While I was in graduate school, I worked part-time at a literary agency. My primary job was read the slush. After a few months, I turned to the senior agent with whom I shared an office and said, “It would be nice to find something good once in a while.” She laughed the dry laugh of the knowing, “tell me about it.” Her all knowingness was coupled with a weariness, squared with disgust and finished with a demi-glaze of contempt. Someone once asked me how I know if something’ s good. It bites me in the ass. Have you ever missed anything? Does turning down The Liar’s Club count? Are you afraid of missing something that could be huge? No. That’s the way the crumble cookies. If you don’t see it, you can’t sell it. Every work that surfaces did so because it was believed in. You can’t get it all. That said, if I turned my adorable nose up at anything that went on to become a “franchise” like Fifty Shades or Twilight or The Tipping Point, yeah I would want to die. At the very least turn in my agenting badge.
What books out there would you have missed had they crossed your desk?
Filed under: Uncategorized | 45 Comments »
Met a really impressive young producer today. Heard about what he has in the pipeline, pitched him a couple of novels. Shot the shit about industry gossip. I continued to spread the rumor that Courtney Love got Ed Norton addicted to heroin when they made the Larry Flynt movie and it took him a few years to kick, which explains his disappearance in the late nineties. We trashed a movie about yuppies having babies and talked about the new Bourne which I loved, and kept the rumor to myself that Jeremy Rennert was a porn star whose cock rivals Willen Dafoe’s. YP (young producer) never, not once took out his phone while were talking. I was impressed. Some movie people actually carry a Blackberry and an iPhone as if they’re gunslingers out of a Clint Eastwood vehicle. Bam! Bam! Oh, and what about Tony Scott jumping off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA. Respect. The dude made Top Gun. I love everything about this fucking business. I can’t quit you movie business.
I’m in a mixed state. Elated one minute. Deflated the next. Falling asleep. Can’t sleep. Strangely happy. Predictably unhappy. Great certitude. Grave doubt. Patient. Irritable. Loving. Disgusted. I’m clearly closing in on my writing project and I want to throw myself down a dry well.How can my script be brilliant one hour and a piece of shit the next. How can I have a panic attack at the dry cleaner and weep in the shower after a tepid workout? How can I tell every writer I know to keep on, keep going, grab the motherfucker by the throat when I’m at the bottom of a bathtub? Who am I kidding?
A couple of letters asked to be filed in the Asshole File recently and what a pleasure it was! The last letter I put in there was over two years ago! Look, the bar is very high to make it into my Asshole File, and the reason is probably because I’m such a big Asshole myself. Or, perhaps, rejection letters don’t bother me as much anymore, nor do letters from world class narcies or arrogant pricks. Or break up letters. I can take it. Of course, more subtle affronts have also been known to qualify for the file. There’s even a business card from a high ranking lieutenant from the publishing wars with one word scrawled on it: lunch? I have this nursing home fantasy where I’ll be smoking Pall Malls in a screened in porch and reading the file, along with all the letters and scraps I’ve tucked away in shoeboxes over the years, and I’ll laugh and cry as think about my beautiful launderette.
There is a little clusterfuck of questions in the Ask Betsy that all circle around the same drain: when do you know it’s done? When the juices run clear. When the frog dies. When the ravens dance. When a beautiful woman gently touches your arm and takes your hand and you soundlessly climb a marble staircase and the wind picks up just so. You know you are done when you don’t look at it for a month, go back to it, read it out loud and don’t make a single mark. Or when the last page hisses out of the printer and you shove the manuscript in your saddle bag and take off through town on your palomino.. It’s done when the next thing you want to write gets noisy. It’s done when your agent says so. When your editor says so. It done when you can’t take one more step. It’s done when you come.
While we’re on the subject of movies, I watched ONCE tonight and I found myself sobbing at the end. It’s the story of two lonely people who briefly make some music together (that’s literal not sex) and for various reasons must part. It’s so simple. So moving. These are the stories that are very hard to sell. They are considered small, quite, inconspicuous. How the fuck it got green lit or financed I will never know. It’s also a musical. WTF. And now it’s a big hit on Broadway, too. What’s the lesson? Do your work. Just do your fucking work. You want to write about a mushroom cap, write a about a mushroom cap. THe other day I saw a photo of some sculpture that’s at the bottom of the ocean and you have to scuba dive to see it. Right on! I mean this is a gigantic world. Make your sandscape. Make your horse out of tape. I knew a girl who sculpted with butter. Write your epic, toe your name in the sand. This is for you but it’s really for me, a hundred note cards blowing in the wind. One potato more.
A writer recently confessed that he napped a great deal when starting a project. Sometimes taking two and three naps a day. Of course, one wants to imagine pole vaulting into a new project, high diving off a great promontory, covering one’s body in red clay. One wants to be bold, to spar, to find the chord progression, the last turn of a rusted key. You do not want to be drooling on your satin pillow, body fetal, a sinister mosquito lazing around your ear. You do not want to be dead to the world when the world is calling. I get it, though I have different psychosomatic writing symptoms. I think, and I’m not sure if this is a technical term, but I think all this napping is about fear. It’s about the daunting task ahead. It’s about shutting down, over and out, where’s my bankie, and please shut the fuck up I’m trying to get some sleep around here.
I hit a wall. I was going about my happy little revising way as if I were a haircutter with a sharp pair of scissors. Wisps of hair fell to the floor. The girl in the chair was smiling when she so often cries. And then it happened. Page 78. Page seventy-fucking-eight. I’d go back five, ten, fifteen pages all in a running start to get over Page 78. But I kept leaping into oblivion or crashing like the guy in Temple Run. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. A fresh set of 105 index cards up on the wall.
Thanks so much for all the good wishes. I had a mixed day, highs, lows, good news and disappointments, difficult situations and moments of grace. Just kidding. I don’t believe in moments of grace unless you count the subway arriving just as you get to the platform, the doors opening right in front of you. At home, John took me to Chick’s, a roadside crab shack on the water, and we ate onion rings in the lifeguard chair and for no reason I can understand he started singing Leon Russell songs. When we got home he gave me a book I had coveted some time ago but couldn’t justify. I can not tell you how happy I am to have it. It’s a book about pottery by a master potter.
Betsy Lerner 