Take your time. Take your time is code for: read my pages now. When a writer says read it whenever you get a chance, he means skip your daughter’s wedding and get reading, pal. There is nothing more adorable than a writer pretending to be mellow, cool, chill. Dude, read it whenevs. I’m already working on a new project. I could use a big break so take your time. Take your time is code for: my life is in the balance. Writers have developed all sorts of coping mechanisms to cope with the waiting. Some include: self-flagellation, excessive self-love, massive weight gain, massive weight loss, cleaning and organizing, chopping garlic, and my personal favorite: cutting frayed towels into dust rags.

How do you handle the agonizing, soul-killing, mind-fuck of waiting?

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How many times have I heard  a writer say, upon delivering his book, “Be brutally honest.” Really? Wouldn’t honest suffice? I don’t think anyone really wants brutal honesty, especially once they get it. Some editors can take out your molars and you don’t feel any pain, their “brutal” notes couched in kind and supportive suggestions. Other editors can take a single hair from your head and make you feel as if you’ve been scalped, so sharp their hatchets. Do we say be brutally honest because we suspect our reader will otherwise be too gentle or generous with us?

A publisher once said, before rejecting one of my client’s projects, “I want to be gentle with you.” Gentle? Because I can’t handle the truth (a la Jack Nicholson)? Or gentle because you’re an all loving God who would never hurt a small to mid-size animal in your kingdom.  Another editor, in a rejection letter, said, “I feel I must be brutally honest,” before telling me my client couldn’t write. Really, thanks for the heads up. I guess I’ll withdraw the submission, fire the client, hand in my agenting badge and go back to bagging at Astor Wines and Spirits where I won neatest check out station three months in a row.

Be brutally honest. Give it to us straight! We can take it! No pussyfooting, thank you. Pull the band-aid off fast. Kick out the jambs. Press down on the wound until the pain feels so fucking weird. Be brutally honest. Do we say it because we really believe we want to hear the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Do we say it as an expression of our strength? Our invincibility? Our superiority? Fragility?  Our stupidity? Or do we mean, by asking for the brutal truth, that we hope  you will fall so deeply in love with our work that the skies will open, love and money will tumble over themselves to find us, and no one anywhere will ever suffer again?

How do you like your honesty? Straight up or with a twist?

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This is a big one. A big lie. And whenever a writer tells me this, I think long and hard before taking him on. Can you guess what it is? Okay, stand back, here it is: I don’t need a lot of handholding. LIE. LIE. LIE. Sans truth. That’s like a guy saying he doesn’t like blow jobs. Or a gal saying she doesn’t like Bosch appliances. Look, anyone who thinks they don’t need handholding through the fun-loving process of getting published is kidding himself. But it’s worse than that because invariably the person who makes this pronouncement is the one who needs far more than hand holding. He needs pep talks, commiseration conversations, babysitting, spoon feeding and diaper changing.

I don’t mind hand holding, in fact I’ve sort of built my reputation on it. But the fact still remains that a client who makes me laugh, who takes his lumps and comes back fighting, or who just works incredibly hard, that writer will continue to inspire me (both to hand hold when needed, but more important to keep me working hard for him). The worst is when a client calls and you groan before picking up the phone because you know a litany of complaints will follow. THe complaints, of course, are valid. News flash: publishing isn’t democratic or fair. Neither is the fact that I didn’t get asked to my prom. Or that the medication I take to make me stable makes me heavy. Or that I can’t hold a tune. Look: Tell me you need a little hand holding. Tell me you need a lot. Tell me that there aren’t enough hands in the world to hold what ails you. Just don’t lie to me.

Come clean. How much do you need?

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Sometimes, there comes a moment in the writing of a book when a writer tells me, in hushed tones, that he needs a studio, an office, a yurt, just some other place to go and write. He is emphatic. He can no longer get his work done — only a move can save him. Often writers work from home and suffer a certain lack of solitude, privacy, quiet.  They need a place to sprawl out, to leave their papers and books about. They need a place to think.  I get all that. Writers need to get away from the kids, the phone, the UPS man. Still, there’s  Mary Higgins Clark who dragged her typewriter on to the fire escape every night after she got the dishes washed and put her kids to bed. Or Ray Bradbury who deposited dimes into the typewriters at the public library to bang out his fiction. And many like them. When you have to write, when you are at the beginning of your career, you’d write on the roof of your mouth if you had to.  Is it just me or does a room of one’s own sound more like a  place to jack off and smoke dope? Yes, of course you need a corner of your own, but not mid-book. When you want to find a new place mid-project you’re looking for a geographical cure, and like most geographical  cures they usually turn out to be short-lived and expensive. The minute you think something like a new space can save you, you’re a goner.

Agree? Disagree? Where do you write?

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