THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is about writing, publishing and what makes writers tick. This blog is dedicated to the self loathing that afflicts most writers. A community of like-minded malcontents gather here. I post less frequently now, but hopefully with as much vitriol. Please join in! Gluttons for punishment can scroll through the archives.
If I’ve learned one thing about writers, it’s this: we really are all alone. Thanks for reading. Love, Betsy
It’s official. I’m a simile slut. I don’t know when to stop. If I can compare something to anything else, I will. Given the chance to use “like” or “as” I’m all over that shit. Look, I spent 40K on a poetry MFA, what the hell else am I gonna do. My editor (yes, ahem, working on ye olde first novel, lol) has pointed it out, exasperation all over the margin notes. An early reader also commented on the PLETHORA ( a word I hate that reminds me of lady parts) of similes: “If the simile is not precise, it fails to do the job it was meant to do and draws attention to the artifice that’s taking place.” Busted. So true. The simile must thread the needle, you know, the one in the haystack. I’m off my fucking rocker with this revision. Please stop me before I kill again.
What does a workaholic do on vacation? How does a workaholic know when vacation’s over? How hard does the rain have to fall? I can still remember the first day of school after summer, pretending not to be excited, but secretly so happy to be back behind a desk, the smell of new supplies, new books, watching a new teacher try to make an impression. My mother’s sandwiches in tin foil, a piece of fruit banging around in my lunch box. I did four loads of laundry when we got home and walled off.
When you say you’re not good at something, what do you mean?
Back when I was a mushroom getting my MFA, there was a woman in my workshop who dazzled. She wasn’t taller than everyone, she only seemed that way. I have had the great privilege of working with Jean Zimmerman as her editor first, now as her agent, and always her friend. Her dazzling historical novel, SAVAGE GIRL, has just been published by Viking to great early acclaim.
CONTEST: Who is your favorite bad guy (in literature) and why? I’ll ask Jean to judge the answers and top three answers will win a copy of Savage Girl.
Sooner or later, a historical crime novel is bound to drag you down some dark alley and into the nastiest, most lawless precincts of the period. Jean Zimmerman followed this tradition in her first novel, “The Orphanmaster,” a descent into the hellish criminal haunts of 17th-century New Amsterdam. In SAVAGE GIRL (Viking, $27.95), this canny author puts all that aside and turns to the Gilded Age for a sweeping narrative, set within the cloistered ranks of high society in 19th-century Manhattan, that raises touchy questions about what it means to be civilized.
Even in this exclusive world, the Delegate family is more privileged than most. The paterfamilias, Friedrich-August-Heinrich (also known as Freddy), has taken his family and a retinue of servants on his private, sumptuously appointed 12-car railroad train to Virginia City, Nev., to visit the silver mine that’s boosting his already considerable fortune. But when the Delegates depart from this brawling Wild West boom town, they have an additional passenger, a beautiful, feral young woman from a land that’s “savage, wild, forsaken by God and man” — who’s said to have been raised by wolves. Found at a sideshow, she’ll be the ideal experimental subject, Freddy thinks, for the nature-or-nurture debate roiling his intellectual set.
Photo
Credit Christoph Niemann
Using Freddy’s intelligent but decidedly peculiar son Hugo as narrator adds another layer of suspense to the story. A student of anatomy at Harvard, this young man has an unhealthy fondness for knives and a vivid imagination when it comes to Bronwyn, as the “Savij Girl” comes to be known. But who’s to say where imagination leaves off and obsession takes over, once the family is back in its Fifth Avenue mansion and the “Pygmalion”-like process of civilizing Bronwyn (who keeps her own set of razor-like steel claws and creeps out of the house to visit the wild animals at the zoo) begins in earnest.
The wondrous sights Zimmerman rolls out for us — a picnic on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, a stopover at the “fabulous, glorious” Palmer House hotel in Chicago and visits to mansions up and down the East Coast — are all the more piquant when Bronwyn’s admirers begin turning up, cut to ribbons, at almost every whistle stop. If this is civilization, bring on the wolves.
‘My Fair Lady’ Meets ‘Psycho’: PW Talks with Jean Zimmerman
A feral child unsettles Gilded Age New York City in Jean Zimmerman’s Savage Girl.
How did the book come to be?
I’d always wanted to write about a wolf girl—that is, one afflicted with the genetic condition known as hypertrichosis, which causes a person to resemble an animal, with fur growing all over his or her body. Many children with the condition were exhibited in American sideshows in an earlier period. Related in my mind was the phenomenon of so-called feral children, a girl or a boy purported to be raised by wolves (or by bears, or big cats, or goats, or, in one reported case, by rats). I ultimately crashed these two ideas together in Savage Girl.
What did the murder plot add?
A random killing here and there really focuses a narrative. We don’t know who is committing the murders in Savage Girl, but indications point to Bronwyn—and with good reason. The historical record shows that feral children were prone to violent outbursts.
