Today, a client described the feeling of waiting for his book to come out in the new year. “One minute I know nothing’s going to happen, it’s already over. And the next minute I’m winning the Pulitzer.” I’m not going to say the truth is probably in the middle because more likely than not nothing will happen, another worthy book will slip beneath the waves, or as a writer once said of publishing a book, it’s like carrying a bucket of water to the sea.
We can talk about the terrible odds of getting recognition. We could also talk of the writer’s ego, the grandiosity and the insecurity, the hopelessness and magical thinking. Or we can talk about the opening night jitters, the complete and total lack of control over whether you will be reviewed at all, and if so what will be said, and then, of course, will it sell.
I ask my client what he’s working on. It’s a sleight of hand question to distract him from the oncoming traffic, but I also think that a new project is the hair of the dog and the only way to move on, move forward, to understand that this one book is just that: this one book. It does not a career make (unless you are Harper Lee). Or, like me, you can continue to shamelessly flog a ten year old book. I’ve seen embittered writers who swear off ever writing a book again, write again.
I don’t think it’s about the triumph of the human spirit. In fact, the desire to keep writing and publishing is more likely a triumph of human perversion. I want to know: does it ever get easier. Does a writer ever say, I’m good. Or, I’m happy. Or is that for other people?
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I was on a panel tonight at The College of Holy Cross. The moderator asked me what I was doing when I was college age and in the few years after. Fucking up, battling depression, gaining and losing tons of weight, having bad affairs, eating cheeseburgers, smoking Marlboro’s, wearing cowboy boots, going to poetry readings, sending mental signals to guys I liked in my literature classes, failing typing tests at major publishing houses, frequenting coffee houses and haunting book stores, alienating friends, stock piling Percodan, and writing bad poems. I know, I’m an inspiration.
If you’ve been checking in here at Forest for the Trees, you know that I am a devout atheist. Today, while walking to the subway, I asked myself how I could be so sure that there’s nothing. In a world of such obvious uncertainty, where did I get my certitude? THen I had the realization that it makes me feel good. And I think it’s why I believe so deeply in art, that it exists in the face of nothing. We need to make food, clothes, shelter, movies. But art, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, music. It comes into the world like a child, unbidden. Some people believe that they create to honor god, or glorify god. When I look at a Blake I get that. But I’ve also had a similar experience walking through Serra’s tilted walls.
I gave another informational interview today to a young woman about to graduate college. I was super distracted the entire time, wondering if I could avoid the bread basket at lunch, if a certain author was going to blurb a book, how annoyed I was to get a one word response (“Thanks”) to a three page editorial letter. I was looking at her resume and it all looked good (Swahili! Varsity Tennis! Poetry Prize!), but my mind was on whether I could take the week between Christmas and New Years and finish my fucking screenplay, if I left the money on the kitchen table for Pam our dog walker, if I was ever going to finish vetting the contract on my desk, and get the twenty galleys off on my desk to my foreign agents. Or was I going to die under a pile of manuscripts, or crushed under an Ikea bookcase, or crushed under the huge wheel of the M5, or electrocuted by a live man hole, or go into anaphylaxis as a result of eating a pine nut and die?
Last week at our agents’ lunch, we bid farewell to one of our founding members who is leaving the agenting fold. It’s been a decade since we first got together to commiserate and offer support. What unifies our group is that we were all editors, now agents. I think it’s a very strong bond because we all take an editorial approach to our work, for better or worse. In any case, someone asked our departing agent what he was going to miss most. “Being a writer’s first reader.” We all mewed with identification. It is a sacred position to hold.
Dear Betsy-
Today’s Style section in the NYT devoted a great deal of space to group of highly educated, underemployed kids who started their own on-line magazine called 
Making a magazine is the young writer’s equivalent of putting on a play. It’s that fantastic time in your life when you are nothing and everything, when you have to take what you want, create what you don’t have, band together or die. Algonquin Round Table, Bloomsbury Group, Merry Pranksters, THe Lost Generation, Big Wednesday. What is the point of being a writer if not gathering with other like minded assholes at a bar or cafe and insisting on your superiority. Writers hate each other and need each other and, I believe, will better survive this impossible Darwinian struggle and the world’s general indifference if they have a place to go, a magazine to behold, and a respite from being so alone.
How do you roll?
Hello Ms Lerner
When I packed up my bag for work this morning and hoisted the 500 or so pages of manuscript on my shoulder, I actually thought for the first time that maybe I should get a Kindle or a Nook. Then I thought, I’d rather be a hunchback than read on a screen. When I got on the train and unfurled my NYT, I noticed the man next to me reading from the well lit place of his ipad. Gosh, it sure looked cheery in there. And then I thought I can’t cope with any more chargers, passwords, etc. I imagined myself dangling from the end of a charger, the screen flashing: low battery, low battery. My epitaph: She Forgot Her Password.
Betsy Lerner 