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.
For as long as I’ve been talking to groups about writing, I always say that it’s a huge mistake to share your work with family and loved ones, ESPECIALLY YOUR MOTHER. I also say it’s a mistake to talk too much about your work before it’s produced, especially in the nascent stages, because you dispel its power somehow.
What’s wrong with me?
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Nearly every writer I met with in Miami was working on a memoir. Each one had a story more harrowing than the next: disease, abuse, mental illness, etc. Each one moved me, and you know I’m a misanthropic bitch who really only cares about a handful of people in the universe and where I’m going to get my next Twix bar. So what the hell happened down there? Am I going soft?
When I was young, I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have twenty-seven diaries and countless others lost along the way. My diaries also served as scrapbooks. I’d tape in ticket stubs, important letters, lyrics, poems. Most of the tape now yellow and brittle like the fingernails of the dead. I did’t imagine any future for myself as a writer. WHen I started writing poems, I never imagined getting them published. Only then I started sending them out, typing my nervous letters on onion skin letters to places like The Antioch Review and Crazyhorse. Then my disastrous MFA. I remember putting my manuscript together in my robe, chain-smoking, believing there were correspondences, rhythms, wit. I never dreamed that I would carry a tote bag filled with manuscripts. I never dreamed I would receive flowers from young writers. People ask me if I still write poems. The answer is still no.
In a PW rant last week, a famous writer said, “The Internet is not to blame for your unfinished novel: you are.” As far as I’m concerned, the internet was created to keep more crappy novels from crowding the in-boxes of bitching ass agents like me. From crowding the shelves of bookstores. From taking down trees. From becoming e and crowding the what? ether? I think the more the internet keeps people from writing the better. Thank you internet porn. Thank you E-Bay. Thank you YouTube. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg. Every minute you surf the web is a minute you don’t write something stupid and pathetic. The internet is the next best thing to wanking, face picking, drawer reorganizing, and therapy. The internet is what separates the yolk from the whites. O, internet! O, website! The keys on my keyboard are ghost letters. The ring on my finger is you. The internet is in my bed. And this is my fuck you.
I’m going to love up some writers in Miami on Thursday and Friday. I’m giving a talk called “Why Your Book Isn’t Selling.” I’m getting a little nervous that it might be too negatively cast. Even worse, I got roped into reading pages and doing the fifteen minute consult. I stopped doing these years ago when a woman cornered me in the ladies room, deeply upset my response to her pages. She was crying and yelling, mascara streaking her face. I was done doing consults after that. But somehow the nice folks in Miami got me in a weak moment. I feel like these 15 minute consults are the drive-by shootings of the conference world. Of course, I’ll do my best to help the writers who dare seek the great and mighty Oz. I want to save everyone, that’s my problem. I’ll also want to race back to the hotel and get a solid hate on for myself while I watch as many episodes of Law and Order the universe will offer up.
Leaving L.A. What wouldn’t make me cry. Leaky bag am I. Why does every new beautiful step sweep up in its hem so much sadness? Where did we go? Sunset Boulevard? A lemon TR6? I lost my notebook, my glasses, my pencil case. I lost my camera, my wool cap, my son’s bandana. A young man with a slow smile. Angela Lansbury sips tomato juice like a queen beside me. Did it flush? Did it drain? Is the driver Russian? Can you bear me? Am I too much? O, to not give an exquisite shit. Is Laurel Canyon a canyon? Am I the Pork King? In and Out Burger? Are those tits real? A small child with a port wine stain falls off a swing. I rented a car I didn’t drive. I watched the wedding and wanted to die. This dim light. This still life. A couch. A slant of Hopper light. You do not have a new idea. You do not have a new book. There are no pages left. The last typewriter died last night in Bangladesh.
Books might sell in clean well-lighted places, but they’re written under the floorboards, where mushrooms grow and centipedes crawl. I despise all the twee bullshit about how we “can’t not write,” the mystical jerkoff writing guides about Bones and Birds. Still, I think that’s the great divide. That’s why all the chipper Facebook updates are lies, why the happy how-to blog posts are bullshit. That’s why giving talks at the local birdwatching society isn’t just good marketing, it’s also bad writing. That’s why lurking in the foyer of an elementary school looking like you cut a slit in your trenchcoat pocket is worse than merely uncomfortable.
In late May and early June of 1986, between grad school and my first day at Simon and Schuster, I rented an efficiency in Mt. Desert Island, Maine for three weeks. I planned to write, clear my head, get over a break-up. After I got lost hiking for a few hours with only Madame Bovary and some yogurt covered raisins in my back pack, I called it quits. I was never very from the main road as it turned out, but I’m a big pussy with an overactive helter skelter imagination. I think it was day eleven.
I like to watch people in bookstores. If I could, I would follow them around with a survey or a tape recorder. I want to know why they pick up the books they pick up. Did they go into the store knowing what they wanted? Had they read a review, heard the author on NPR, or had the book been recommended? Were they just looking around and a jacket or title jumped out? Were they familiar with the author? DId they read the jacket copy, the blurbs? Did any of that make a difference? Did they read the first page, the last? Did they smell the spine? Did the display make a difference? The jacket art?The author photo? I live to understand why people are attracted to books.
Betsy Lerner 