You often write about the status of women. Was there something in particular about the women of the Gilded Age that intrigued you?
I found the debutante to be a fascinating creature and the coming out process one that was as constricting as it was lovely. Here were the grand dames of society, banding together when a girl reached the age of 18 or so, helping to usher her into a new social status. There was some power in the process for women. The learning curve was steep. There were new gowns and dance lessons, teas, ritualized social visits, and grand balls. The fashions were extraordinary. Yet debuting was filled with the strictest rules and obligations, and if you failed, there was the threat of punishment—remaining a spinster. I wanted to search beneath the opaque surface of the debuting process to find deeper meanings. That meant talking about both corsets and bloomers.
“Zimmerman’s dark comedy of manners is an obvious homage to Edith Wharton, a rip-roaring murder mystery more Robert Louis Stevenson than Conan Doyle and a wonderfully detailed portrait of the political, economic and philosophical issues driving post–Civil War America.” –KIRKUS
This is for the French editor who came by the office this week and said she had started her day every morning reading my blog. Well, my blog and a Galoise. God, that’s a dreamy combo. She just started a new job after twenty years with one publisher. She has read everything and has a wonderful way of talking about writers and their books. More, she had a quiet confidence, clear about what she would publish and how. Honestly, it’s a such a pleasure working in publishing when you get to talk books with a sexy, French editor. Yes, my life is this train and these are the sub-titles: Books float like rafts in a calm sea. Everything eats. This is the French cream you brought me, made from green tea. Do you have a light, my love?
Sometimes editing a book is a ratfuck. You keep chasing something through a maze that no longer leads anywhere. It’s a sand trap. The canary’s last song in a forsaken mine. And sometimes editing a book is like making love to an ordinary woman or doing algebra. No one ever tells you how slow it is, how 5-10 pages an hour is a clip. Like therapy or sex: are you even doing it right? What goes on behind closed doors? It’s about attention. It’s about asking every question. It’s about having a feel for the fabric. It requires an innate sense of structure, an eye for the telling detail, a finely tuned sense of syntax, tense, rhythm. I think being an editor is most like being a tailor. Take it in, move the button, hem the sleeve. How handsome you look in the mirror. How trim.
I used to have a friend called Raymond. He saw me through a lot of heartache. One of his standard soliloquies was about how great love wasn’t for every day. Everyday you could reasonably expect: a cup of coffee, the newspaper, a good dump, etc. But great love, well, it was going to take its time. This is true for finding great authors and projects.
When I left one publishing house for another, my boss pulled me over and said, if you remember anything, remember this: patience. Was this the generic advice he gave all young editors trying to make their mark, or did he see the mania in my eyes? Either way, it felt like fuddy duddy advice, be cautious, belt and suspenders. Didn’t getting anywhere require daring, action, taking a leap?
What happens when months go by and you don’t see anything you like. I’ve often compared this predicament to the lowering of sexual standards in a dive bar after 2:00 a.m. This is okay for a one night stand, but can be disastrous when you take on a book that you never quite believe in, acquired in a fit desperation. This happened to me once when I was an editor, and it only had to happen once.
When I was a young editor, there was an editor, maybe two years older than I was, but miles ahead of me in her career, who I was insanely jealous of. I didn’t even like her books that much, but she was clearly a player and she was very beautiful. Over time, the gap closed and I had my own stable of authors. But the jealousy never abated. Just the sheer mention of her name made me crazy when she acquired a book or climbed the publishing ladder to even greater heights. At some point during this time, I came up with the Bete Noire Theory of Publishing. This is when one particular person out there is the focal point of all your envy. The sick part is that you need this person like the winter needs the spring. And I believe every editor has one. One editor who sees all the same projects, gets courted for all the same jobs, who wins auctions and beds interns. (I don’t actually approve of bedding interns, but that’s another post.)
I also believe that most writers have their own Bete Noire. You know the writer who has agents clamoring for her. The writer The New Yorker plucked for their debut fiction issue. The one whose book gets optioned by George Clooney, or after having flop after flop still gets a lucrative contract from Knopf. Or maybe it is the one who wrote about what you’re still trying to write about. Or who received a Pulitzer for a book you couldn’t read it was so…downmarket. Or who has a great husband five kids and is about to publish her sixth novel. Or worse, the one whose husband left her, has five kids, a rare disease that’s eroding her vision and is still about to publisher her sixth novel. These fuckin’ people.
Who makes you crazy? Who is the one? And you don’t have to name names, though we surely wouldn’t stop you.
When I was an editor, everyone at the publishing houses feared a few agents, most notably Andrew Wylie who has gone on the record with his disdain for publishers. He was a bully, he didn’t play by the rules (or rather he played by his own rules), and he exacted huge advances for his clients.
