let him out from time to time. He watched television with us. Mr. Alex loved to watch music concerts, especially when it came to watching New Kids On The Block perform. He even learned the words to their songs and would sing along with them.

Whenever my dad would talk on the phone, Mr. Alex would imitate him. My dad talked fast in his manner of speech. Our parrot learned to do the same through imitating him.

He was such a sweet little bird, even though he’d wake up early in the mornings whenever I had a day off from work, and he’d kick his cage. In doing so, he woke me up with all the noise he was making. I told him if he didn’t stop kicking the cage and start behaving himself, I’d take away his music privileges. All and all, I’ll always remember the special times we had together.

When my parents sold our house and moved down to Florida, my brother sold Mr. Alex to a pet shop to make sure he’d get a good home. I couldn’t take the bird with me, because I was staying at the college dormitories when attending college. Pets weren’t allowed other than fish. My brother and other relatives weren’t able to take him either, because they were working, and didn’t want to be woken up at night by him.

© Copyright, Kiki Stamatiou, 2015

He looks down on us in the garden. Surely we are not the target. But something has caught his attention and he has swooped in to check out the ground to see if there is something down here he wants. It is usually a zarigueya, or opossum, or sometimes a dead rat. It might even be an iguana, but I think I would have seen a dead iguana, even in the neighbor’s yard. And the aroma of a rotting iguana is not one you can miss. Still, if a turkey vulture is in your tree, you can bet there is something dead on the ground.

This particular bird sits very still, barely moving but for his head, slowly perusing, searching. His great gray talons spread wide and grasp the branch; you clearly would not want those talons grasping for you. In fact, the mere presence of a turkey vulture, while visually awesome, makes you check your position, making certain there is a close retreat should the need arise.

His steely body curves upward to a large, proud chest and continues to the thick neck and head that is, frankly, a bit too small. The coal-black feathers gather neatly against his back; when he is in flight you wonder how he folds those long wings into such a compact space.

Sitting in the tree above my garden, he casts a pallor that makes even the flamboyanes lose some of their fiery red color. There is not a cat to be seen, and I feel I should retreat, as well. But I cannot; I am drawn to the bird’s god-like magnificence. I don’t know if any civilization has used the turkey vulture as a great spiritual symbol, but it would be entirely appropriate to elevate the bird to one of respect and reverence.

I attempt to snap a photo or two, but the photos are inevitably unsatisfying. Turkey Vultures land with their backs to the sun so as not to allow the bright rays to interfere with their sight, so photos are backlit and the subject is dark. Clever. I have many photos of turkey vultures, but all of them unsatisfying.

But then, I’m not certain turkey vultures were put on Earth for my gratification.

I don’t see any birds, but from my chair in front of the open window I hear three of them. The first one is conversing with pauses between words. Wae, wae, wae, waewae, wae. It’s the one farthest away. I have to push my ear through the house to hear it. The fresh, cool air is propelling his sound into my home. I’m sure I’ve heard this bird or its kin before.

The second one is in this tree somewhere. The tree is I think some kind of oak and is healthy and changing. Its blooms hug it near its base more firmly than at the top. It’s the biggest thing in a yard full of bushes and shrubs. The bird, hidden in this sea of green leaves somewhere, is chirping a standard song where each note extends for minutes unless you lean in to really hear the parts where she changes her tune as she inhales and exhales. heehooheehooheehooheehooheehooheehooheehooheehooheehoo.

Somewhere in the middle there is a third crying out, making a noise that sounds like the radiation that comes from the sun in a desert. It wails for ten or twelve seconds at a time before it stops. If it were a visible wave it would be a bell – starting soft, getting loudest in the middle, falling back into silence. aaaeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeaaa. It reminds me only of heat. It’s the sound I’d expect to hear if I pressed my face to the pavement of a highway in the summer. It is a new cup of coffee, set aside for a moment or two. It’s the pool of grease on the center of the pizza slice and the dark backseat of a parked car after a wedding. Every few minutes a few of those steaming sounds overlap, like there’s a second or third one making the same hot sound, but I know it’s a single bird. He doesn’t always stop to do other things before starting again.

The dove cooed softly to the other doves, eating the many different seeds I had put in the bird feeder this morning. I watched as they gathered around the food, almost in a civilized manner, taking turns eating the stale seeds. The fluttered their white feathers, hopping around and looking every now and then for any signs of danger. I held very still, watching them from the window. Suddenly, a noisy cardinal came swooping down towards the bird feeder, spooking the doves a bit. The cardinal, and a few others of its kind, started colonizing the food. The doves quickly moved away, letting the scary red birds eat. These birds, I noticed, were a lot different from the doves. They pecked at each other, eager to eat their food. A lot of times, they would quickly snap their heads around, looking for every other bird that wanted their food. I thought the doves were much better.

Stretching her arms, she yawned. A bird dropped by her right on the benched. She shoo’ed it away.

“What a fine morning,” she said.

Her eyes dropped and her head started falling down. A bird perched on her head and she jerked right up.

“Shoo.” Her hand waved it away. It titled it’s tiny little head at her. “Shoo, you stupid bird, shoo.”

She yawned again. The bird flew away.

The fresh wind blew again and she found her eyes started closing again. She rested her head on the soft cradle of the bench. The birds were chirping. She breathed slowly and deep.

One deep inhale. One deep exhale. One deep inhale. Hold. One deep exhale. Hold.

A bird fluttered by her hands. She continued breathing. The bird danced towards her shoulders. Exhale.

She heard more flutters of wings. Inhale. Louder chirps. The bird on her hand stopped moving. It scratched softly on her skin. A small smile appeared on her mouth.

Then it pecked at her.

Her eyes shot wide opened. She glared at the bird. Then her eyes raised up as she saw the school of birds surrounding her. They were bobbing their tiny little heads and chirping.

She waved her hands around them. They didn’t move.

“Hell?” she said.

The little bird on her arms scratched her again. A sigh escaped her lips.

“That’s nice,” she said.

The birds started flying away. All that’s left was the bird perched on her hands and about 4 or 5 slowly closing in on her.

She shoved her hands inside her pockets. She found dry stale crackers. She grinned at the birds.

“Okay you dumb birds,” she said as she cracked the crackers in tiny little pieces. She threw the food on the ground. “Here you go!”

The birds didn’t move.

They went closer and she started to look like like kind of feathered weido. She scratched her head.

A cup of steaming coffee appeared before her face.

“Didn’t know you were into Disney stuff,” he said.

She took it and took a sip. “You’re late Jon.”

“Good morning to you too,” he said.

She blinked. She looked around. The birds were already gone.

She frowned. “This coffee stinks.”

Seagulls surround my house. That’s logical, given that I live by the seaside. Yet the profusion of these pseudo-pigeons of the port is more that I could have expected when I moved here.

Driving around the corner, I glimpse a whole flock of seagulls resting on a huge garbage container. I can barely see what’s underneath, for it’s swamped in white and grey feathers. For all the shrieking and flapping those birds make, they are remarkably cool when I drive by. A few of them give me the eye. They’re not afraid of humans; nobody comes to slaughter them; they feed on the overflowing rubbish bins and the discarded remains of fast-food meals. The trail of faeces they leave behind is rivalled only by pigeons’. They are the classic residents of the city, as timeless as the craggy cliffs and the waves.

It’s not unusual for a gull to sit on window sills, engaging in staring contests with humans and their pets. The braver ones fly through open windows, daring to question what lies inside; they get chased out by frightened housewives and immensely loyal cats.

A handful of other species make themselves comfortable in the gulls’ wake. Tiny brown and grey ones picking at invisible crumbs; the occasional blackbird; the ever-present pigeon, who feasts on everything; sparrows which love to hop around instead of fly.

it twaddled on its flimsy feet, looking for its next location as it sat upon the twig of an olive tree. its tail looped around its body and began chirping in a burst of excitement. the evening sun was blocked by a single ball of cloud, there was a gentle breeze which carried with it dry autumn leaves. the bird had already disappeared and it felt empty,

Birds of a feather flock together.

Thats the idiom that comes to mind as I watched the pidgeons gathered on the ground looking for seeds in the grass.

Those wild birds. They risk danger and captivity by coming near humans and for what? For the sake of food.

I cant decide whether thats brave or just stupid.

I smile to myself, remembering a song about about poisoning the pidgeons in the park. I found its dark humor hilarious and it was a well written song.

Pidgeons are so weird, I thought as I watched them take flight when I came a little too close to them. How do they sync their movements so well together. Do they take choreograhy lessons?

I laugh at the idea of birds taking dance lessons from humans. Most likely it was the other way around and humans learned a thing or two about dancing from the pidgeons instead. With their little swaggering bodies, they always looked ready to throw it down and have a dance fight.

Birds have a life of their own. They do not act the same way that people act. The birds rest in the green trees and chirp with each other. As they fly they slap their wings and dive down to the ground below then. Once on the ground they search for bugs, worms and just grass to eat. They search for sticks and once located they grab it and fly into the tree where they have staredt building a nest. Their home will have eggs and soon the eggs will crack and little baby birds craw out of the egg shell and grow up to fly away like their parents to repeat the lives of their parents.

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Submit Comment

Join over 450,000 readers who are saying YES to practice. You’ll also get a free copy of our eBook 14 Prompts :

Popular Resources

Best Resources for Writers Book Writing Tips & Guides Creativity & Inspiration Tips Writing Prompts Grammar & Vocab Resources Best Book Writing Software ProWritingAid Review Writing Teacher Resources Publisher Rocket Review Scrivener Review Gifts for Writers

Books By Our Writers

You've got it! Just us where to send your guide.

Enter your email to get our free 10-step guide to becoming a writer.

You've got it! Just us where to send your book.

Enter your first name and email to get our free book, 14 Prompts.

Want to Get Published?

Enter your email to get our free interactive checklist to writing and publishing a book.

• Writing Resources: Bird by Bird

by Melissa Donovan | Aug 27, 2024 | Writing Resources | 2 comments

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Bird by Bird is a classic book on writing. You’ll hear about it in writer circles, at workshops, and it will appear on book lists by some of your favorite authors. This book had been sitting on my to-read list for years by the time I got around to reading it, and now I can see why it’s so popular.

“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life…as it lurches by and tramps around.” — Anne Lamott,  Bird by Bird

When I read books on the craft of writing, I’m looking for one of two things: I want to learn something new that helps me improve my writing, or I want to be inspired and motivated to get some writing done.

