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
I feel so awful about not blogging more often, but as you know I’ve run off with a new lover called BookTok, and I find the whole whacky world of content creation (lol) and influencers and scrolling to be deeply intriguing. It’s like learning a new language or going to a foreign country. Not knowing the rules, trying to get comfortable, wanting to join but afraid of messing up. I’ve been making little videos where I read from the diaries I kept in my twenties. It’s been something of an excavation and what I see is that this little monster has been at it for a long time. Writing almost every day in those notebooks, blogging every day for years, and now my first novel. I like to say that it poured out of me, or dropped into my lap, but the reality is that every diary entry and post was part of my story, part of developing my voice, part of enjoying connecting with people and being less afraid. I like to joke that I’ve written a coming of age story at 63, but it’s no joke. It just took a while.
Dear Readers of this Blog, In the spirit of the year winding down, I thought I’d post my annual hate list: Everything pink and Barbie and my outsize jealousy of Greta Gerwig even though she has done nothing to me personally and made the highest grossing film of the year opening doors for women filmmakers which is awesome. Romantacy as a new genre. People hating on my new home away from home, TikTok, and blaming CoHo (Colleen Hoover) for the demise of fiction. People “not getting” Taylor Swift. Calling Twitter X. Succession and people praising it for the “writing.” The loss of constitutional rights. The battle for the soul of our country. The world in flames.
Sending love and light and bright new pages. Stay healthy, keep writing whatever you do, and hope to see you in the new year.
A friend just forwarded this Substack post to me (you guys aware of Substack? It’s platform for writers to make money from subscriptions – cutting out the middle man — and there’s great stuff on it). Hennyway: this was right up my alley. Love the negative writing vibe. Reminded me of us. Almost did a spit take.
Dearest Readers of this Blog: I have been cheating on you. I’m not going to lie. I’ve been seduced by TikTok, BookTok specifically. A year ago, people in publishing were saying that it’s the only social media to move the needle (the sales needle). So while most people turned their noses up at it, and Colleen Hoover, I decided to check it out. I’m astonished at what I’ve found, dancing cowboys and kitten videos aside, there is a vibrant community of book lovers who read in every genre, including classics. It’s a way to discover what is popular and why. A lot of people are reading out there, and sharing their thoughts, and creating communities. I’m definitely a newbie, but when I make a video that people respond to, I have to admit it’s thrilling. If you’re interesed, check me out @betsylerner
In other news, my debut (!) novel has gone into production and will come out next year in November. My editor has kicked my ass seven ways from Sunday and I’m beyond humbled and grateful. Not only have I improved by book as a result of her painstaking work, I feel as I’ve become a better editor myself.
To anyone who is still hanging around the Lerner Home for Wayward Children, I hope you’re okay. I hope you’re bringing a writing project to fruition or starting a new one, or just writing in your diary, or a long letter to a friend. If you’re out there, catch us up. xo, Betsy
Even though I’m an agent, I still do a great deal of editing for my clients. Lately, I’ve been working with a writer I’ve known for over 25 years. By now, it’s like we’re an old married couple. I know her strengths and weakness. She knows my pet peeves and prejudices. We bicker about the same things, agree about the same things. Sometimes we don’t have to say anything at all. When I suggest a more apt word, move a paragraph, change the tense, she’s delighted. Calls me a genius. A small halo lights up over head. No change is too small. And I am thrilled when she takes a chance, makes a leap, says “look ma, no hands” with a string of sentences that blows my mind. In the end, it’s the dance. The call and response. The trust that if I know you’ll catch me, I am free to fall.
I’ve been working on my editor’s notes for a month with ten days to go. She has nipped, tucked, corrected, questioned, prodded, challenged, and inspired me. Word choice, cliches, active verbs, varying sentence structure, wordiness, tightening, extraneous details, point of view. After 30 years of editing, I’m humbled by her work. If a sentence, sentiment, or thought is off by a hair, she questions it. She calls me out on all my bad habits. She has also encouraged me to take more chances. I am almost ready.
My editor sent my quote unquote novel back with her notes. It’s a true, old school line-edit. Be still my heart. Her pencil is everywhere: tone, structure, point of view, word choice, continuity, transitions. There is nothing like being in the hands of a real editor. The careful attention, the big picture, the perspective. You know my level of gratitude is enormous. That’s not to say that I didn’t plummet to the depths today, just facing how bad the bad parts are, the rookie mistakes, the wanton abuse of semi-colons. The sheer wordiness (which I had deluded myself into thinking was my “voice”). I’m gonna get a good night’s sleep and hit it again in morning. The one guarantee about writing: One day you’re great and the next you’re the worst.
Someone called me “driven” the other day and it kind of bothered me. What does that even mean. Honestly, I’m probably more compulsive than I am driven. I don’t like leaving things unfinished. It’s also true that I get frustrated when people tell me that they can’t write, or they have to make themselves write, or they need certain circumstances in their life to be able to write. In my mind, it’s something that you do because you don’t know how to make sense of the world any other way.
When I was about around eleven or twelve, my mother and I were driving by a corn field dotted by brown stalks sticking out of the snow, and I remarked that they looked like the stubble on a man’s face. She said that my observation was a simile. A comparison using like or as. I attribute my love of poetry and writing back to that moment and pleasing my mother, a woman difficult to please. Metaphor, more abstract, came later, more gradually. When I finished War and Peace the other day, I felt as if a glacial metaphor had moved through me, the book encompassing all of life on a grand scale and also on the most intimate. And yet through all that, one image keeps coming back to me. There is a hunt for rabbits where thousand-ruble dogs compete with mongrels, and a mongrel named Rugay is the victor. Tolstoy writes, “For some after, they kept looking askance at red Rugay, who trotted along Uncle’s horse with mud all over his hunched up back, jingling the fittings on his leash, with the serene air of a conquerer.” Yes, a metaphor for the whole book, the Russian army defeating the French, but oh that phrase, “the serene air of a conquerer,” the sound and flow of it, the feeling and image it stirs, the inherent simile. And that, dear reader, is the depth of my love of writing, right there in a single phrase.
Remember, on the first day of school, you will be asked what your did on your summer vacation. I hope you’ve been writing. Honestly, I’m stalled out waiting for notes. I tried to jump back into a screenplay outline that feels dead on the vine in this post-Barbie landscape. Actually, Barbie has nothing to do with it. When do you declare a patient dead? DNR? Now that I’ve finished War & Peace, I’m determined to read a lot of really short books that also promise to change my life. I’m starting with Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector. So far, it’s brilliant. And she wrote it when she was 23. Fuck me dead.
Betsy Lerner 