Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Bird by Bird occupies a place between two genres of writing: the memoir and the “craft book.” Memoir is a distinct genre from autobiography, as it typically approaches the writer’s life from a single lens rather than trying to capture the full scope of their life. Memoirists also typically employ far more artistic license in how they shape and tell their story, as their goals are personal and literary rather than political or historical.

Craft books, meanwhile, are meant to instruct the reader in finer points of writing and provide them with an artistic outlook on the process of making fiction or nonfiction. Their popularity increased throughout the second half of the 20th century into today, in part as the rise of academic creative writing programs has led to a much larger audience for craft books. Since craft books often grow out of the classes a writer teaches in a creative writing program—as is the case with Bird by Bird—creative writing programs have a role in generating the books themselves as well as providing an audience for them. Works like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done, and Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World take a generalist approach to literary craft and theory, while other books such as Virginia Tufte’s