In the first few days of reading this book, I got a lot of writing done! Every time I finished reading a chapter or two, I would hurry over to my desk and type furiously. So this book definitely fulfilled one of my two criterion for what makes a good book on the craft of writing.

Overview of Bird by Bird

“There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

The full title of this book is Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life . It’s part writing advice, part memoir. However, the memoir material is different than what you find in Stephen King’s On Writing , which focuses on his life as a writer, whereas Lamott delves into her personal life, sometimes sharing stories that relate to her career and experiences as an author and other times sharing stories from her life that are unrelated to writing, although she might have used them in her writing.

This is a useful book for general-purpose creative writing, with chapters that cover first drafts, false starts, writer’s block, and knowing when you’re done. This book also does a good job conveying information about the life of a writer, although it’s only one writer’s experience and certainly not representative of all.

Most of the material is applicable to various forms of writing, but there is a slight emphasis on writing fiction and memoir, with chapters on character and dialogue and various bits of advice about drawing from your lived experiences for writing projects.

As a traditionally published author, Lamott offers some useful anecdotes about her experiences with agents, editors, and publishers. These aren’t presented explicitly as career advice, but they do offer some valuable insight. For the most part,  Bird by Bird focuses on craft rather than the publishing and marketing side of things.

I’ve read dozens of books on the craft of writing. At some point, you stop picking up new bits of advice that you can apply to your writing. For me, it’s getting harder to find new insights about general, creative writing. That doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to learn — there’s always more to learn! But I’ve already picked up (and integrated) most of the general advice floating around out there. So for me, a book like this serves as a refresher. Therefore I think it will provide fresh wisdom for newer writers while providing reminders for more experienced authors.

And refreshers are necessary. I’ve often been perusing a book on the craft and come across some bit of writing wisdom that I’ve known for a while, but I’ll gain a deeper understanding of it, or I’ll realize that it’s just the technique or method that I need for some project I’m currently developing.

“You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer — you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act — truth is always subversive.” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Although I found this book inspiring and motivating, some sections felt dated (referring to late-night talk-show hosts of the 1990s); and some of the jokes either fell flat for me, or I would find myself wondering if something was meant to be taken literally or as a joke. Having said that, I got a lot out of this book. I found the personal stories interesting, and as mentioned earlier, the book made me want to do some writing — and that’s always beneficial.

Bird by Bird

I would definitely recommend  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life   to anyone who’s interested in creative writing. Whether you’re looking for tidbits about the life of a writer, seeking new writing tips and techniques, or just want some inspiration and motivation to fuel your writing, you’re sure to find something useful within the pages of this book.

Get your copy at Amazon

I think you are spot on eith your review. It has been years since I read Lamott and then I did so reluctantly. When I finished, I was sorry about procrastinating. I thought then that what I got was not so much about craft (not like I got from King, who cites Lamott) but morale building and writing differed from publishing.

I think there’s often expectation from craft books to learn a bunch of new things about the craft, but sometimes we just get refreshers or inspiration or insight into other writers’ processes, all of which are valuable. Thanks, Samuel!

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Subscribe and get The Writer’s Creed graphic e-booklet, plus a weekly digest with the latest articles on writing, as well as special offers and exclusive content.

Recent Posts

• Writing Tips For Staying on Your Game
• Punctuation Marks: The Serial Comma
• Getting Creative with Essay Writing
• Tips for Crafting Language

Write on, shine on!

Pin It on Pinterest

How do you write the sound of a bird?

Writing out the sounds that birds make in text can be a challenging task. Unlike human speech, bird vocalizations do not follow regular language and grammar rules. However, with some simple techniques, you can accurately represent bird sounds in writing. In this article, we will look at different methods for writing bird sounds and noises, when it is appropriate to write out bird calls, common bird vocalization spellings, and how to choose the right descriptive words to capture the essence of a bird’s voice.

When is it Appropriate to Write Bird Sounds?

There are several instances when writing out the sounds of birds can be useful:

• In fiction writing, bird vocalizations can help set a vivid scene and create a sense of realism for readers.
• In non-fiction nature writing, phonetically writing bird calls helps identify species for readers who may not be familiar with the birds.
• In birding field guides and resources, written out sounds help birders accurately ID birds by call when they cannot see the birds.
• In poetry and lyrics, mimicking bird vocalizations can establish mood, tone, and rhythm.
• In transcriptions of bird language research and data collection.
• When differentiating between the songs, calls, or alarm cries of various bird species.

Writing out bird noises is especially helpful for auditory learners who comprehend information better when it is verbalized. Overall, writing bird vocalizations allows writers to add sensory details to their work and helps readers engage with content on a deeper, more immersive level.

Common Methods for Writing Bird Sounds

There are several common methods writers use to phonetically spell out the sounds birds make:

Direct Phonetics

This method spells sounds out exactly as they are heard using letters of the English alphabet. For example:

• Chickadee: “chick-a-dee-dee”
• Whip-poor-will: “whip-purr-will”
• Killdeer: “kill-deer”

This strategy works best for bird vocalizations that have clear, distinctive sounds easily replicated with letters. However, some subtler or more complex bird noises can be difficult to capture accurately using direct phonetics.

Descriptive Words

Writers can also use evocative descriptive words that mimic attributes of bird vocalizations:

• Owl hooting: “Whoo, whoo-hoo”
• Hummingbird buzzing: “zzzhh, zzzhhh”
• Woodpecker drumming: “rat-a-tat-tat”

Words like buzz, hum, twitter, whistle can all communicate a vivid sense of how a bird call sounds. This method offers more flexibility but can also feel less precise than direct phonetics.

Combination Approach

Many writers opt for a combination approach that utilizes both direct phonetics and descriptive words:

• Chickadee: “tse-day-day”
• Red-winged blackbird: “conk-a-ree”
• American crow: “caw, caw, caw”

This blended method provides the specificity of phonetic spelling while leveraging strategic descriptive words to better capture intricate bird noises.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia refers to words that phonetically imitate or resemble the sound they describe. Some examples of onomatopoeia bird calls:

• Cuckoo: “cuckoo, cuckoo”
• Loon: “hoo-hoo-ooo-hoo”
• Sapsucker: “tuka, tuka, tuka”

When the vocalizations of a particular bird species already have an associated onomatopoeic word or phrase, this can be the simplest option. However, onomatopoeia may not work well for all bird calls.

Guidelines for Writing Bird Sounds

Here are some helpful guidelines for writing bird vocalizations:

• Listen carefully and identify unique qualities of the sound like pitch, cadence, rhythm.
• Start simple. Resist the urge to use complex phrasing and just capture 1-3 syllable mimics.
• Read sounds aloud to test if they replicate the bird call.
• Spell sounds as they are heard naturally rather than forcing them into conventional English letters.
• Use hyphens and commas to indicate pauses, breaks, and stops.
• Consider capital letters for increased volume and emphasis.
• Give context and tips about the bird’s tone to clarify the feeling of sounds.

With practice and an attentive ear, these tips will help writers develop effective phrasing to accurately convey bird vocalizations.

Common Bird Call Spellings

Certain phonetic spellings have emerged as conventional shorthand for translating the most common bird sounds:

Birds of Prey

These represent some of the most identifiable vocal spellings that can help differentiate birds by sound.

Choosing Descriptive Words

Beyond just phonetic mimics, writers should also consider strategic adjectives, verbs, and adverbs to describe the tone and quality of bird vocalizations. Helpful descriptive words include:

• High, melodic, low, booming, shrieking, rumbling
• Rapid, frantic, sluggish, slow, sputtering, brisk
• Clear, sharp, eerie, raspy, hoarse, cracking, whispery
• Loud, blaring, booming, deafening, faint, muted

Pairing phonetic text with strategic descriptors creates vivid images in readers’ minds and conveys informative details about the feeling of the bird’s unique sounds.

Mimicking Difficult Bird Calls

Some species like cranes, swans, and tropical birds make more intricate vocalizations that can be challenging to capture with basic phonetics. Here are some tips for tackling tricky bird calls:

• Listen to professional audio recordings to identify patterns.
• Note transitions between different sound elements.
• Break longer calls into shorter segments.
• Use hyphens, commas, and punctuation to indicate pauses.
• Use creative phonetic combinations like “reek”, “skraa”, “kleow”.
• Compare to instruments; trumpet, whistle, siren, etc.

With an attentive ear and plenty of practice, even difficult bird sounds can be converted into descriptive text.

Examples of Bird Vocalizations in Writing

To illustrate effective phrasing, here are some examples of writers incorporating bird sounds into poetry, prose, and field guides:

The early bird trills its sweet-sweet, sweet-sweet dee-dah-did-it sings the little bird morning, morning brrrrings! chew-chew, chop-chop trills the robin at work

– “Bird Poem” by Kristine O’Connell George

First came the peculiar cry of a green plover, that seems to be pronouncing the word pill-will-willet; then the louder shriek of a sandpiper, uttering the syllable weet; then a faint sseep sseep , from the bosom of the fragrant ferns.

– Excerpt from Wake Robin by John Burroughs

Field Guide

Pileated Woodpecker Call: Loud, ringing, reverberating; somewhat resembles maniacal laugh; “uk-uk-uk-uk-uk”

Cedar Waxwing Call: Very high, thin, lisping; almost a hiss; “szeee” or “tszzeeeee”

As you can see, there are many creative strategies writers employ to capture the sounds of birds. With practice, you can develop your own effective style.

Writing out the calls, songs, and alarm cries of birds requires patience, an attentive ear, and a vocabulary of phonetic language, but it can be mastered with some fundamental techniques. Listen closely, start simple, use agreed-upon call descriptions when appropriate, and sprinkle in descriptive verbs and adverbs. Phonetically spelling bird vocalizations allows writers to vividly recreate birds’ sounds in text form and provide informative details that engage readers and create an immersive experience. So grab your pen and field guide, find a flock of feathered vocalists, and start translating those tweets, trills, coos, and caws into descriptive writing.

Related Posts

What bird is similar to the tufted titmouse, do snowy owls bark or hoot, what is the description of a parasitic jaeger, how do you bandage a bird’s wing, leave a reply cancel reply.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

How to Write an Essay on Birds: 9 Interesting Areas to Focus

How to write an essay on birds? There are some interesting facts you can write about. Information about birds can be an excellent source for a creative essay. Birds are found in every part of the globe, creating a large variety of species to write about, especially when well-researched. Interesting bird facts can create wonderful topics for an essay, including unique theses that a student can explore and develop an enjoyable piece of writing.

