Dear Ms. Lerner:
Are there different ‘types’ of client? The midlist author with no idea his career is in irretrievable decline (although you’re fully aware)? The literary author trying to deny the fact that she only had one book in her? The Shotgunner, who sends you a different idea every month? The Hibernator, who you don’t hear a whisper from for years, until a new manuscript arrives at your desk? I’ve always wondered if agents have a ‘Field Guide to Clients.’
Also, what percentage of clients sell a couple of books then never write anything else? What percentage keep writing, but stop selling? For how long?
Sincerely, W
Dear W: Clients, like agents, come in all shapes and sizes. Insecure, egotistical, driven, lazy, perfectionist, intrepid, resourceful, blaming, determined, fragile, headstrong, complaining, stoic, you name it. I think I even wrote a book about it. More interesting is to watch how any given writer responds to going through the process of sending out his work, looking for an agent, getting a publisher, getting his edits all the way through to post-publication. Every aspect about the writing process is character-defining. For instance, when one writer gets rejected he takes his marbles and runs home. Another swears he will never quit as a result of getting turned down – he doesn’t care by how many. One writer gets a great review, believes his own press and never writes another true word. Another writer gets a great review and develops a case of stage fright, never writing another word. One writer gets slammed by reviews and becomes a pit bull, another grows timid and eventually silent. Your books slips beneath the waves: do you? A Field Guide to Getting Your Ass Kicked is more like it. A Field Guide to self-loathing and doubt, a guide to self-flagellation and self-aggrandizement and hemorrhoidal hell. A field guide to every insecure thought and jealous rage. A field guide to my brilliance, to my ass, to misanthropy, my loneliness, my love. What species are you?
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My office is starting to look like a maternity ward at the full moon; it feels like all my clients are delivering their pages at the same moment whether it’s a final manuscript, a draft, a chapter, a treatment, a partial. If I know one thing about writers it’s that they hate waiting to hear what people think. The minute they hit send, the bomb starts to tick. Lots of writers go right to the dark place, imagine the worst. Though some are confident, and when they hand you the pages they will tell you so. It makes me think of a small child proudly handing you a page from a coloring book, the crayon insanely outside the lines. Some go into free fall and pick at their own flesh. Some start shooting off revisions: Wait! Read this draft! or If you haven’t read yet! It’s the worst, like waiting for a guy to call after you’ve fucked him.
Today, a 
Do you ever regret anything you’ve written, wish you hadn’t published it, or even just shared it with another person? Now that my daughter is a teen, I sometimes gulp hard to think of what she will think of me if she reads my memoir. I was quite cavalier when I wrote it. My motto: secrets did the most damage. It was the stuff under the carpet that kills. Now, the carpet’s looking mighty fine.
I’ve been trying to write about something that happened two weeks ago. I was in therapy and I did something I’ve never done before: I told my shrink what my screenplay was “about.” Actually, I told her the plot, more specifically about the two main characters and how I couldn’t write what I had planned about them. Just as I said it, I knew for the first time what the story was really about, who these characters were. I had led myself right back into the central drama of our family (once again) even as I believed I was writing about entirely different creatures.
Exhausted. Fell asleep on the train. All my manuscripts slipped off my lap and on to the floor. The woman next to me didn’t flinch or shift her legs as I frantically gathered my pages (today’s haul: four new chapters by a client, 50 pages of a project my business partner wants a second opinion on, four prospective proposals, and two contracts). The bitch who won’t move is immersed in a library copy of Debbie Macomber’s novel, A Good Yarn. (The head line on Debbie’s website is, “Wherever you are, Debbie takes you home.”) Debbie, can you take me home?
Betsy Lerner 