While I was in Paris, I stayed at a hotel that used to be a monastery and it still had monastic amenities. In other words, no television, no radio, no minibar. There wasn’t even a clock in the room, just the ringing of the church bells next door. On top of this, I do not have an international cell phone. So without any of the usual methods by which to measure my self worth: scale, blog stats, emails, phone calls, or any of the usual distractions: LA Law, diet coke, tropical flavored jelly beans, I did the only thing left for me to do: write. I brought two books and a notebook in which I have been writing a book for three years on and off. I read both books and I filled nearly forty pages in my notebook. My hand ached, ink splats appeared on my hands and on my shirt, and the pad from pressing too hard appeared on my middle finger, a badge of something.
It was an amazing week to go without all the usual distractions. I wrote all morning and long into the night. As they say of babies just beginning to nurse, I latched on. I wrote every chance I could get, and the more I wrote, the more ideas came to me, so much so that I even took notes for future scenes and observations to better flesh out. Long before cell phones and computers, etc. I was able to find myriad distractions so I’m not blaming technology. I’m just noticing what a week away proved.
What are your biggest distractions from writing? Besides reading scintillating blogs?
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I spent a few days thinking of ways to mortify Betsy in this space, but I don’t have a copy of her updated book, and I don’t have the patience to click on every link in her blogroll looking for things to hate. I considered writing about how your publishing ‘team’—your agent and editor and publisher—functions like a family, more specifically a family in which your publisher fucks you under the stairs while your editor pretends not to notice.
Okay: You’re a writer, I’m a writer. It’s five in the morning, your neighborhood is asleep except for the guy whose having an affair with the lady down the block and the kids huffing under the magnolia tree and Old Man Needer who has been walking in his sleep since Leno went off the air and he keeps waiting for the national anthem and those planes flying in the air and flags flying…..before the 24/7 became a plague on humanity. You sit, turn on your computer (if you have a typewriter I admire you; if you are actually writing with a pen or pencil I love you). You write this sentence and you shuffle for another cup of coffee. You’re back. You read and reread your sentence and you continue. . .
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. I didn’t touch the screenplay all weekend. I worked instead on what I call “work work.” Read and edited all weekend. Saw one movie and took two long walks in what was arguably the “perfect fall weekend.” But otherwise, I read. In the hammock, on the patio, on the couch, in my bed. Everywhere I go a trail of manuscript pages and eraser shavings, coffee mugs and Diet Coke cans. I didn’t even read the freakin’ NYT and the cover of the book review is a review of the new Philip Roth by 
I’ve been helping a writer with the ending of her book for a few weeks. I see so clearly the forest while she is hugging the trees. I’ve tried gentle persuasion, I’ve tried a firmer hand, I’ve tried to see it from her point of view. I’ve given structural and line edits. I’ve talked character motivation and reader expectation. I’ve tried to make one point: in the beginning is the end. I mean at least in this case. This is not a po-mo novel, this is not an experiment only using the letter “e.” Okay, how do I know I’m right? Experience. An exquisite sense of pacing, moment, language, and integration. Because I am a student of poetry and I believe the cup seeks the ball whether it wobbles and falls, or lands with a satisfying clink. I know from endings and I know from blue balls. I know how to twist in hot sheets with a symphony of a thousand locusts sawing outside.
What do we really mean when we tell ourselves that we suck? Do we also think we are great with equal passion? Does it mean we are without talent, ego, will, drive, passion, or imagination. Is it soothing to say it: I suck. Only you don’t really mean it. Could you go on if you really believed it? Or how about: This is shit. What does that mean? We tell ourselves a million different things all day long in relation to our writing. For me there’s nothing worse than getting up after a few hours and thinking something is good. Wait, scratch that. For me there is nothing worse than getting up after a few hours and thinking something is shit. Back up: for me there is nothing worse than wasting a few hours examining the pores on my face. What can I say: writing is looking in a mirror, down a well, through a forest that smells. It’s bread and cheese, it’s the lower lumbar crying, the balls itchy beyond belief. How do you know if you’re good, if you’re work is good? If you’re on the cover of Time Magazine? How many, even then, cry: am I good? Do I suck? Is this shit? And does it matter, I mean beyond the check clearing as our beloved A. would say? Lower your standards! Raise high roof beam, carpenter! See you in Hell!
Should you know your competitor’s work or avoid it at all costs? Should you sleep with the enemy? When I was working on The Forest for the Trees, there was one book that terrified me and I stayed far away from it. It was everywhere, it was beloved, and duh it was about writing. It had the greatest title, the kind of title that appealed on every level, and a sublime jacket, the kind of jacket that makes you want to own it, and only suits the book more after you’ve read it. Everyone seemed to have read it and everyone loved the motherfucker. Of course, I’m talking about Bird By Bird. I knew if I read it, I would never write my book. The shadow it cast was too large. I finally read it years later and here’s a newsflash, it’s wonderful. As it turns out, I really didn’t have to worry since Lamott’s book is about writing, and mine is about self-loathing. Phew.
Betsy Lerner 