When writing an essay about birds, it’s important to consider researching these facts, especially their biological composition. For instance, one can write an essay about birds by highlighting some distinguishing characteristics between bird species. This type of writing would be most interesting in English, particularly due to the distinctive nature of scientific descriptions. You can also include a short note about their biological differences in each section to make the essay more appealing.

Interesting Facts for Writing an Essay on Birds

Feather distinction.

One of the most interesting topics for an essay on birds is their feather diversity. Birds have distinctive appearances in structure, order, and color. Feather distinction is one of the distinguishing characteristics between species. However, some species have different colors based on various biological and environmental factors. For instance, some bird species have distinctive differences between the feathers of a male and a female. In other cases, the differences may appear disorderly but are worth investigating.

Migration marvels and global distribution

Some bird species are migratory, traveling between regions, even continents. Since the migrations coincide with seasons, they create some migration marvels worth writing about. For instance, seagulls migrate between winter and summer, running from the cold weather. During their travels, the birds create awesome displays of their traveling routines, mating habits, and hunting traditions. This topic is most suitable for nature lovers, people willing to investigate many species for their beauty and scientific facts.

Nesting prowess

You can also write an essay on birds based on their architectural techniques. Birds build their nests differently depending on their size, primary predators, and location. While the weaverbird prefers loosely hanging tree branches, the penguin can only nest on the ground near mountains and ocean shores. The structure and composition of the nest also differ significantly, creating an array of architectural designs to compare. Any person interested in birds understands the importance of a nest, especially during mating and incubation.

Egg laying facts

Birds are oviparous or egg-laying animals in English. Different species lay different egg sizes, colors, and shapes. They have distinctive characteristics based on their egg-laying habits, including location and responsibility. Some birds, such as the Cuckoo , exhibit parasitic behaviors in brooding. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, forcing the foster parents to incubate a foreign egg and feed an adopted chick afterward. Egg-laying habits can be quite an impressive topic for an essay on birds, especially due to the amount of scientific evidence available online.

Sociocultural rituals

Another interesting concept you can write about birds is their social lives. Like humans and any other living thing, birds socialize on different occasions. Some live in large groups, while others are loaners. However, all birds have distinctive mating rituals. Some specials engage in colorful, elaborate courtship traditions. They display marvelous moves to attract mates, using their wings and, in some cases, their avian architectural prowess to assert dominance. Birds engage in long relationships that resemble marriage in humans. The bald eagle is a good example of a bird species that marries or mates for life. The differences in sociocultural behaviors can create an amazing topic for a good essay.

Cognitive capacity

Some bird species are worth writing essays about, especially those that have shown high intelligence. Students can investigate intellectual abilities in birds to find impressive topics for their term papers and final research. You can even hire an experienced academic writer to help with the information gathering and drafting. For instance, CustomWritings professional essay writing service is a prominent helper with over ten years of experience supporting students’ journeys. While intelligent avian is attractive, finding accurate and reliable supporting evidence on such a topic can be daunting. With professional assistance, you can access scholarly articles and integrate findings from research in your essay on birds.

Vocal abilities

Birds are also known for their vocalization capabilities. While students cannot transcribe bird songs into writing, investigations into singing abilities can constitute a good essay. Most importantly, one can research birds’ ability to vocalize or mimic different sounds. Some bird species are known for their vocalization, especially when imitating humans and other birds. Others can produce relatively unique sounds, making them an attractive piece of marvel for analysis.

Scholars and researchers tend to focus on the biological differences between birds. Notably, biologists have invested significantly in understanding the genetic differences for classification and knowledge gathering. With this information, students can develop exciting topics for their essays or end-term research papers. Another interesting point of focus is the survival instincts and abilities of birds. While some species rely on camouflage for safety, others are birds of prey. The details about each bird’s genetics can help explain distribution and preferences.

Life expectancy

Similarly, the biological differences explain the differences in life expectancy. It’s difficult to ascertain the length of life in wild birds due to constant migration. However, scientific evidence suggests that some birds live longer than others. A good essay writer would consider analyzing the reasoning behind these differences and identify genetic and environmental characteristics affecting the length of life.

How Do I Write an Essay on Birds?

The best approach for writing an essay on birds involves conducting sufficient research. A good student would start by identifying an interesting fact to write about birds and research it. The information gathered from the knowledge search can then be used to create a comprehensive essay topic with a compelling thesis. The interesting facts about birds can also be a good hook for the introduction. The essay on birds should be organized professionally, adopting a basic paper structure with an introduction, body, and conclusion.

Writing an essay on birds should also incorporate scientific and scholarly evidence. A good writer understands the need to integrate external sources with supporting and counterarguments. This approach will make your essay more interesting to read and easy to grade. Your professor may be impressed by your capacity to research a wild topic and investigate evidence found in scholarly works. Besides, supporting your arguments with reliable and verifiable arguments makes your writing believable. You can also impress the reader with ideas corroborating your knowledge of birds. For instance, you can integrate information about mating in an essay about birds’ vocal abilities to demonstrate a connection between the two issues. In the end, your essay about birds should be compelling and informative.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Want to adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open practices.

A Bird Came Down the Walk Author : Emily Dickinson ©1862

A Bird came down the Walk — He did not know I saw — He bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass — And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass —

He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all around — They looked like frightened Beads, I thought — He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home —

Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam — Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon Leap, plashless as they swim.

Introduction to Creative Writing by Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Friday essay: on birds — feathered messengers from deep time

Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Delia Falconer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties — almost a year to the day after another — I went to see my mother in the family home. She wasn’t a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.

Each bird, apart from the snatching kookaburras, was touchingly gentle in the way it took food from my fingers. The white cockatoos ate daintily, one-legged. The lorikeets jumped onto the sloping ramp on both feet, like eager parachutists, to quarrel over the apple and press the juice from the pulp with stubby tongues.

Lined up on the veranda rail, the magpies cocked their heads to observe me before accepting meat precisely in their blue-white beaks. They had a beautiful, carolling song, with a chorded quality in the falling registers. But the bright-eyed butcher birds had the most lovely song of all: a full-throated piping, which I’ve heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute.

Over decades, a family of these little blue-grey birds, had come to stack their hooked meat-eaters’ beaks with mince, which they flew to deliver to young somewhere in our neighbour’s garden, though we had never bothered to try to work out where they lived. This afternoon, when my mother and I opened the door, they landed by our side as they always had, having spotted us from their watching places. For a brief moment, surrounded by these vital creatures, I felt as if I might still want to be alive.

Small agents

Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence. The Irish imagined puffins as the souls of priests. The ancient Romans released an eagle when an emperor died in the belief it would “conduct his soul aloft”. In the Abrahamic religions, doves are given powers of revelation. We have even been inclined, right up until the present, to imagine birds as the souls of our recently departed returned to us, if only for a moment.

Even without being recruited into such labour, birds touch on our lives in small but significant ways. Once, in the botanical gardens of Melbourne, a boyfriend laughed until he almost cried at the mechanical, eager hopping of the tiny fairy wrens, a fact that only made me like him more. A friend tells the story of her uncle who ordered quail for the first time at a restaurant and cried when he saw it on his plate. “She had a raven’s heart, small and obdurate,” American author Don DeLillo writes of a nun in Underworld ; it is my favourite description in any novel.

In Japan, where my partner and I tried to ease our sadness, the calls of crows were ubiquitous in every town. Like the low sounds of its deer, they had a subdued, almost exhausted quality, as hollow as the bells that are rattled to call the oldest spirits to its Shinto temples.

In 1975, when his first wife left him, Masahise Fukase began to photograph these birds, which he had seen from the window of a train. He would keep taking their pictures – on a hilltop tori at dusk, grouped on the budding branches of a bare tree, in flying silhouette – for ten years. Ravens would become one of the most famous books of modern photography , hailed as a “masterpiece of mourning”. While some people see the birds in his photos as symbols of loneliness I see them as embodiments of pure intention. “I work and photograph to stop everything,” Fukase said. As if fulfilling a prophecy, he would spend the last two decades of his life in a coma, after falling down the stairs at his favourite bar.

Yet for all our emotional investment in them, we’ve never treated birds particularly well. To train a falcon in Qatar, owners sew the young bird’s eyes shut, unstitching and then restitching them for longer intervals, until it is entirely dependent on its keeper. In Asia the appetite for caged songbirds is so great that their calls are disappearing from its forests. Our careless acceptance that these extraordinary creatures are subject to our will is perhaps as damning as any direct mistreatment of them. This is symbolised for me by that fact that, in North America, owners of long pipelines add a putrid odorant to the natural gas they carry so that turkey vultures, circling over the deathly smell, will alert them to methane leaks.

We are currently draining marshes globally three times faster than we are clearing forests. Migratory Red Knots fly 15,000 kilometres per year between Australia and their breeding grounds in the Arctic Tundra, but they’re declining because of the industrial development of the Yellow Sea’s tidal mudflats, where they stop to feed and rest. One of the details that most haunted me in the reports of Australia’s mega-fires was the fact that many birds that survived the radiant heat would die of smoke inhalation because the continuous one-way airflow of their breathing systems and air sacs meant they couldn’t cough to clear their lungs.

When we first moved into my childhood home, wattlebirds fed in the grevilleas, calling from the rockery with voices that sounded, as a poet once said to me, like the cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne. While their long forms ending in a slim, curved beak seemed the embodiment of alertness, they were the birds our cat caught most often. To see one, rescued but internally injured, vomit up its honey and grow limp was one of my first intimations as a child of the world’s evils. Unable to bear the thought of their sleek, streaky bodies in the bare earth, my mother would bury them wrapped in tea towels. But it was the 70s and no one thought to keep the cat inside.

As my mother entered her nineties, her life contracted around her birds. Although experts were now advising that the lack of calcium could soften chicks’ bones, I continued, against my conscience, to put through her weekly grocery order, which contained as much bird mince as food for herself. She had stopped feeding the cockatoos, which had chewed her windowsills and the struts of the back door, but when they heard us in the kitchen they would still plaster their chests like great white flowers against the window or poke their heads through the large holes they’d made over the years in the door’s wire fly screen.

But it was only the butcher birds that ever entered through these gaps to wait for her by the sink, feathers fluffed calmly. Once or twice, one would come and find her in the dining room and quietly walk back ahead of her to be fed. When I came with the children, she would press food into their hands as she stood behind them at the door, leaning against the kitchen counter for support. So she continued to be one of the estimated 30 to 60% of Australian households that fed wild birds, a statistic that suggests that we need them far more than they need us.

