In the do as I say not as I do department, I am not really writing. I am totally absorbed by my work as an agent. And I don’t mean the selling side, which is also intense and exciting and draining in equal measure, but the reading and editing, the coming up with titles and sub titles, all the million hummingbird wings that lift a writer’s experience. I have been doing this a long time, plowing these fields, finding rocks in the rows. I know these doors and the fear behind each one. The hideous, glorious free fall, the finality that doesn’t end, the constantly evolving narrative of self and ego. Here is the forest and here are the trees. My life’s work as tailor, midwife, spy in the house of love. One of my writers who travels far and wide said I belonged behind my desk. But I heard curtain. There is simply nothing more difficult than cracking words out of your ass.
What keeps you from writing?
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Are there any writers who you love so much that you read all of their books? That you drop everything when a new book of theirs is published? That you reread them so often that the spines are broken, the pages soft with wear? THat you won’t lend them? That you go their readings and are either too tongue tied to say anything or blather like a fool? That you get into bar brawls over them? And keep buying copies of their books to give to friends. And when they publish a stinker you understand and forgive. After all, who can be a genius all of the time?
I write, produce, direct, and perform brilliant monologues while driving. They are usually inspired by some lingering resentment I’ve nursed throughout the day, being honked at (especially for not responding quickly enough when the light turns green), or seeing someone with a strange outfit as I did today, like the guy in seersucker shorts, orange day glow socks, and a Mohawk gelled within an inch of its life. The monologues, also known as rants, mine the ugliest parts of myself and range widely. I will attack anything and anyone including the aged and infirm. And I will astonish myself at how nasty, degenerate, and cruel I can be. Actually, it comes as no surprise.
When I worked as the corporate file coordinator at Morgan Stanley, I picked up a few business tips and truisms. One was that you had to give any new venture at least five years before pulling the plug. I think there is an analogy with writing, though it may be more like ten years. Or twenty. And worse, there may be no plug. I think it’s good to have five year goals. I think it’s good to keep track of progress or lack thereof so that you don’t gaslight yourself about whether or not you’re making progress. It’s very easy to lose track and fail to see the strides you do make.
The lights came back on today. Joy. We were only inconvenienced. Nothing more. I keeping thinking about the woman whose two young children were swept away from her when their street flooded. There was so much devastation, many lives lost. But it’s that woman I think of, the biblical scope of her loss. The universal fear: letting go of what we love, having it taken from us. Great waves of loss sweep through our lives. My father. My sister. Then Tom by his own hand. I break this silence with news of the worst sort. Friends, writers, aunts, heroes. You don’t think: this. This storm. This tree twisted off at the trunk as easy as a soda cap. When the lights came on I walked through the house as if I were being led through by a realtor, noting every room for its particular charm. Yes, that molding is lovely, just lovely. In the small library, a reading light cast a halo on the couch, and in its glow a book with a marker somewhere in the middle.
Dear Lost Souls: are you out there, did you wake up, is it dry, are you alright? I’m writing from an internet cafe and feeling the first sun on my face in a while. We still don’t have power, NYC is a mess, but our home was not struck by a two hundred year old tree. Some food is starting to rot. At night, we read by candlelight, very LIttle Women. Then a flashlight guides the way upstairs, and for a moment I am in a movie I’d prefer not to be in. In my dreams last night, Matt Damon was seated next to me on a plane and confided in me that he had kissed a man. Then he asked me what I thought was my best quality. I said, I’m kind. Just now, the sky looks like an El Greco painting. I am on my third Americano. And I’m wondering about all of you love bugs.
Let’s talk about the blank page. Let’s talk about the Shining. Let’s talk about senior year at NYU and my Milton paper. How you can quilt a perfectly fine legal yellow pad from writing the same opening sentence over and over again. I used to have zero tolerance for people who feared the blank page. Why the hell are you a writer, I secretly thought to myself, while nodding empathically. Same thing with writer’s block, which is a version of death by blank page. You don’t know what to say, you don’t know how to say it. Or, you’re afraid to say it. Or, you have no tolerance for your own limitations. Or, you a coward. Full stop. Or you know what you don’t know. And care. Or you think you’re better than the blankness. Or you are unworthy. Or you are not in therapy. Or a page is a mirror is a stone is a flower is a sesame bun. I studied with the great Charles Ludlam, playwright, actor and founder of the Ridiculous Theater. He said that he always wrote a few sentences into the next page of whatever he was working on so he never had to face the blank page. That’s the best advice I ever heard apart from cod liver oil and a pack of Lucky’s.
Would you die if you did not write? Would you brawl, scrawl obscenities on subway walls, would you stink up the room? What would you tell yourself every Sunday when the clothes tumbled out of the dryer that you briefly believed life was good, that making gardens and meals with herbs was good, that driving up to the window at McDonalds and ordering a Blizzard was good. How can possibly live your shitty life, your wonderful life, your tiny notations in a foreign hand. Writers are like you and me: they fight for mother’s silver, they get new tires, they cancel their subscription to Vanity Fair. I felt that way when I was young. Those absurd poems were like a long stick that pulled me from the center of the lake to a wobbly raft. Of course, you hold on. Of course you cover your body. Those notebooks you carried with everywhere and the words that filled them. They way you set yourself apart, above. Sitting at a counter as if you were alone, as if the little show fooled anyone. And when you quit? You didn’t die. DIdn’t dig your own grave. Taps wasn’t heard. The sky didn’t turn purple. The yellow fields didn’t turn to gold.
Betsy Lerner 