Let’s talk about a subject near and dear to my gall bladder. The way writers talk about their own work. Often they tell me that they think their work is good, quickly followed by a caveat, “but what do I know,” or ” but you’ll tell me.” Some will go out on a limb and tell me that they think they are better than Franzen or (insert the name of the author about whom you are most envious). Other writers tell you their work is crap, shit, etc., and you are meant to rush in like a wave and banish that thought. Though some, even highly decorated writers, do believe their work is crap, and it is a sign of mental illness. I love it when someone says they are not great, but they are good. And we are meant to understand that good, in this context, is somehow better than great, somehow more real, more honest. “I’m not saying I’m the best,” means “I’m the best.” “I don’t care if I win a Pulitzer” means “give me a god damn Pulitzer.”
I think how you feel about your work is an extension of how you feel about yourself. Does this make sense or am I blowing more Lerner smoke? Better yet: tell us how do you feel about your work?
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This is a post about something very difficult to come to grips with that no one likes to talk about — it’s about hitting the wall. And by that I mean when you are stuck, whether you’re crashing into the wall or the wall is crashing into you. I’m not talking about a bad day or even a few months of writer’s block. I’m not talking about a string of rejections or seeing your book on the remainder table where no one wants it, even for $5.99. What I’m talking about is something deeper and more terrifying. It’s when you realize you’ve been writing the same book over and over. Or when you can no longer stand writing in the register you’ve been writing in and don’t know how to get out. This isn’t a slump, a bad patch, a bush-league case of writer’s block or stage fright. This isn’t about not being able to come up with a new idea. This is bad. It’s when you understand the limits of your imagination, intellect, creativity, skill, or drive. It’s when you no longer know when you’re faking it; when you’ve succeeded at fooling yourself. I’ve seen it in writers over the years. You can’t say anything. It would be cruel, like waking a sleepwalker. You know the writer is in agony even if he can’t admit it to himself, even if he’s on the couch five days a week, it’s almost impossible to admit.
I’ve always been turned off by people who say they can’t write certain things until their parents die. Does that mean they go around hoping for mom and dad to choke on a pecan at Thanksgiving? I don’t think you can hijack your writing for the sake of people’s feelings. And who are you really protecting? And I’m not just talking about confessional or autobiographical writing. All writing has something at stake, or should, in my humble. You don’t have to engage in character assassination, or pen a Mommy Dearest, but you have to take me there. I want a manuscript to take me somewhere I’ve never been, or somewhere I’ve been a million times and show me something new. I don’t like polite writing, polite conversation, or conversation about weather. I want a writer to be fearless because I’m a pussy.
Dear Betsy: 
Dearest Readers of this Blog: I want to thank the people who comment and the undertow of lurkers for putting up with my peri-meno posts of the last few weeks, whinging about my screenplay and general douchification. I’m beginning to see a way back in. And I really want to thank the person who said make it darker instead of lighter. And while that may not be the way to go, it was good to have someone remind me that the daughter of darkness is not a pussy. Anyway, I just want to say that the wheels are turning, thank you for the pep talks and the wrist slaps alike; I’m not going to use this “platform” to dirty any more diapers.
I call it the Rapture of the Deep. It’s when a writer is so deep into his work that he begins to think everything in the known universe relates to it. He could be staring at a laminated menu, a horse galloping in an open field, or a proctologist snapping his rubber glove, and believe that each of these tableaus relates to his work. Or the day’s headlines about taxes, popularity ratings, or Ashton Kutcher filling in for Charlie Sheen, and somehow relate these events with his novel. In scuba diving, rapture of the deep results from oxygen deprivation and can cause a diver to swim in the opposite direction from the surface when he needs air. Rapture is a sublime combination of narcissism, compulsion, and expansiveness; it can be confused with mania as it shares some of the same symptoms: racing thoughts, grandiosity, exaggerated self-regard.
Yesterday, my mom treated me to lunch and a Broadway show. On the train into the city, I broke a cardinal rule: I told her the plot of my new screenplay, which I’ve finished in long hand, but just need to type out. I yammered on about what happened, and then, and then, and then. Every now and again I stopped to ask if it was too melodramatic? She insisted it wasn’t. Do you want to hear more. She did! On one occasion she bit her lip as the plot thickened, then squeezed her eyes shut as a bad thing was about to happen. Where do you get this stuff, she asked more than once. Not an indictment so much as a true bewilderment. And this of course is hilarious to me, because I think it’s so obviously about us, metaphorically speaking.
I was invited to participate on a publishing panel last week at NYU. The last time I saw that many eyes glazed over is when I was student there thirty years ago. The panel never really came together, and I think I alienated a fellow panelist right out of the gate. He was lamenting the fact that writers couldn’t make a living just writing anymore. If five percent of writers make a living writing I would be surprised. I said that no one invites you to write, no one cares if you do, and that it is against the world’s indifference that you create. If you are lucky enough that the world loves what you write, then perhaps you will be among the few who make their living writing. The rest of us get up at dawn or write all night, or write on vacations, or quit for years and hate ourselves in an even more special way. Is it fair that a thriller writer can make millions and poet basically nothing. Is it fair that a “popular” historian can make millions while a scholar puts twenty years into a book for which he will be paid $5,000? Fair? If my mother raised me on one consistent mantra it was this: who said life was fair? And she said it after I wailed about the great injustices of life: my sister getting a larger portion of mac and cheese, the fact that I had to wear her hand me downs, including a set of faded olive Danskins. Enough said.
I have a little problem, among many larger problems, and I’m going to break the news here and first on my blog, among my nearest and dearest strangers: Whenever I write, I fall asleep. Boom! One minute I’m typing and the next I’m out, nodding off in front of the monitor. It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it didn’t also happen in front of my writing partner. At first, I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, like the way you head snap at the movies or the opera and hope the person next to you doesn’t notice. As if.
Betsy Lerner 