Scientists began to think in the 19th century that birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, when the 150-million- year-old fossil skeleton of Archaeopteryx — which we now know was capable of short bursts of active flight — turned up in a German quarry.

The Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley observed the bony-tailed, feathered fossil’s striking resemblance to small dinosaurs like Compsognathus and proposed that it was a transitional form between flightless reptiles and birds. Huxley’s theory fell out of favour until the last decades of the 20th century, when a new generation of palaeontologists returned to the similarities between the metabolisms and bird-like structures of dinosaur fossils and birds, and there is now a consensus that birds are avian dinosaurs. That the birds with which we share our lives are the descendants of the hollow-tailed, meat-eating theropods is a true wonder that never fails to thrill me.

Birds, like us, are survivors. They escaped the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) mass extinction event 65 million years ago: the fifth and last great dying in the history of our planet, until the Sixth Extinction taking place around us now.

Scientists were able to work out, from unusually high deposits of rare iridium (which mostly comes from outer space) in the Earth’s crust that a ten-kilometre-wide asteroid hitting the area that is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula had killed off three quarters of the world’s living creatures by causing forest fires and then a freezing “nuclear winter,” which inhibited photosynthesis and rapidly acidified the oceans. Its blast was thousands of times more powerful than the combined force of all the nuclear weapons in the world today. The dust and debris it dispersed into the atmosphere eventually settled into a thin grey band of iridium-rich clay, which came to be called the K-Pg boundary and, above it, no trace of a non-avian dinosaur can be found.

In historical ironies whose obviousness would shame a novelist, it was geophysicists looking for petroleum in the 1970s who would discover the existence of the Chicxulub crater. Walter Alvarez, who discovered the “iridium anomaly”, was the son of physicist Luis Alvarez, a designer of America’s nuclear bombs, with whom he posited the asteroid strike theory; Alvarez senior had followed in a plane behind the Enola Gay to measure the blast effect as it dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.

The ground-dwelling, beaked avian dinosaurs were able to scratch out a life for themselves in the ferny “disaster flora” that replaced the obliterated forests; their intelligence, their feathery insulation, their ability to feed on the destroyed forests’ seeds, and to digest the “hard, persistent little morsels” as one writer puts it, would help them to survive, and later flourish.

More incredibly, these dinosaurs were already recognisably bird-like, inside and out; capable of at least short horizontal flight like quails, the parts of their brains that controlled sight, flight and high-level memory as expanded as those of modern birds’, while our early mammal ancestors — small, nocturnal, insectivorous, shrew-like mammals — were hiding in clefts and caves.

It is now thought that the world’s oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis , could probably fly and was combing the shallow beaches of today’s Belgium, in the way of modern long-legged shore birds, 700,000 years before the K-Pg mass extinction.

Because of a wealth of new fossil evidence in China, we now also know that feathers are far more ancient than we once thought; they didn’t evolve with birds 150 million years ago but are instead probably as old as dinosaurs themselves. In fact, many of the dinosaurs that we have been trained to think of as scaly, were at least partially feathered, including the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex , which may have used its primitive feathers, like a peacock, for display.

Powerful electron microscopes have allowed scientists to determine that the long filaments covering 150-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx , the first feathered non-avian dinosaur discovered, in China, in 1996, were “proto-feathers”; and even, looking at the melanosomes inside them, that they were ginger, running in a “Mohican” pattern down its back and ending in a stripey white-and-ginger tail. Similar examination of the melanosomes of another Jurassic-era theropod found that it had a grey-and-dark plumage on its body, long white and black-spangled forelimbs, and a reddish-brown, fluffy crown.

Scientists are puzzled about what dinosaurs’ feathers, which developed before the capacity of feathered flight, were “for”, but I don’t really care: the fact of them is startling enough, along with the imaginative readjustments we have to make in seeing the fearsome creatures of paleoart that we grew up with, locked in orgasmic conflict, as softly plumaged. Did their young call for them with the same open-mouthed yearning as baby birds, I wonder? Did they possess their own sense of beauty? If we imagine dinosaurs as being less alien and fluffier, does it make our own era’s potential annihilation seem more real?

Read more: Meet the prehistoric eagle that ruled Australian forests 25 million years ago

Over the last century folkorists and psychoanalysts have kept trying to account for birds’ deep hold over our imaginations; as agents of death, prophets, ferriers of souls, omens, and symbols of renewal and productivity. Some attribute it to the power of flight and their ability to inhabit the heavens, others to the way eggs embody transformation. But could it be that the vestigial shrew-like part of ourselves has always recognised them instinctively as the emissaries of a deep past, much older than we are? “We float on a bubble of space-time,” writes author Verlyn Klinkenberg , “on the surface of an ocean of deep time”.

Recently, this deep past has begun to reassert itself as, even during coronavirus lockdowns, burned fossil fuels continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, bringing its concentration in the air to levels not seen since the Pliocene three million years ago when the seas were 30 metres higher. To try to help us understand the literal profundity of this moment in the history of the earth, writers have been looking increasingly below its surface, far beyond the human realm, to its deepest, billions-of-years-old strata.

In his astonishing Underland , English writer Robert Macfarlane travels physically far underground into caves, mines, and nuclear waste bunkers, to revive our ancient sense of awe as forces and substances once thought safely confined there begin to exert themselves above ground, but also to convey the enormity of the long shadow we will cast into the future of a planet that has already seen periods of great transformation.

In Timefulness , geologist Marcia Bjornerud argues that understanding the Earth through her discipline’s vastly expanded time-scales can help us avoid the almost unthinkably grave consequences of our actions. We live in an era of time denial, she writes, while navigating towards the future with conceptions of the long patterns of planetary history as primitive as a 14th-century world map. And yet, she writes, “as a daughter, mother, and widow, I struggle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face.”

Yet here, I think, all around us on the surface of the planet, are our vivacious and inscrutable companions, feathered messengers from deep time, who still tell their own story of complex change.

What lives and dies

At a writer’s festival in northern New South Wales, I remember, a magpie lark landed between the chair and speaker on stage to let forth a cascade of liquid notes, “as if, to say,” a droll friend sitting next to me said, “I too have something to contribute!” while I found myself wondering, yet again, how something with such a small heart could be so alive.

To think about dinosaurs, as evolutionary biologist Steven Brusatte writes , is to confront the question of what lives and what dies. To think that dinosaurs were far more complex than we imagined, Klinkenberg muses, interrupts the chain of consequence we’ve been carrying in our heads, which assumes that deep time’s purpose was to lead to us as the end point of evolution. The history of feathers and wings, in which the power of flight appears to have been discovered and lost at least three times, shows that evolution is not a tree, but a clumped bush. And yet, Klinkenberg writes, “Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the purpose of what came before.”

The same could be said of mothers. When the time came to choose the photographs for my mother’s funeral, the images of her as a child in Mexico and Canada seemed as unreal as dispatches from the moon. The photographs of our mothers as young girls are so affecting a friend wrote to me, because they show them living lives that were whole without us. Now my own children turn their heads away from pictures of me as a girl, because, they say, “You don’t look like you.” And yet, if our minds struggle to encompass the deep time of our mothers, I think, how can they hope to stretch across aeons?

On my last visit to my mother, I left her on her front step throwing meat to the two magpies which had learned to come around from the backyard, away from the other birds, and would follow her on stilted legs around the garden. When she pressed her emergency pendant the next morning, I missed her call; it was my partner, hearing her faint answers, who called the ambulance. Unconscious in the hospital, she died having never known that she had left her home. When I stopped back at the house afterwards, one of the butcher birds, which I had never seen around the front, was on the windowsill of her dark bedroom, break pressed against the glass, looking for her.

This is an extract from Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer, published by Simon and Schuster.

• Friday essay

Director of STEM

Community member - Training Delivery and Development Committee (Volunteer part-time)

Chief Executive Officer

Finance Business Partner

Head of Evidence to Action

Bird by Bird: Unlocking Creative Potential One Step at a Time

Chapter 1 What’s bird by bird

“Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life” is a non-fiction book written by Anne Lamott. It was first published in 1994. The book is a guide for aspiring writers, providing insights, advice, and personal anecdotes about the writing process and the challenges and joys of the creative life. The title of the book comes from a family story Lamott tells about her brother who was overwhelmed by a school project about birds and her father’s advice to “take it bird by bird.”

Chapter 2 Why is bird by bird Worth Read

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott is worth reading for several reasons:

1. Practical Writing Advice: The book offers practical advice and insights into the writing process. Lamott shares techniques, exercise ideas, and personal anecdotes that can inspire and guide aspiring writers. She addresses common challenges, such as perfectionism and writer’s block, and provides strategies to overcome them.

2. Humor and Wit: Lamott’s writing style is humorous and engaging. She uses wit and self-deprecating humor to make the book relatable and enjoyable to read. This approach makes the potentially daunting task of writing more approachable and encourages readers to embrace their imperfections and quirks.

3. Emphasis on Craft and Revision: Lamott emphasizes the importance of craft and revising one’s work. She emphasizes the importance of getting a first draft down without worrying too much about its quality and then dedicating time to revision and refinement. This approach helps readers understand that writing is a process and that it is natural for initial drafts to be imperfect.

4. Personal Development: “Bird by Bird” extends beyond writing advice and delves into personal development. Lamott shares her own experiences, struggles, and triumphs, giving readers a glimpse into her life and how writing has shaped her. This personal touch adds depth and authenticity to the book.

5. Inspiration and Motivation: The book serves as a source of inspiration and motivation for writers. It encourages readers to persevere through obstacles and to find their unique voice. Lamott’s honest and encouraging tone helps writers stay motivated and reminded of the joy and significance of their craft.

Overall, “Bird by Bird” is worth reading because it offers valuable writing advice, humor, personal insights, and inspiration, making it a valuable resource for both aspiring and seasoned writers.

Chapter 3 bird by bird Summary

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott is a book about the process of writing and the challenges that writers face. The book is divided into several chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of writing.

Lamott begins by emphasizing the importance of starting small and breaking down the writing process into manageable pieces. She advises writers to take it “bird by bird”, meaning to tackle the task one step at a time.

Throughout the book, Lamott shares personal anecdotes from her own writing journey, including her struggles with writer’s block and self-doubt. She also provides valuable insights and advice on different aspects of writing, such as developing characters, finding your voice, and handling rejection.