In a Vanity Fair article he was quoted as saying, “When I got into the business, I saw that agents had…friends. Their close friends were publishers, and their second closest friends were their clients. Their friendships with certain editors, certain houses were important to protect the longevity of their profit margin…It’s a source of satisfaction…that editors do not recommend us to writers. They say, ‘No, no!” Whatever you do, don’t go with Andrew.’ Well, thank you very much, we’re doing our job.”
I realized then it was better to be feared than loved. Fewer people will attend your funeral, but so what. You’re taking a permanent dirt nap anyway. Unfortunately, I think the only I person I scare is myself.
When I left editorial for the dark side, a fellow editor took me aside and said he thought I was making the right decision, becoming an agent. He had observed that I fought too hard on behalf of the authors, that I didn’t realize who “buttered my bread.” I couldn’t let anything drop. He said I wasn’t a good company girl. I took all these as great compliments, that I was a true champion of writers. Though I also felt vaguely accused of being…immature.
My parents had always accused me of never knowing when to stop, but why should I have stopped begging to go to that Peter Frampton concert? So what if I had a 102 degree fever. Why wouldn’t I want to go to my 34th Grateful Dead Concert? What is enough? I keep pushing because I believe in the these little fuckers known as books. And if they’re worth publishing, it’s worth trying to get it right. In the ten years I’ve been on Andrew Wylie’s side of the fence, however, I still find my stance is more collaborative than confrontational.
That said, I’d like to be feared. I want editors to tremble and publishers to faint. And please, don’t think of me with a referral. For god’s sakes, man, whatever you do, don’t go with Betsy Lerner.
Two manuscripts came in last week on stretchers. One needed a heart transplant, the other a new leg. It took hours of surgery, but they are both doing well. People ask if I still edit. I can’t not edit. I think we all read with pencils in our hands. Isn’t that the job?
I’ve been editing writers for 25 years. A lot of the work is routine by now, easy to spot, easy to fix. Sometimes the diagnosis is more difficult. You can have a very well written book that doesn’t move you. You can have a beautiful mess. You can get a beautiful mess into shape. But how do you add feeling?
Editing is also about trust. It’s a dance. You have to feel that your partner won’t drop you. Will catch you. Sees the forest, sees the trees. Sees the birds. Sees the maggots. You know I love to hear stories about worst experiences, but I’d really love to hear about the best thing you learned from an editor or reader.
Years ago, long before I became an agent, I fixed up three couples, all of whom got married. I didn’t even know any of them particularly well. I just had a “feeling.” And when things worked out for the happy couples, I applauded my own prescience. (Let the record show that this skill did not extend to my own romantic adventures.)
My point: this same “feeling” applies to agenting. Of all the things the job entails, first and foremost discovering writers, the next most important decision you make is selecting the editor you are going to submit any given project to. I think this is common knowledge, but in case it isn’t, you can only submit your book to one editor at a publishing company. If that editor passes, it’s a pass for the whole house. You can’t try the editor in the next office over. Your chance with that the publisher is over. So a good agent will have relationships with a few or more editors at every house and have as much hard as well as anecdotal information about each editor with which to target the submission. Writers often ask how we decide which editors to send to. You choose a certain editor over another at a publishing house to submit a project to because :
You have a perfectly clear sense of what they are looking for; it has “their name on it,”
You have sold them books in the past and you’re tight.
You have some inside knowledge from lunch dates about the editor’s life or taste .
You’ve done copious research (i.e. a publishersmarketplace.com search) into their buying patterns .
You saw their name on a restroom door at Grammercy Tavern in conjunction with a certain sexual proclivity.
I wonder what’s more difficult these days: getting married or getting published.
Sometimes editing a book is a ratfuck. You keep chasing something through a maze that no longer leads anywhere. It’s a sand trap. The canary’s last song in a forsaken mine. And sometimes editing a book is like making love to an ordinary woman or doing algebra. No one ever tells you how slow it is, how 5-10 pages an hour is a clip. Like therapy or sex: are you even doing it right? What goes on behind closed doors? It’s about attention. It’s about asking every question. It’s about having a feel for the fabric. It requires an innate sense of structure, an eye for the telling detail, a finely tuned sense of syntax, tense, rhythm. I think being an editor is most like being a tailor. Take it in, move the button, hem the sleeve. How handsome you look in the mirror. How trim.
I used to have a friend called Raymond. He saw me through a lot of heartache. One of his standard soliloquies was about how great love wasn’t for every day. Everyday you could reasonably expect: a cup of coffee, the newspaper, a good dump, etc. But great love, well, it was going to take its time. This is true for finding great authors and projects.
Two manuscripts came in last week on stretchers. One needed a heart transplant, the other a new leg. It took hours of surgery, but they are both doing well. People ask if I still edit. I can’t not edit. I think we all read with pencils in our hands. Isn’t that the job?
Betsy Lerner 