I was talking to a young writer the other day and the question came up about whether you need to “stay in your lane,” meaning stick with one genre. He writes screenplays and plays and poetry, and he had started thinking about writing a novel. What is my advice? I have no idea. If you’re aiming for one thing, it’s probably smart to just do that one thing and hone your craft develop contacts. But some people play multiple instruments, and others write, direct, and act. When I think of how much I put into poetry as a young person, and all the screenplays I’ve written that have gotten nowhere, and the books I wound up writing instead, I honestly can’t make much sense of it. I can connect the dots, but there was never a plan. One thing led to the next.
Do you have a path?
credit: cool2bkids
Filed under: fiction, Poetry, screenplays, Screenwriting, Writers, Writing | 8 Comments »
When I was young, I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have twenty-seven diaries and countless others lost along the way. My diaries also served as scrapbooks. I’d tape in ticket stubs, important letters, lyrics, poems. Most of the tape now yellow and brittle like the fingernails of the dead. I did’t imagine any future for myself as a writer. WHen I started writing poems, I never imagined getting them published. Only then I started sending them out, typing my nervous letters on onion skin letters to places like The Antioch Review and Crazyhorse. Then my disastrous MFA. I remember putting my manuscript together in my robe, chain-smoking, believing there were correspondences, rhythms, wit. I never dreamed that I would carry a tote bag filled with manuscripts. I never dreamed I would receive flowers from young writers. People ask me if I still write poems. The answer is still no.
Why are poets such a-holes, you might ask. Is it their power with language, is it their widow’s peak streaked with white, is it their penetrating gaze or the way they pronounce poem pome? HOw about the way they read their own work? It’s like watching someone masturbate in slow motion. God, it’s gross. I used to love poetry readings, soaking up the beret life, drinking the warm Chardonnay. I fucking hate Chardonnay. And for some damn reason when I tell a waiter that I would like white wine, they always ask if I’d like Chardonnay. Is there something about me that screams Chardonnay? Why can’t they ask if I’d like a Pinot? A Sancerre? Another thing, poets think they’re better than other people.
Let’s talk about poets. Poooets. Wordsmiths. Visionaries. Mongrels. Thieves. When I was getting my MFA, someone asked the great William Matthews why poets didn’t have agents. “Because 15% of nothing is nothing.” When people discover that I have a degree in poetry and won a couple of prizes when I was still in diapers, they ask me with a hopeful longing, “Do you still write poetry?” And it sounds like, do you cavort with the angels, do you still touch yourself gently, or lay down in a field of alfalfa where wild ponies run?
What was your first literary orgasm? Roger W. Straus, venerable co-founder of FSG, claimed it was The 
I ruin another morning yet again. Downstairs, my husband reads Delillo’s new novel. He’s been up since dawn, reading, making notes in his tiny Catholic trained script. He is completely energized by some idea or sentence and he wants to talk about it. I make a face that can only be interpreted as: you’re not going to make me talk about writing. He wonders aloud how I do this for a living given how much contempt I have for most conversations about writing. He says he’ll never bring it up again. I say, good.
When I was in the fifth grade, I was crazy about my English teacher Miss Presnell. She has horse hair clogs and played Jethro Tull’s Aqua Lung during class, handing out the lyrics for us to analyze.
Betsy Lerner 