Dear Betsy,I am a huge fan and I rarely like many people sooo that’s how much I value your presence through your blog. My question: Do you recommend getting “away” for writers?
My book is two thirds of the way through the first draft. For the final push and second draft, I was thinking I really need to get away from my family for a week or two. Am I kidding myself? Will this help or should I be able to write anywhere?
Thanks a million, NAME WITHHELD
Dear Escape Artist:
This is a fantastic question. I’ve always been dubious of writers who need to sequester themselves to get their work done, and I’ve equated doing so with the “geographic cure” popular among drug addicts and alcoholics. Or, to use my mother’s words, you take your problems with you. Or you can’t run away from them. Or, if you can’t write at your own desk, you probably won’t be able to write on a deserted beach.
But you’re talking about making that final push. Yeah, if you can afford it, I think it’s a great idea if you’re temperamentally suited to isolation. I also believe that being quiet for long stretches when you are deeply focusing on your work is ideal.
When you no longer have to serve up the tater tots, or decline brochures from the witnesses, or spread pet friendly rock salt on the drive, or Woolite your teenager’s lace bando, or worry about the dog’s glands, or make conversation with the dry cleaner’s wife; when all you have to do is pull a robe around lumpy body and write, take a long walk and figure out how to make a transition that’s been vexing, when you can eat a sandwich over the sink so as not to dirty a dish, when you only have so much time and you are old enough to know how to use it, then, yes, it’s a great idea. But if all you think you’ll do is eat Ranch Doritos and surf porn, you really ought stay home.
Where do you go and what do you do?
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Twenty-six years ago on a freezing day in late January, I checked myself into a hospital. All I had with me to read was a Robert Frost poem folded into my pocket, given to me by Richard Howard, my beloved poetry teacher. I was long out of the practice of memorizing poems, but I memorized this one as I waited the long and terrifying hours until I was admitted. And I read it over and over again. In the hospital library I would find three other books that would keep me company during my long stay: Don Quixote, Middlemarch, and August. But it was that poem that kept me alive.
A very wise and generous person read my script and had the following insight about my so called unlikeable main character. He said that it wasn’t really his story and that the emphasis was misguided. In fact, I had started the movie with him and it’s really about the female lead. Start with her. He thought the character was fine, he needed to be minimized, co-opted differently. In all my years of editing authors, I had never proposed an insight like this. It was a lightening bolt and I’ve been re-writing like a mother fucker ever since. I’m talking like the old days getting up at five and keeping at it until my back cries for mercy. Other readers helped me kiss good bye some awful flashbacks, and quash some really stupid scenes. And I’m told Goth is out. Good to know.
Do you read the Garnet Hill catalogue and think your life might be nice if you were the one really pretty teacher in a large public school? Are you lying to yourself about your desire for fame? Did you remember your father’s birthday, now seven years gone? Are you constantly hungry? Do you think you saw Paul Mckenna and realized it wasn’t Paul McKenna and tried to recall what did or didn’t happen with Paul all those years ago. A Lean Cuisine and a wank. And always the city with her anonymous embrace. All the faces you can’t recall, and then a line of young children in bright puffy jackets holding on to loops on a rope so as not to get lost. Cue danger. Stop crying. This is your brain not on drugs. This is your beautiful house. Do not write this down unless you want to forget. 
I feel like saying something that might be unpopular, but I don’t believe that “characters write themselves,” that they “have minds of their own,” that they “do things you didn’t expect,” etc. To me that’s like saying a marionette moves his own strings, that an onion peels its own layers, or a nose picks itself. Writers say things like this to me all the time and I struggle to understand. For me the whole joy of writing is being the great and mighty Oz. It is true that sometimes, in the writing, aspects of story or character reveal themselves. But to my mind that’s from years of practice like developing the ability to see many chess moves ahead, or playing a riff like Jimmy Page.
I am on empty.
Today is publication date for Eli Gottlieb’s 
IS THIS LIKE A PUBLISHER’S SWEEPSTAKES SORT OF THING? Was I born yesterday? Do I have to write a check to get in? Wear pork chops around my neck to get the dog to play with me? Is this a gateway award that will lead to crack or oxycontin? Did I ever mention that I won a poetry prize in high school and there was an awards ceremony in Hartford and I wore a hunter green plaid skirt cut on the bias. Tell me about everything you’ve ever won or wanted to win. Badly.
Betsy Lerner 