Lamott emphasizes the importance of allowing yourself to write badly in order to get the creative juices flowing. She encourages writers to embrace their imperfections and understand that first drafts usually require a lot of editing and revision.

In addition to offering practical writing tips, Lamott explores the emotional and psychological aspects of the writing process. She discusses the vulnerability that comes with putting your thoughts and ideas on paper, and provides guidance on dealing with the fear of judgment and the criticism that can come with writing.

Overall, “Bird by Bird” is a humorous, honest, and inspiring guide for aspiring writers. It encourages readers to embrace the messy, imperfect nature of writing and offers insights into the joys and challenges of the creative process.

Chapter 4 bird by bird Author

Anne Lamott is an American novelist, non-fiction writer, and teacher. She is also known for her work as a political activist and public speaker. Born on April 10, 1954, in San Francisco, California, Lamott has written several books throughout her career, both fiction and non-fiction.

One of her most famous works is the book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” It was first published in 1994 and is considered a classic guide for both aspiring and established writers. In this book, Lamott shares her personal experiences and wisdom about the craft of writing, offering advice, insights, and anecdotes.

Besides “Bird by Bird,” Lamott has written numerous other books, covering a wide range of topics such as faith, motherhood, personal growth, and social issues. Some notable titles include:

1. “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year” (1993): Lamott chronicles her experiences as a single mother during her son’s first year.

2. “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith” (1999): A memoir where Lamott explores her journey with faith and spirituality.

3. “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith” (2005): Lamott delves deeper into her struggles and triumphs in matters of faith.

4. “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers” (2012): Lamott explores the power and necessity of prayer in everyday life.

5. “Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy” (2017): Lamott reflects on the importance of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion.

In terms of editions, it is subjective to determine which of Lamott’s books is the best. However, “Bird by Bird” remains a highly acclaimed and widely recommended book for aspiring writers and has spawned several editions over the years.

Chapter 5 bird by bird Meaning & Theme

Bird by bird meaning.

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott is a book about the craft of writing, and it offers a combination of practical advice and personal anecdotes from Lamott’s own experiences as a writer.

The main meaning or message of the book lies in its title, “bird by bird.” This phrase comes from a story Lamott tells about her brother, who was overwhelmed with a school project on birds and was ready to give up. Their father told him to just take it “bird by bird,” meaning to break the task down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

In the context of writing, Lamott uses this phrase to illustrate the importance of taking the writing process step by step, focusing on one small part at a time. She emphasizes the importance of not getting overwhelmed by the enormity of a writing project, but rather approaching it with patience and persistence, focusing on one aspect at a time.

Additionally, “Bird by Bird” also explores the theme of embracing imperfection and the messy, often chaotic nature of the creative process. Lamott encourages writers to accept their own flaws and to let go of the need for perfection, emphasizing the importance of just getting the words on the page and allowing the editing process to refine and shape the work later on.

Overall, the meaning of “Bird by Bird” is about the importance of perseverance, breaking large tasks into smaller, manageable ones, and embracing imperfection in the creative process.

bird by bird Theme

The theme of “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott can be summarized as the power of reflection, perseverance, and the importance of taking small steps towards personal growth and creativity. The book emphasizes the idea that the journey of writing (or any creative pursuit) is often chaotic, daunting, and filled with self-doubt. However, Lamott encourages readers to embrace these challenges and take them one step at a time, just as a bird builds its nest one twig at a time. Through the theme of reflection, the book also emphasizes the importance of being honest with oneself and accepting imperfections in order to grow as a writer and as an individual. Lamott’s personal experiences and anecdotes provide practical advice on how to navigate creative endeavors, highlighting the significance of staying committed and patient while also finding joy in the process.

Chapter 6 Other Accessible Resources

1. “ [By Anne Lamott ] Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Paperback)【2018】by Anne Lamott (Author) ” by Anne Lamott. This is the original book by Anne Lamott that provides detailed insights into her writing process and offers guidance for aspiring writers.

2. “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within” by Natalie Goldberg. This book is another popular resource focused on writing and offers practical advice, techniques, and exercises to help writers develop their craft.

3. “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King. In this memoir, Stephen King shares his personal journey as a writer and offers valuable insights into the craft of writing, including tips and advice for aspiring authors.

4. “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard. A thoughtful reflection on the writing life, Dillard delves into the challenges and rewards of being a writer, offering inspiration and practical advice for aspiring authors.

5. “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert. While not specifically focused on writing, this book explores the creative process and encourages readers to embrace their creativity and pursue their passions.

6. “Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin shares her thoughts and advice on writing, including exercises to help writers improve their craft and navigate the complexities of storytelling.

7. “Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process” by Peter Elbow. This book provides practical tips and strategies for writers at all levels, with a focus on developing a confident and powerful writing voice.

8. “The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers” by John Gardner. Gardner, a renowned novelist and creative writing teacher, offers insights and advice for aspiring fiction writers, covering topics such as plot development, character creation, and the writer’s role in society.

9. “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” by Julia Cameron. Although not specifically about writing, this book provides a structured approach to tapping into one’s creativity and overcoming creative blocks, making it a valuable resource for any aspiring artist.

10. Writing communities and creative writing workshops. Joining a writing group or participating in a creative writing workshop can provide invaluable support, feedback, and inspiration from fellow writers. These resources can often be found locally through community centers, libraries, or online platforms.

Chapter 7 Quotes of bird by bird

bird by bird quotes as follows:

1. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”

2. “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

3. “One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.”

4. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

5. “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up.”

6. “I started to work ridiculously hard just to be a little more forgiving of myself when I inevitably failed. And then I began to write better.”

7. “Writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.”

8. “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

9. “When I get writer’s block, I read books about writing.”

10. “Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.”

Chapter 8 Similar Books Like bird by bird

1. “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard

In this beautiful memoir, award-winning author Annie Dillard explores the creative process and captures the essence of the writing life. Through introspective and poetic prose, she shares her own experiences, insights, and struggles as a writer, offering inspiration and encouragement to aspiring authors.

2. “ On Writing : A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King

Renowned author Stephen King combines elements of memoir and writing guide in this essential book for writers. With candid anecdotes from his own life, he provides valuable advice and practical tips, along with honest reflections on the writing process, making it a must-read for any aspiring writer.

3. “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert

Drawing from her own personal experiences as a writer and creative artist, Elizabeth Gilbert explores the enchanting world of creativity in “Big Magic.” Gilbert encourages readers to embrace their own unique creativity, offering insights into overcoming fear, finding inspiration, and cultivating a creative mindset.

4. “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” by Julia Cameron

“The Artist’s Way” is a transformative guide designed to ignite and nourish your creative spirit. Through a twelve-week program, author Julia Cameron provides practical exercises, insights, and tools to help readers unleash their creativity, overcome creative blocks, and cultivate a more fulfilling creative life.

5. “ Steal Like an Artist : 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative” by Austin Kleon

In this concise and inspiring book, artist and writer Austin Kleon challenges conventional notions of creativity. Using engaging anecdotes and visual examples, Kleon encourages readers to embrace their influences, find their own creative voice, and navigate the modern creative landscape in unique and innovative ways.

These book recommendations, ranging from memoirs to practical guides, explore various aspects of the writing life and offer valuable insights and inspiration for aspiring writers and creative individuals. Each book delves into different aspects of creativity, from overcoming fears and blocks to finding one’s unique voice, making them worthwhile additions to any writer’s bookshelf.

Written by Bookey

https://www.bookey.app/ ⭐Unlock big ideas from bestsellers in 30 mins audio, text, and mind map

Text to speech

Creative Writing

Ruth asawa san francisco school of the arts, about birds.

by Avi Hoen (’15) From the Sarah Fontaine Unit

The world is stupid.  No it’s not.  Well it kind of is.  It sucks sometimes.  When you’re on top of it, it feels awesome.  Not awesome as in “new pair of shades,” but awesome as in, “a bird just gave birth to an elephant.”  That kind of awesome.  But it’s only “elephant-birthing awesome” some days.  Most days, it’s “bird birthing cockroach” awesome.  Not very awesome.

Today the world birthed a bird and that bird birthed another bird so it isn’t very special today.  There are a lot of birds being birthed in the world.  Some birds are awesome and some birds just shit on your car.  A year is like birds.  Each day is an egg.  From each egg you don’t know what kind of bird is going to hatch.  Today could be a “white-throated kingfisher” day, or today’s egg could be scrambled and stuck to the frying pan.  As I said you never know what kind of day it will be.

Birds live on the world, usually they don’t live on top of.  Birds get the short end of the feather.  But know that some bird out there had an amazing day.  Be sure to know it had a great time eating berries and shitting on your car.  The world is full of chain reactions like this.  Bird eats.  Bird shits.  Shit on you.  Bird is happy.  You feel like shit.  You shit on someone.  You feel happy.  Someone feels like shit.  The world is one happy piece of crap.  Get used to it.

I got used to this bird eat bird world when I was little.  I always knew I was an insignificant little red berry, soon to make it into a bigger birds stomach.  Maybe that bird would be Big Bird.  Big Bird taught me the world.  Elmo has one messed up world.  I hope a bird shits on Mr. Noodle.  I take that back, I didn’t watch much TV as a child, probably because most kids shows were like that.  A three-year-old shouldn’t be filling their head with singing cloth puppets.  A three-year-old should be filling their minds with enlightening thoughts, such as Icarus and how trying to be something you’re not is just a stupid waste of time because we are all gonna die and melt away when we get to close to reality.  Sorry, those would be horrible thoughts for a toddler.  Maybe they should keep their minds on T.V. and birds.

When I was little I had a bird feeder.  It hung from the tree.  Then one night a raccoon came and ate all the bird seed.  As I said, birds always get the short end of the branch.  It’s the circle of life though.  Actually it isn’t.  Hardware Store Brand bird seed has no place in something as significant as life.  Except it does.  I eat food from a grocery store too.  I do not partake in the natural circle of things.  Therefor I am a bird.

Life sucks for birds, some days.  Life sucks for me, some days.  It depends what kind of eggs I buy at the grocery store.  Free-Range, Organic, Cage Free.  Life is full of options.  I also have the option of buying the Caged eggs.  Funny how they don’t specify on those packages that the chicken never saw the outside light.  Of course when I shop at the Costco I have all these options and more, but the assumption is made that I am going to feed the entire flock with 18 dozen eggs.  That probably stems to the idea of cannibalism.  It would be a bad idea to feed eggs to birds.  I feel bad for chickens, their young is always sold off, and what isn’t eaten by the humans is given to the pigeons who don’t know what they are eating.  Pigeons truly are “chicken-brained,” I don’t blame them for being content with their stupidity, I wouldn’t want to know if I was eating monkey fetus.  Makes it seem like pigeons have a pretty good life.

