I’m curious about the moments in your life when you made huge decisions about your writing life. To first share your work, to first send it out, to apply to a writing program or conference, to talk to a famous writer. To take a year off to write. To take a mindless job that wouldn’t impinge on your writing time. To quit writing. To switch to non-fiction, or to fiction. I’m asking because a few writers have asked me lately: should I continue, should I stop teaching, should I go to journalism school, should I write for magazines? I guess what I’m asking is:
Did you ever come to a fork in the road? What did you do?
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Today I had an attack. This is when I walk by a bookstore and can’t go it. Can’t. Go. In. I know that if I see the front table offerings, all the books beautifully stacked in their best back to school clothes, and the darling shelf talkers with their lovely cursive print, and the shelves with their gorgeous mosaic of spines, and the carousel of Moleskins, I know that if see all of that and smell the coffee brewing and overhear a couple talking about Larry Shteyngart that I will feel myself fall from a great height and there will be no sound and the light, of course, will be diffuse, and later I will be sitting beneath an elm tree wishing I had a sweater, my copy of All My Pretty Ones worn, and the jacket, black and violet, an exquisite bruise about to yellow.
On our company website, each of the agents has a paragraph about the kinds of book we are looking for. In mine, I wrote that I like the “hard to categorize,” which I thought was a clever way of saying that I’m quirky, that I think outside the vag, that I welcome misfits, eccentrics, lunatics and losers. And as a result, I get the craziest shit. The “truth” is that I do like the HTC, but I probably can’t sell it. The reason is that HTC stuff is hard to package, hard to market, hard to publicize and ultimately hard to find an audience for. I could cry over the HTC books I haven’t been able to find a home for. And as a result, I’m not as open as I have been. I just turned down a beautifully written book about marrow, an epic poem about saline. I turned down a family memoir about a group of people who don’t know one another but still hurt each other, and a book of humorous essays about genocide. Am I losing my edge?
Well, I’m not one for holidays, let alone Hallmark card holidays, but I did quite enjoy mother’s day this year. It started with a text from my fifteen year old filled with many colorful emoticons and ended with burning a tic off my dog and folding three loads of laundry with all socks present and accounted for. Somewhere in between, I stretched out in the backyard with a book I’ve been dying to read: 
I’ve often talked about the peak moment in an agent’s life when he gets to tell a writer that there is an offer. What I’ve not written about is all the rejection any agent has to shoulder on behalf of his or her clients, and how those rejections get processed. For me, they only make me stronger and in that way being a stubborn bastard has suited me in this line of work. My mother once said that I never think I’m wrong (not a compliment), and that I always get what I want (again, not flattery). What she missed in the observation is that I’m a determined mother fucker. I eat rejections for breakfast. I paper the walls with them. Make origami. The longer you hold my head under the water the happier I am. Not at first; I used to flail. You couldn’t survive as an agent if you didn’t know how to cope with rejection and help your writers cope with it as well. Last week, I had to deliver a rejection to writer. His response was the best: no worries on passes, my main fuel for writing is revenge, anyway, so he unknowingly just gave me a boost.
Do you think before you write? Or do think as you write? Or do you write first and think later? Or do you write to figure out what you’re thinking. Do you write in your head? In full sentences or fragments? When I was young I would say, I just write. ANd what I meant was I don’t plan or think about what I’m going to write. it just comes out, and then I work with it. Now, with screenplays, I figure it out down to the index card, but that’s because a plot it required. These posts: they explode from the constellation of stars in my head, the tiny petals of a daisy plucked to death, a datebook covered with extravagant doodles from the point of a classic ball point pen. They come from the well of a car door crammed with maps, napkins, receipts and wrappers. From a Neil Young sky and some beloved old boots.
What is true? What is real? What is authentic? What if I told that the story about the little girl having a meltdown at the bus stop was a fiction, if I made it up, or if I only witnessed the mother grimly walking off the bus and fabricated the rest? Would you feel I was a bad person? A good writer? Would it make any difference? Does a writer have a solemn pact with a reader to tell the truth or is she a master manipulator? Are things more real because they happened? Why does fiction sometimes feel like it holds deeper truths? Poetry even more so? THe more people responded to the story the more disgusted I felt with myself for writing it even though I wrote it as close to my memory of it as possible, down to the Hello Kitty backpack. And I’ve thought of that little girl and that mother many times, entering the short story of that moment in their lives as I did, by chance.
This morning while I was driving to the gym, I saw a little girl, maybe six or seven, refuse to get on the bus. Her mother picked her up to put her on the bus, but the girl thrashed so violently that the mother had to step back off the bus, nearly losing her balance. Then the girl wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist. A line of cars had formed by now, no one going anywhere until the school bus lifted its stop sign. The mother leaned over the little girl and whispered something to her. By now all the kids on the bus pooled around the front to taste a piece of the action. Then the mother tried to disentangle herself from the daughter’s grip, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She picked her up again, the small body ramrod, and with even more determination hoisted her on to the bus. I heard her scream, “you have to go to school.” And then the mother descended the bus steps, her head low, and marched grimly home. The school bus heaved a sigh, or so it seemed, and carried on. The ten or so cars also rolled along Dayton Street into an otherwise overcast Monday, each thinking their own thoughts. Me, I cried.
If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know that I like nothing more than to have a big fat pity party and invite all my friends.You know I like to wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t been kicked out of film school, if I hadn’t fallen apart, if I had kept my eyes open when I kissed you. I try to understand why I didn’t make any sacrifices for my writing such as financial security, health insurance, a lifetime supply of remorse. Should we take the ferry or should we take the train? Did he just litter? Did you see that? I want to thank my parents, my sisters, the babysitter who got us stoned and taught us how to make Chex Mix. I want to be grateful for what I don’t have. I want to braid my counselor’s long dark hair again. If you went to my high school, you know a boy died there, you know the seniors paint the big rock out front, and that everyone is bored or maybe it’s just me. Is that a grey bear or a snowy owl? I saw my father in a tree. He wouldn’t look at me.
Betsy Lerner 