If you are reading this, you’ve made it to DAY 5 of our 30 day 30 minute writing challenge. Amazing! If you’re just joining now,

jump in and jump start your writing. I don’t want to brag, but my 30 minutes flew by this morning from start to finish.

I’m not going to say I was on fire, but it was hot. Usually, when I sit down to write, I imagine I need a few hours if not more.

And that has been a big impediment. I do long for more time, but getting something done, producing a few new pages, connecting with a project that was heading for the crypt is really rejuvenating. Also, I apologize for being so positive and upbeat.

What is the first thing you remember writing? Mine was a diary, age 6, that chronicled the ways in which life was unfair.

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DAY #4 Who’s still with me? I spent my thirty minutes going over earlier pages. I think the goal, ideally, is to write new material. And I meant to but I also needed to touch base with earlier pages. Were there redundancies? Discrepancies? What could I do better? Sometimes you just need to start at the beginning of the diving board. Tomorrow, I’m going to push myself forward. But the bigger victory was simply that I did my thirty minutes before doing any other publishing work. In other words: bite me.

What in your life competes for your writing time?

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You made it to Day 3!!! If you missed a day, just jump back in. There is going to be a huge reward for the people who stick with it, which of course is the satisfaction of knowing you did it. I spent about fifteen minutes of my time going over the last few pages and making corrections. Then I hit upon a tangent and took it all the way down river. Generating new material is such a fucking drug. Maybe that’s why we keep doing it. To get a contact high off your own word bracelets.

Where is your story set? Mine’s in New Haven, New York, Pennsylvania, London, Arizona and the Keys.

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My life’s battle has been to put my work first. So yesterday, DAY 2, was a revelation in that I actually have a half hour and I can actually make some progress. Okay, don’t get excited. It’s only the second day. But I feel all of you with me. And I also feel I can’t let you down. Basically, I’m your bitch.

Please put the last line of what you wrote yesterday in the comments.

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So it looks like we have 27 people taking the Betsy Lerner 30 day challenge. I don’t know about you, but I’m PUMPED. Here’s what happened to me setting out on this “journey.” I got up early to get some editing done. The whole time I kept telling myself to do my writing. Take the half hour. And then I did it. I literally looked at my watch and started. The first fifteen minutes were brutal. The second fifteen flew by. It was amazing. I had to stop because of “work.” But I’m feeling it.

What was your Day #1 like?

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So I just completed a workout regimen. Thirty minutes of exercise for thirty days. I’m not even going to talk about how svelt I am, or how much sand is running through this hourglass body of mine. Instead, I want to challenge all of us nutcakes who read this blog to write for thirty minutes every day for 30 days or until Thanksgiving. Every day. Thirty minutes.

Who’s in?

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If you write every day, is it prayer? A form of prayer. Or squid ink? Or a strand of floss on the bathroom floor. If you write every day, do you go to heaven or hell or Graham Green’s desk. He wrote a page every day. Think about it. I still say write by hand, still believe it’s a form of prayer, contact between the pen and page, pressing down, your singular handwriting, your hand. If you write every day you will get better. There may be a sentence you’ve yet to write that wants your blood. Are you prepared to give it? And what would you steal? A kidney? A phrase? A shade of blue? What if you wrote every day and found a wee pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or three pieces of coal or an Abyssinian cat. What if your sentences choked you to death, or cradled your head, or played Gin Rummy waiting for the ultimate discard? What if you wrote an unrecognized masterpiece, or the emperor’s new clothes were Gucci?

How often do you write and what’s your excuse?

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Sometimes I think of my clients as babies in a nursery. At any given moment, a few will be sleeping, a few will be fitful, and a few will be screaming their heads off. And it’s my job to soothe them, calm them, and reassure them. The screaming usually happens when the rejections are piling up, or in the months before publication when anxiety is highest, or at some point after publication when it feels like: is that all? Some clients are screaming inside, but it isn’t in them to make a fuss. Something about the whole process makes them feel ashamed and small. Others act as if they are impervious to disappointment. Operative word is “act.” It may take some writers months or years, but eventually the baby will scream its head off. One writer, two years after his book bombed, told me that he’s wasn’t bitter. A blind man could see he was extremely bitter. As a writer, bitterness if your god-given right. I could recite chapter and verse what went wrong with all three of the books I wrote. Can I remember anything good that happened? Not as vividly.

What kind of baby are you?

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Let me be very clear: publishing = pain. Or as Saint Teresa of Avila famously said, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.” It’s painful because you believe that getting published is the culmination of your dreams, the apotheosis of your desires, the time for you to finally take your place at the table. I think I’m fortunate in that I was still naive when I went to graduate school for poetry. I pretty much believed that only dead people wrote books. Getting a poem in a lit mag was giddy-making. I couldn’t imagine a book. I gave up all things poetic and went to work in publishing where I became the cynical little monster that I am today. When I published my first book, it was a self-help book. Far from Mount Olympus. I wrote to hundreds of writers conferences and writing programs and set up tons of speaking engagement mostly at my own expense. I did that for 2-3 years until I burned out. It wasn’t the worst experience at all. Some people do have a good experience, but in my role as an agent over the last thirty plus years, I’ve mopped up so many tears, visited so many rehabs and looney bins, I’ve pretended that a bad review didn’t matter, I’ve spun reasons for no one showing up to your reading, no reviews, no book sales, no prizes, no ads, I’ve talked about personal satisfaction and accomplishment and getting back on the horse. Have you tried therapy, medication, yoga, volunteer work? Writing is hard. Breaking in is almost impossible. Getting published is a kick in the head. Enjoy!

What is your unanswered prayer?

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I want to go out on a limb and respond to some of the comments that expressed frustration with publishing and my comments about credentials and so forth. First, I really do get the pain associated with being on the margins or feeling marginalized. As most of you know, I’ve been knocking my head against the Hollywood sign for decades. And I’m fairly certain I will go to my grave without any of my scripts being made, I’ll never be in a writer’s room, and certainly never collect my Oscar for which I have many speeches prepared. I always tell myself I’m going to quit and yet I keep writing. That is my choice. Most people break through by working in the industry and working their way up. I didn’t do that. It’s a disadvantage. So be it.

If you don’t get an MFA, work in journalism, attend writer’s conferences, publish in literary magazines, pitch essays, etc. then you are at a disadvantage. Think of it this way. You pick up two books in the store. One has blurbs on the back, one by a writer you admire. The other is blank. The first book has an advantage at the cash register. If I get two submissions in a day and one writer has a writing prize and a couple of publications and the other has nothing, the first submission has an advantage. It’s also true that the title will grab me as well as the first line and paragraph. All the credentials and referrals are not going to get your work accepted if it sucks, but it will probably get looked at first. But tons of crap gets published, you cry. Yes, this is also true. How do we explain in? My mother always said, that’s what makes horse racing. To each his own. There’s no accounting for taste.

When I was an editor, a project was brought up at the editorial meeting. It sounded amazing and we all read it for the following meeting. I was out that week, but the following meeting I asked, “Whatever happened with that treacly piece of shit?” I was told that the editor acquired it for a tidy sum. Awkward! I invoked my mother’s horse racing metaphor. Well, that treacly piece of shit sold millions of copies and spurred a cottage industry of similar books.

Quit if you must. Quit if you can.

Tell me your dreams.

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