Maybe I’m a pigeon and I can peck morsels of Doritos from the sidewalk cracks.  No roses, just chips.  Did you hear about the pigeon that grew from the crack in the concrete.  You probably didn’t because it didn’t actually happen.

A lot of things in life don’t actually happen.  In fact most of the world doesn’t actually happen.  It’s a whole sea of thought, full of fish getting eaten by birds.  What actually happens is just bird shit.  Damn.  Oceans seem pretty bleak now.  I’m sorry for blowing your mind in depressing amazement.

I read some bad rhyming poetry in a book that went “A geek with a beak will have a life that is bleak, don’t be a geek and speak what you think.”  I never actually read that.  I don’t need to cite a source.  Birds probably don’t use quotes, or MLA 7 or APA, or EasyBib.  If I am a bird I can sing my own songs, that I make up in my bird brain and sing them from the branches of the world.  No citation needed.  Unless… do mockingbirds cite what they sing.  No, they probably don’t.  The way they find love is a whole lot of bird shit.  The way people find love is pretty stupid too.  As I said earlier, I am a bird, therefore people are birds, and the world makes the same amount of sense as a fresh splatter of bird shit on the sidewalk.

Birds should probably be recognized because they are related to dinosaur ancestors.  Which is pretty cool.  That’s only if you like dinosaurs.  When I was little I told people Rumpelstiltskin was my great-grandfather.  No one believed me.  I didn’t believe me.  A bird might have trusted my statement for a minute, but even a bird brain is smarter than a  lie.  Besides, birds are related to dinosaurs, that has to count for something.

OK, it probably doesn’t count for much.  I mean, look at how we treat dinosaurs.   When we find a dead one we display it, and when we find a decomposed one, we drive cars.  It might be a double standard.  One day, birds will be the source of petroleum gasoline, and also petroleum jelly.

You know what’s crazy, is that during the oil spill, the birds ancestors, the dinosaurs, killed the birds with their decomposed fossil fuel!  Talk about a great way to avenge your death.  So I guess having dinosaur ancestors is a double-edged sword.

My guess is that birds have a hate-love relationship with swords.  Actually, they probably just hate them.  Swords are only good to kill birds, birds would need opposable thumbs to use them properly.  Video games lie.

As Peter Griffin agrees, “the bird is the word.”  I’m not sure if this has any relevancy to birds and the world, but words are also the world.  Words are the sword that the birds can’t use.  Blue Jays can’t say great words like “hootenanny,” “cautious” or my personal favorite “cooties.”  Despite birds not speaking words, they communicate in their ways.  This enables them to be functional members of society.  Just like you and me.  In fact, I would go so far to say that they are more functional in society then the average human being.  After all, they understand the defiance of gravity.  And if life has taught me anything it’s that gravity brings you down.  Unless you are on the moon.

Scratch that, birds don’t teach us diddly-shit, except what shit is.  WAIT! So, basically if the world is shitty, and birds are the all-mighty creators of shit, then technically speaking birds are god. HOLY SHIT!

Share this:

Leave a comment cancel reply.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Bird by Bird

Anne lamott.

With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From "Getting Started,' with "Short Assignments," through "Shitty First Drafts," "Character," "Plot," "Dialogue." all the way from "False Starts" to "How Do You Know When You're Done?" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses "Writers Block," "Writing Groups," and "Publication." Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.

If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.

238 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 1994

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Ernest Hemingway One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.” - Anne Lamott

E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. Year after year my students are bursting with stories to tell, and they start writing projects with excitement and maybe even joy — finally their voices will be heard, and they are going to get to devote themselves to this one thing they've longed to do since childhood. But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith. Their sense of self and story shatters and crumbles to the ground. Historically they show up for the first day of the workshop looking like bright goofy ducklings who will follow me anywhere, but by the time the second class rolls around, they look at me as if the engagement is definitely off. "I don't even know where to start," one will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, thought. Just start getting it down.

10 key takeaways from Bird by Bird

What makes Anne Lamott’s 1994 writing book so good? We unpack some of the key points of Bird by Bird: Instructions for a Writing Life

• Post author By Arja Salafranca
• 4 Comments on 10 key takeaways from Bird by Bird

Here are 10 key takeaways from a book that has become iconic: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by memoirist and novelist Anne Lamott . It’s been nearly three decades since it was published in 1994. In the years since it’s become something of a cult book, recommended by writing teachers, read by students of writing, and has even been revised from its original publication and gone into numerous printings. What makes it such a great book, though? Besides Lamott’s fantastic sense of humour, which elevates this text beyond mere instruction, this one has some real and useful down-at-home honesty about the writing process.

Let’s look at the 10 takeaways as they relate to the crafting of fiction from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life .

1.  Getting started

Lamott is an experienced writing teacher, and this book shares information that she tells her writing students. One of the first bits of advice is: “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.”

This comes from the fact that many of her students say that they don’t know where exactly to start. Lamott says to start with writing about their childhoods. She says to write down all your memories, as truthfully as you can, without worrying about getting it done well.

The danger is that there might be too many memories and details with the resultant “brain freeze.” in this case, she suggests confining yourself to writing about your first few years in kindergarten moving on to first grade and so on. Write down your vacations, focus on big holidays and big events, birthday parties, what people ate or what they wore.

As to how to physically start, Lamott’s advice is simple:

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so.

2. Think short

Here’s where some of the “bird by bird” advice comes in. Incidentally this piece of advice comes from Lamott’s father, Kenneth, who was also a working writer. Lamott’s brother was once overwhelmed by an assignment on birds, and her father said to him to take it “bird by bird.”

Lamott says to take it little by little in short bites:

The first useful concept is the idea of short assignments. Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of—oh, say—say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one- inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running.

So, instead of thinking, “I have to write 300 pages or 100,000 words” tell yourself you just have to write this chapter, or, as Lamott says, “…this description of the river at sunrise … or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry … But we are going to finish this one short assignment.”

3. First draft is a child’s draft

Terrible name, and that’s perhaps the point, but we’re all familiar with the term “shitty first drafts.” Lamott says this is “even better news” than the idea of short assignments. All writers have to complete such drafts, she advises, which is how writers end up with second drafts and terrific third drafts.

The idea here is that:

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well so what, Mr. Poopy Pants,” you let her.

Just get it all on paper is Lamott’s dictum, you never know what might emerge and what might be useful in those pages. You might produce some beautiful writing which will lead to other beautiful writing—or not. Worth noting, too, is that Lamott also points out that writing is its own beautiful reward.

4 Ditch perfectionism

Another really good piece of advice from Bird by Bird is to ditch perfectionism. It will, says Lamott, “ruin your writing and playfulness and life force. … Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”

In this delightful chapter, Lamott shows is at pains to get the message across that writing—like life—is messy. An important point to remember when you sit down in front of that screen.

WRITING COURSE: KICKSTART YOUR NOVEL IN 6 WEEKS!

With NaNoWriMo around the corner you may need some extra motivation. Learn how to write your first 3 chapters and create a plan to finish. You will learn how to How to troubleshoot your writing process and stay on track

5. Watching a Polaroid develop

Lamott presents the analogy that writing a first draft is like watching a polaroid develop. In other words you’re not going to know what comes out of your pen until you’ve written it. She writes about how details of a story emerge the longer you look, and as you look around at the world you’ve created.

To illustrate this point, she recounts a time when she was asked to write an article on the Special Olympics. A tall African American man fell into step with her and handed her a Polaroid of himself with two friends who had Down’s syndrome. Pointing to his own image, he said, “That is one cool man.” And that was when the story started coalescing in her mind, from that one image that had been handed to her.

6. Knowing your characters

In discussing character, Lamott returns to the example of the Polaroids, saying that it takes time to get to know them.

She says that we are all born with an emotional arc—and so it is with every character you write. And this is what you want to discover about your characters. An emotional arc is the list of changes that a character undergoes through a story, and can include “Boy meets girl” or “a Cinderella, rags to riches story.”

The point is to discover as much as possible about the interior life of your characters, and discover such things as who they voted for in the last election, or what would they stop doing if they found out they had six months to live and so on.

Interestingly, Lamott speaks about the fact that writers’ characters come from within each writer: 

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.

Your characters are shaped by who they are, and you can dig deep into discovering them by looking within. And if you are struggling to write a character that you are, not this advice is a way of accessing that:

One way to do this is to look within your own heart, at the different facets of your personality. You may find a con man, an orphan, a nurse, a king, a hooker, a preacher, a loser, a child, a crone. Go into each of these people and try to capture how each one feels, thinks, talks, survives.

Lamott also says that narrators should be likeable, quoting the American writer and educator Ethan Canin who said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.” A reliable narrator is another must, that they are not playing games or being coy but that they are telling their truth. And, finally, remember that getting to know your characters takes time.

Read our useful guide to character questions for over 100 questions to ask your characters to deepen your story arc.

7. Plot grows out of character

This next point links directly to that of character, and Lamott gives some wise advice in this respect and one of the simplest, yet effective descriptions of plot:

“Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.”

Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up. … I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.

Her thoughts are to find out what motivates each character, what they care about most, because then you will have discovered what’s at stake for them. Find a way to express this discovery in action, and take them from good to bad and so on. Something must be at stake, though, to create tension. By closely observing your characters and watching them move around in the world, you will see what they are capable of.  

She also compares plot to that of telling a joke: “Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff—just like a joke. The setup tells us what the game is. The buildup is where you put in all the moves, the forward motion, where you get all the meat off the turkey. The payoff answers the question, Why are we here anyway? What is it that you’ve been trying to give?”

Sometimes Lamott hasn’t always known what the plot of her fiction will be, just the shiny bulbs of ideas, but staying with her characters and seeing how they interact with each other has shown her what their story is.

Quoting John Gardner , she writes that “the writer is creating a dream … and that it must be vivid and continuous.” Asking others to read your work is another important point that is detailed in this chapter, as you can’t always see the problems in your own work.

Get to grips with plot by taking a course in how to plot a story, which will show you how to start and develop a plot line.

