There is a little clusterfuck of questions in the Ask Betsy that all circle around the same drain: when do you know it’s done? When the juices run clear. When the frog dies. When the ravens dance. When a beautiful woman gently touches your arm and takes your hand and you soundlessly climb a marble staircase and the wind picks up just so. You know you are done when you don’t look at it for a month, go back to it, read it out loud and don’t make a single mark. Or when the last page hisses out of the printer and you shove the manuscript in your saddle bag and take off through town on your palomino.. It’s done when the next thing you want to write gets noisy. It’s done when your agent says so. When your editor says so. It done when you can’t take one more step. It’s done when you come.
How the hell do you know when it’s done?
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While we’re on the subject of movies, I watched ONCE tonight and I found myself sobbing at the end. It’s the story of two lonely people who briefly make some music together (that’s literal not sex) and for various reasons must part. It’s so simple. So moving. These are the stories that are very hard to sell. They are considered small, quite, inconspicuous. How the fuck it got green lit or financed I will never know. It’s also a musical. WTF. And now it’s a big hit on Broadway, too. What’s the lesson? Do your work. Just do your fucking work. You want to write about a mushroom cap, write a about a mushroom cap. THe other day I saw a photo of some sculpture that’s at the bottom of the ocean and you have to scuba dive to see it. Right on! I mean this is a gigantic world. Make your sandscape. Make your horse out of tape. I knew a girl who sculpted with butter. Write your epic, toe your name in the sand. This is for you but it’s really for me, a hundred note cards blowing in the wind. One potato more.
A writer recently confessed that he napped a great deal when starting a project. Sometimes taking two and three naps a day. Of course, one wants to imagine pole vaulting into a new project, high diving off a great promontory, covering one’s body in red clay. One wants to be bold, to spar, to find the chord progression, the last turn of a rusted key. You do not want to be drooling on your satin pillow, body fetal, a sinister mosquito lazing around your ear. You do not want to be dead to the world when the world is calling. I get it, though I have different psychosomatic writing symptoms. I think, and I’m not sure if this is a technical term, but I think all this napping is about fear. It’s about the daunting task ahead. It’s about shutting down, over and out, where’s my bankie, and please shut the fuck up I’m trying to get some sleep around here.
I hit a wall. I was going about my happy little revising way as if I were a haircutter with a sharp pair of scissors. Wisps of hair fell to the floor. The girl in the chair was smiling when she so often cries. And then it happened. Page 78. Page seventy-fucking-eight. I’d go back five, ten, fifteen pages all in a running start to get over Page 78. But I kept leaping into oblivion or crashing like the guy in Temple Run. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. A fresh set of 105 index cards up on the wall.
Thanks so much for all the good wishes. I had a mixed day, highs, lows, good news and disappointments, difficult situations and moments of grace. Just kidding. I don’t believe in moments of grace unless you count the subway arriving just as you get to the platform, the doors opening right in front of you. At home, John took me to Chick’s, a roadside crab shack on the water, and we ate onion rings in the lifeguard chair and for no reason I can understand he started singing Leon Russell songs. When we got home he gave me a book I had coveted some time ago but couldn’t justify. I can not tell you how happy I am to have it. It’s a book about pottery by a master potter.
Well, I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it, wasn’t even going to say anything, I mean really who cares? What am I, ten years old? Is this pin the tail on the donkey? A pony ride? Is this the peanut hunt that turned into a Hitchcock film when a child stepped into a hole that turned out to be a bee’s nest? Is this the cake that said in pink icing: Happy Birthday Besty? Besty! Tomorrow, I am fifty-two years old. And I want to say unequivocally that I am very happy to be alive, that being alive is better than being dead. And if I have just one wish it is this: that you work with all your might and love with all your heart and never lose hope and never give up.
They fuck you up your mum and dad, wrote one of my favorite poets Philip Larkin. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you.
Just push through, of course you have bad days, you can’t put out everyday, you’re not even working, you’re kidding yourself, you’re too old, don’t tell people you’re writing a screenplay, you sound like a douche bag, that producer was just being polite, that fucking asshole didn’t get back to me. Should I follow up? Don’t be a douche. You’re weak. The script is good. Good not great. It’s too careful. People don’t act like that. You don’t know what you’re doing. Can I overdose on Coke Zero? Does anyone have a cigarette? WHat would it be like to quit and just live. Work on my collections: buttons, ribbons, lacquer pens, antique cigarette boxes, scarves, and mass cards. Is there a better feeling than killing a line? Or moving your rook? If I were a man I would walk all night, sit with my legs apart in wide V. If I were a girl I’d wear heels and bracelets and Amy Winehouse eyeliner. I think there are only so many combinations of ideas. So many sentences. There is a finite number of semi-colons; please use them sparingly. Yes, two fucking snowflakes are alike. Yes, the watched pot will boil eventually. Yes, cliches are like corn on the cob. Yes, you are a complete original. This is your life, this is your life chained to a desk, chained to a hope, chained to a dream.
You know the great Faulkner dictum: In writing, you must kill all your darlings. Is it true? Are the pieces you love the most and are most recalcitrant about giving up the very pieces you must kill? Does your desire to hold on to them indicate a blind spot on your part? Something precious or too personal or just bad? Does loving it so much point to a lack of objectivity? Are your darlings the best or worst of your work. Is killing the darlings a good rule of thumb or yet another fucked up twisted mind game known as writing? I spent last week killing two darlings from my screenplay. And three monologues that I loved way too much. (Yes, it’s true, I love nothing more than writing dialogue for old Jewish men taking a shvitz.) I have to confess, stripping out those characters and sub-plot opened up the whole fucking thing.
Betsy Lerner 