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.—Anne Lamott Tweet This

WRITE DIALOGUE THAT SOUNDS AUTHENTIC AND TRUE

If you’d like some help with crafting realistic dialogue that showcases the personalities of your characters, take our course on how to write realistic dialogue. Learn how to solve common issues with dialogue.

8. Dialogue is a pleasure

Dialogue in a story represents a change of pace from description and exposition, and says Lamott, “And we have all the pleasures of voyeurism because the characters don’t know we are listening. We get to feel privy to their inner workings without having to spend too much time listening to them think.”

There is a danger though in writing  bad dialogue which can “break the mood of a piece.” Lamott gives some good advice on this score, saying dialogue is not an exact reproduction of the way people speak, that it’s a “matter of ear. … You’re not reproducing actual speech—you’re translating the sound and rhythm of what a character says into words. You’re putting down on paper your sense of how the characters speak.”

Dialogue is more like a movie than it is like real life, since it should be more dramatic. There’s a greater sense of action. In the old days, before movies, let’s say before Hemingway, the dialogue in novels was much more studied, ornate. Characters talked in ways we can’t really imagine people talking. With Hemingway, things began to terse up. Good dialogue became sharp and lean. Now, in the right hands, dialogue can move things along in a way that will leave you breathless.

As to how to create this good dialogue? Read your dialogue aloud and listen to people talking when you’re out in the world. Also, each character should be identified by what they say, and they should all sound quite different from each other. It’s “ the way to nail character” and a vital part of any story.

If you’d like help with “nailing” your characters, consider doing our course in dialogue writing. It consists of four modules with videos, guides and valuable feedback.

9. Set design

Sometimes your characters may need to “wait in the wings” while you work out the setting of your fiction. Imagine you’re setting the stage for their appearance. This means working out where they live, and if they have money, what sort of furniture they have and so on. Lamott recalls working on a book where her character loved gardening—but Lamott is a known plant killer. She talked to the experts, and when her novel came out readers assumed she was as avid a gardener as her character, which wasn’t the case, of course, even after all her research. She had reached out to an expert who had helped her design a fictional garden. And has continued to reach out to experts when setting her characters in places she has never been.

10. How do you know when you’re done?

Lastly, how do you know when you are done? Writes Lamott, “I don’t quite know how to answer it. You just do.” After having gone over your work numerous times, rewritten it, taken suggestions on board, “and then finally something inside you just says it’s time to get onto the next thing.”

You know that your manuscript is not perfect and you’d hoped for so much more, but if you also know that there is simply no more steam in the pressure cooker and that it’s the very best you can do for now—well? I think this means that you are done.

Here are the 10 key takeaways as they relate to go about crafting your fiction. Lamott also has lots to say around how to “live” that writer’s life. She looks at topics such as finding someone to read your work, finding a writers group, dealing with self-doubt and a whole lot more. It’s well worth a read.

Probably the best investment I’ve made for my writing career. Having an experienced editor as a critique partner has taught me more about writing in a month than I learned on YouTube, Facebook groups and writing courses these past couple of years put together. – Anthony

• Tags writing advice , writing inspiration , writing motivation , writing process

By Arja Salafranca

Arja Salafranca has published a collection of short stories, three collections of poetry and has edited anthologies of prose. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

4 replies on “10 key takeaways from Bird by Bird”

Plot Driven or Character Driven? The eternal question. My answer leans toward the joy of writing through character development. Draft Zero is character driven with dialogue advancing the story but this is much too slow for most readers and they don’t grasp the subtle. Draft One adds pivotal incidents that force characters to make tactical responses. This sometimes forces characters to change the story. This is pure “Bird by Bird”. When a bird becomes tired, shoot it.

Dear Rex, thanks for your comments. I like that term ‘Draft Zero’. I also think this a wonderful way of writing a novel, great idea!

Why should I read about writing from someone who constructs this sentence beginning: “As a long-time writing teacher, this book delivers…”

You make a good point, that sentence is awkward. I’ve updated the blog. Thank you for pointing this out.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Pin It on Pinterest

• Info & Policies

To Kill a Mockingbird Writing Prompts: Creative, Persuasive, and Informative

Incorporating To Kill a Mockingbird writing prompts into your TKM unit increases engagement and builds essential skills. Here are 23 To Kill a Mockingbird writing tasks ranging from poetry to formal research. Read on for 15 TKM project ideas.

Post overview:

• Creative Writing (8 prompts)
• Persuasive / Argument (4 prompts)
• Informative / Expository (11 prompts)
• Project Ideas

To Kill a Mockingbird Creative Writing Prompts

• To Kill a Monologue

In this To Kill a Mockingbird creative writing prompt students write a theatrical monologue for one of the characters.  The goals focus on characterization, character motivation, and point of view.

Write a Symbol Poem

We will look at symbolism in poetry t o prepare for analyzing  To Kill a Mockingbird .   You will analyze a famous example and then write your own original poem that contains a symbol.

Share a reading of  “The Secret Heart” by Robert Peter Tristram Coffin  (or another poem with a clear symbol).

Write a poem that contains a meaningful symbol and be prepared to offer analysis of your key poetic elements.

• Theme or feeling:
• Tone (speaker’s attitude):
• Mood (feeling created):
• Bonus element (imagery, figurative language, sound device, etc.):
• Creative Writing with Imagery

Imagery draws readers in and kick-starts their imaginations through word choice. Imagery means giving descriptive details and figures of speech that allow the reader to imagine with their senses.

“She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase, and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin. Old-age liver spot dotted her cheeks, and her pale eyes had black pinpoint pupils. Her hands were knobby, and the cuticles were grown up over her fingernails. Her bottom plate was not in, and her upper lip protruded; from time to time she would draw her nether lip to her upper plate and carry her chin with it. This made the wet move faster.” 

Demonstrate imagery by creating an original example and providing analysis. Your example of imagery can take one of several forms: a short story, an excerpt from an imagined narrative, a poem, or an in-depth description of a person, place, or event (descriptive essay).

Word choice terms:

• Figurative language : metaphor, personification, simile, hyperbole, understatement, idiom, etc.
• Connotations : the feelings and thoughts associated with particular words.
• Imagery : helping readers imagine with their five senses
• Allusions : references to or use of source materials
• Sound devices : rhythm, rhyme, onomatopoeia, etc.
• Sense of time and place : dialogue, dialect, allusions, and references
• Tone: the narrator’s attitude toward the subject
• Mood : how the words create feelings in the reader

The Lost Chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird

The class will be perpetrating an elaborate hoax. Everyone will write a “missing chapter” for To Kill a Mockingbird . The best fraud (selected by a class vote) will be published online along with lies about how Harper Lee wrote it.

Your “missing chapter” must fit thematically and show the elements of plot structure (conflict, inciting incident , etc.) The point of view must match the narration of TKM , and the word choice should imitate Lee’s style .

• Writing Dialogue

Harper Lee is a master of writing dialogue. The way her characters express themselves makes their personalities and motivations come to life . The dialect they use creates a sense of time and place.

Write an original narrative that includes dialogue. Your story could be from your own life or pure imagination. R emember that dialogue is the focus. 

• Symbolism Narrative

Write an original narrative with a literary symbol that develops the theme. You might choose to use the symbol in the story’s title (e.g., “The Last Fudgsicle”). The story could be a true event, totally fictional, or somewhere in between.

Your story should have all the narrative elements (theme, characters, plot, etc.), but give extra attention to establishing point of view (the narrator and the narrator’s tone) and using a literary symbol .  

Example: “The Last Fudgsicle”

A thirteen-year-old boy named Zeek is saving the last fudgsicle in the freezer. He is trying to act more like an adult (drinking coffee, being responsible, etc.), so he is saving this childish treat for a special occasion. Zeek’s father dies unexpectedly and Zeek is crushed. After the funeral, Zeek decides he will eat the treat, but he discovers that it is no longer there. He also realizes that he will have some serious responsibilities as the family moves forward. The fudgsicle represents the end of his childhood. He should have enjoyed being childish while he had the chance.

• Point of View Shift

Lee chooses the point of view in To Kill a Mockingbird carefully.  An adult Jean Louise Finch looks back on her childhood. Through her memories we experience the events with the eyes a child. Sometimes the point of view is childish and sometimes the adult point of view comes through.

Rewrite one chapter or event from the novel from a different point of view. You may choose a first-person narrator or a third-person narrator. Make sure to establish and maintain the point of view.  Follow your re-write with an explanation of how the point of view shift changes the telling.

Foreshadowing in Creative Writing

Lee creates feelings of tension and suspense in To Kill a Mockingbird . Think about how the writing puts the reader on edge leading up to the attack on the children. One way that Lee creates tension and suspense is through foreshadowing, clues about what may happen.  

Write an original narrative that includes at least two types of foreshadowing.  The foreshadowing should help build a sense of anticipation, suspense, or mystery.

Types of foreshadowing:

• Concrete foreshadowing : A material item is shown so that the reader or viewer will remember it for later (e.g., the kitchen knives shown early in the horror film). 
• Word choice : The author might clue you in to what type of story this is through word choice. (Why did the author describe the ocean as blood red instead of wine red?)
• Direct foreshadowing : A knowledgeable source tells you exactly what is going to happen. 
• Flashback / flash forward : The author interrupts the timeline to inform the reader.
• Symbolism : Imagine a gangster movie that starts with a bunch of rats killing each other in an alley; they all die. The filmmaker started this way to give you a clue. 
• Red Herring : A red herring is misleading foreshadowing.  The author wants you to guess wrongly. Many readers think that these fishy clues stink.    

Download the To Kill a Mockingbird assignment pages

To Kill a Mockingbird Writing Prompts: Persuasive

• Should Mockingbird Fly Away?

Many schools are dropping To Kill a Mockingbird from the curriculum . Choose a position on whether To Kill a Mockingbird should be read in schools. Does it deserve its place as one of the most read texts in American classrooms ? Write a formal argument to support your position and be sure to address counterarguments.

Outline for a possible response:

• To Kill a Mockingbird should not be required reading.
• Students are harmed by seeing and/or hearing the n-word and racist ideas.
• The inclusion of a false accusation of rape may negatively shape student views.
• The portrayal is racist; Atticus shows agency but African Americans do not.
• The symbolism is too obvious and heavy-handed.
• Some feel that racial slurs are a reality to be faced, but this is a topic best left to parents.
• In conclusion, To Kill a Mockingbird should not be required reading.
• Free Robinson Speech

Imagine that Tom Robinson is alive and in prison. You have been selected to give a speech in the Alabama House of Representatives to rally support for a retrial. 

Your speech in support of Tom Robinson should take the form of a formal argument with a clear claim, supporting reasons with evidence, and a response to counterarguments. Pair your sound argument with effective speech devices.

• Hypocrisy Editorial

Hypocrisy : when one claims to have moral standards that they do not actually follow (e.g., a gossip who claims to despise gossip). Editorial : a newspaper article written by or on behalf of an editor that gives an opinion on a topical issue.

Harper Lee shows the hypocrisies of Maycomb to make her points. For example, The Missionary Society claims to support charity, but the members are very uncharitable in thought and practice.

What hypocrisies do you see in life? Write an editorial to argue against a reality that you view as hypocritical. Topics can range from the serious to the trivial (e.g., a teacher who does not allow students to have drinks in class but is known to spill coffee during lessons).

Addressing counterclaims:

• State the opposing claim: Some conclude that…
• Recognize their reasons: They form this conclusion based on…
• Give your response: This does not change the fact that…
• Does the Jury System Work?

The 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that those accused of a crime receive a speedy, public trial by an impartial (fair) jury.

Is the jury system used in the United States fundamentally flawed or fundamentally just ? Would you be proud to perform your duty as a juror? Conduct a short research project on how the jury system works. Should the jury system remain, or should justice be served in a different way?  

Questions to research:

• How does serving on a jury work?
• In what ways is the jury system just?
• What are some famous examples of the system failing?
• What issues caused the failures?
• What alternatives to trial by jury have been suggested?

To Kill a Mockingbird Writing Assignments: Informative

• A New Point of View (personal essay)

What does it mean to be grown up? How do you know when you are an adult? What are different points of view on the meaning of adulthood? (Think about legal, cultural, and personal definitions.)

One theme of the novel focuses on growing up.  The kids in the story experience events that change their points of view in important ways.  You will write a short personal essay on an event from your own life that changed your point of view.

Example: My First Time Babysitting

• Main idea: I learned that being a caretaker is no easy task.
• Body 1 : Why I thought that taking care of younger kids would be easy money
• Body 2 : The horrific details of my babysitting experience (AKA “The Twins of Evil”)
• Body 3: What it takes to be responsible for others.
• To Kill a Mockingbird in Context (research report)

Harper Lee wrote and published To Kill a Mockingbird during the Civil Rights Movement, but her story takes place decades earlier, during the Great Depression. 

To fully understand the historical context of  To Kill a Mockingbird , one must think about America in the 1930s and in the 1950s-1960s.  Choose a topic related to the historical context of the novel, conduct   formal research , and compose a research report.

• Truth and Fiction

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during the Civil Rights Movement, but her story takes place decades earlier. Aspects of the fiction resemble real-life events of the Jim Crow Era.

Research events and realities from the segregation era and compare what you learn with the events described in To Kill a Mockingbird .  Consider important court cases, laws, crimes, and social norms.  Include evidence from your research and examples from the novel in your comparison.

Scout’s Point of View

Write a response to literature essay analyzing how Lee uses point of view in To Kill a Mockingbird .  We stand in Scout Finch’s shoes as the events of the novel unfold.  The telling would be very different from the point of view of Atticus, Tom Robinson, or an objective (not involved) narrator.

Make sure to discuss Scout’s point of view at the beginning of the novel, her point of view at the end of the novel, and her point of view as an adult looking back on the events.

Lee’s Style (word choice)

How does an author make language powerful and engaging? Lee chooses her words carefully to create emotions and sensations. The imagery she creates makes a memorable impression on many readers.

Write an essay analyzing Lee’s style, especially her word choice. You will be graded on how well you explain elements of word choice, support your ideas with specific details, and include an effective conclusion.

Identify key elements of Lee’s word choice and how she uses them.

• Dialogue and dialect  (how the characters talk)
• Figurative language (idioms, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, analogy, etc.)
• Word connotations (the thoughts or feelings of specific words and phrases)
• Imagery / sensory details (the five senses help the reader imagine)
• Tone (the narrator’s attitude toward the subject – including the level of formality)
• Mood (how the words create feelings in the reader)
• Sentence styles (e.g., short and direct or long and flowing)
• Sound devices (rhythm, rhyme, onomatopoeia, etc.) 
• Allusions and references (mentioning well-known ideas, texts, or examples)
• Comparing Mockingbirds

People love to discuss the merits of different adaptations of their favorite stories, but they do not often provide in-depth analysis comparing the versions.

Write an informative essay comparing the differences between the original novel and the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird .  You do not need to decide which is better; it is more important that you make thoughtful comparisons.

• Studies of Courage

What does it mean to be courageous? In To Kill a Mockingbird , Atticus wants Jem to rethink his definition.  He uses Mrs. Dubose’s example to help Jem broaden his view. 

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.”

Write an informative, personal essay explaining what courage means to you. Support your ideas with case studies from history and real life. Keep in mind that a personal interview can be a research source.

• Hypocrisy in Maycomb: Point of View and Irony

Harper Lee uses Scout’s point of view to show the ironies of Maycomb. Through her eyes we see how hypocritical people can be.

Irony : When the reality is the opposite of what is expected or appropriate. Hypocrisy :  When the behavior of a person or group is contrary to their supposed or stated principles.

Use examples of irony in To Kill a Mockingbird to explain how Lee uses the different points of view to express a message (theme). (Whenever someone is hypocritical it is ironic.)  Choose three or more examples to examine the irony, the points of view, and the message. 

Choose examples that you might write about in your essay body:

• The celebration of Africa (Egypt) in a segregated, all-white school.
• The justice system (that does not care about justice)
• The teacher who disapproves of reading at home
• The Missionary Society (that supports oppression in their own community)
• White people feeling threatened after the trial
• Dill the clown (who laughs at the audience)
• Atticus’ reelection (despite popular disapproval)
• The whispering lynch mob (It’s rude to annoy the man you are about to kill.)
• The thoughtful juror (The man who defends Tom was in the lynch mob.)
• Treatment of the Ewells (respected in court but not in life)
• Criticism of racism in Europe (Scout learns about Nazi Germany)
• Atticus the sexist
• Dolphus Raymond (the drunk who doesn’t drink)
• The supposed psychopath (Boo) is one of the kindest people.
• Parts, Plots, and Episodes

A short story usually has a simple structure with a beginning, middle, and end.  Long-form literature (like To Kill a Mockingbird ) often contains parallel main plots, sub-plots, and even separate parts.

Write an essay explaining the complex structure of Lee’s novel. How do the parts fit together and what is the overall effect? Make sure to use structure terms effective transitions.

• Growing Up (personal essay)

Much of To Kill a Mockingbird explores themes on growing up.  For Jem and Scout, growing up includes discovering some awful truths about Maycomb and human nature.

Write a personal essay explaining what being “grown up” means to you. How do you know when you are an adult? What are different points of view on the meaning of adulthood? (Think about legal, cultural, and personal definitions.)

• Foreshadowing in To Kill a Mockingbird

Lee creates feelings of tension and suspense in To Kill a Mockingbird . For example, think about how the writing puts the reader on edge leading up to the attack on the children.  

One way that Lee creates tension and suspense is through foreshadowing, clues about what may happen.  Write an essay analyzing Lee’s use of foreshadowing and include textual evidence in your explanation.

Choose an example to analyze:

• The kids’ mission to the Radley House
• Waiting for the verdict of the trial
• Atticus shooting Tim Johnson
• Bob Ewell’s attack on Scout and Jem
• Other: ______________________________

Looking for TKM project ideas?

Post preview:.

• Beyond the Mockingbird: Symbol Presentations
• Primary Source Gallery
• Is To Kill a Mockingbird Overrated?  (debate)
• It’s Complicated (class display)
• Themes of Mockingbird Presentation
• Truth and Fiction (research project)
• Free Robinson Campaign
• TKM Artwork (visual exhibit)
• Maycomb on Trial (mock trial)

Read more:  15 To Kill a Mockingbird Project Ideas

To kill a mockingbird writing prompts summary:, to kill a mockingbird creative writing.

• Writing a Symbol Poem
• The Lost Chapter
• Using Foreshadowing in Creative Writing

To Kill a Mockingbird Writing Prompts: Persuasive / Argument

To kill a mockingbird writing assignments: informative / expository.

• Scout’s Point of View
• Lee’s Style (word choice)

Getting students to write creatively, persuasively, and informatively takes critical thinking to the next level. I hope that you can use one or more of these To Kill a Mockingbird writing assignments in your unit.

If you would like the complete assignment pages for the To Kill a Mockingbird creative writing prompts and the rest, check out the  To Kill a Mockingbird Unit and Teacher Guide .

Related post: To Kill a Mockingbird Discussion Questions

Related post:  To Kill a Mockingbird Unit Test (PDF)

• International
• Education Jobs
• Schools directory
• Resources Education Jobs Schools directory News Search

30/30 Creative Writing Model Coursework Response - Edexcel IGCSE

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

30 August 2024

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

This resource CANNOT be used to submit as your own work.

This response achieved top band for both AOs of the coursework rubrik - contributing to a grade 9 overall in a response to an open topic short story theme at GCSE.

It is by no means perfect, therefore it is recommended to be used in class as a sample answer for discussion on what it does well and improvements.

Although directed for the Edexcel IGCSE syllabus, other boards with the coursework option (CIE, AQA, WJEC etc) may find it useful.

This can also be used by those required to write a story for exams as a model response to potentially emulate during timed conditions.

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Get this resource as part of a bundle and save up to 39%

A bundle is a package of resources grouped together to teach a particular topic, or a series of lessons, in one place.

Edexcel IGCSE Model Coursework Responses - R&J, Poetry & Prose, AIC and Creative Writing

**All of these resource CANNOT be used to submit as your own work.** These response all achieved top band for both AOs of the coursework rubriks - contributing to a grade 9 in Literature and Language overall at GCSE. These are by no means perfect, therefore it is recommended to be used in class as a sample answer for discussion on what it does well and improvements. Although directed for the Edexcel IGCSE syllabus, other boards with the coursework option (CIE, AQA, WJEC etc) may find it useful. These can also be used by those required to write similar essays for exams as a model response to potentially emulate during timed conditions. Included: A response on theme of identity in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Disabled’, Moniza Alvi’s ‘An Unknown Girl’ and De Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ A response on the presentation of Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet A response to an open topic short story theme A response on the ways in which Sheila Birling has changed by the end of An Inspector Calls

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource: