The Forest for the Trees Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I. - WRITING

  Chapter 1. - THE AMBIVALENT WRITER

  Chapter 2. - THE NATURAL

  Chapter 3. - THE WICKED CHILD

  Chapter 4. - THE SELF-PROMOTER

  Chapter 5. - THE NEUROTIC

  Chapter 6. - TOUCHING FIRE

  PART II. - PUBLISHING

  Chapter 7. - MAKING CONTACT: SEEKING AGENTS AND PUBLICATION

  Chapter 8. - REJECTION

  Chapter 9. - WHAT EDITORS WANT

  Chapter 10. - WHAT AUTHORS WANT

  Chapter 11. - THE BOOK

  Chapter 12. - PUBLICATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER A FINALIST FOR THE BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD ONE OF NEWSDAY’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR A KANSAS CITY STAR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “Lerner, a literary agent who was most recently executive editor at Doubleday, assumes the posture of a writer’s sympathetic friend, coach, and psychotherapist all rolled into one. . . . Lerner candidly draws on her experience working both sides of the fence, as poet and teacher of writing workshops as well as editor and agent. She offers hard-nosed advice on topics overlooked, such as the dynamics of the author/editor and author/ agent relations; struggles against the temptation of alcohol and drugs; the testing of book titles for marketability; acrimony over jacket art. . . . The book’s real value, however, lies in compelling the ambivalent writer to confront his or her inner dreams, demons, and strengths.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “What writers want is good company and by writing this book, Lerner has given them just that. The Forest for the Trees provides excellent companionship for the long-distance race confronting every writer. . . . [Lerner’s] prose is supple, witty, always informative, and frequently moving. . . . This elegant and funny and informative and passionate and moving book is not only a course in the great dance but a fine example of the dance itself. The Forest for the Trees will move many tortured writers that much closer to becoming well-published authors.” —The Providence Sunday Journal

  “The Forest for the Trees is a delightful and very helpful read, a distillation of both editorial and writerly wisdom. You will enjoy it, and learn something from the book, whether you are an aspiring writer, editor, or professional already on the court.” —The Seattle Times

  “Experienced book editor Lerner has done everything right in her desire to offer relevant guidance to writers. This combination memoir and handbook is reading for the soul.”—Booklist

  “When Lerner writes about the relationship between publishers and writers, the reader feels privileged, as though forbidden secrets were being divulged on how to get published.”—BookPage

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The passage from Maxwell E. Perkins’s March 30, 1942, letter to Marcia Davenport is excerpted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, edited by John Hall Wheelock. Copyright © 1950 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1978 by John Hall Wheelock.

  An excerpt from the letter Susan Cheever wrote to the New Yorker in response to James Atlas’s article “The Fall of Fun” is used with Cheever’s permission.

  Copyright © 2000, 2010 by Betsy Lerner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: April 2001

  First Riverhead revised and updated trade paperback edition: October 2010

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44407-8

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44407-8

  1. Authorship. 2. Authors and publishers. I. Title.

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOR MY AUTHORS

  I really think that the great difficulty in bringing “The Valley of Decision” into final shape is the old one of not being able to see the forest for the trees. There are such a great number of trees. We must somehow bring the underlying scheme or pattern of the book into emphasis, so that the reader will be able to see the forest in spite of the many trees.

  —Maxwell Perkins, in a letter to Marcia Davenport

  (A. Scott Berg, in his biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,

  recounts that author Davenport had turned in a completely dis-

  jointed manuscript of nearly eight hundred thousand words, which

  she revised over a five-month period, according to the editor’s

  extensive notes. The book went on to sell six hundred thousand

  copies.)

  INTRODUCTION

  I NEVER DREAMED OF BECOMING AN EDITOR. Like many English majors, I spent much of my time in college reading novels and poetry, never quite fixing my attention on how I might parlay those interests into a job. In the final months of college, I went to the Career Placement Office, only to discover that I should have signed up in my junior year for the ongoing programs and job fairs. When I visited the head of the English Department to explore the possibility of graduate school, he stared at me in disbelief: applications had been filled out in the fall.

  During those frantic months of trying to secure employment, I met with the daughter of one of my mother’s friends, an editor at Putnam. I put on my only dress for the interview, a cotton plaid A-line jumper with a rattan belt, and rode my bike to the publisher’s offices on Madison Avenue. To calm my nerves before going in, I wolfed down a Häagen-Dazs ice cream cone. In the elevator, I realized the chocolate had stained my jumper.

  The editor’s office was lined with shelves of books, their jackets face out. Most had huge type embossed in silver and gold. I didn’t recognize a single title. Her desk was tidy, but the floor was piled high with manuscripts. I cou
ld tell that she was rushed, that her mother had put her up to this meeting, and I sat there somewhat lumpen and extremely ill prepared. After some pleasantries, she started the interview proper by asking whether I was interested in hardcover or paperback publishing. I looked nervously back and forth between her and her bookshelves, as if I were still in school and there was a chance that someone else might answer. Hardcover or paperback? Was there a difference? I asked.

  Thirty résumés and a half-dozen interviews later, I had failed the typing test at every major publishing house in New York that would see me.

  I wound up taking the only job I was offered, as a receptionist in the library of a large financial institution. I probably don’t have to point out that it paid twice as much as an entry-level publishing position. More important, it required no typing. In a few months’ time, I was promoted to corporate file coordinator, which was every bit as Kafkaesque as it sounds. I spent most of my lunch hours endlessly browsing the dusty shelves a few blocks south at the Gotham Book Mart, a tiny shop wedged among the diamond dealers of Forty-seventh Street. I also picked up the monthly Poetry Calendar there, a broadsheet with tiny print that listed readings for the coming weeks, and scanned the bulletin board bursting with notices of all matters literary. It was there that I found a small advertisement for a poetry workshop. Enrollment was limited, and six poems had to be submitted for the leader’s review by the following Monday. I worked feverishly all weekend, selecting and revising my poems. When I learned, a few weeks later, that I had been accepted, I felt for the first time in a very long while that things just might work out for me.

  That workshop, as it turned out, was a pivotal life experience. The teacher, Jorie Graham, then a young woman with only one book to her credit, changed the way I allowed myself to feel about writing. Until then, my writing had been a secret, almost shameful act. But during those Monday-night sessions among fellow poets I felt transformed, listening intently as Graham passionately critiqued our work and described her own fledgling efforts as a writer. I will never forget her exquisite recitation; she would hold the final syllable before a line break for a breath longer than anticipated or rush one line into the next to give it urgency and life. A year later, with a sheaf of twenty full-length poems, I applied to graduate school for an MFA in poetry.

  To say that attending graduate school is the end of innocence is not an exaggeration. Once again I was wholly unprepared for what would befall me there or for the characters I would meet along the way. But for all the indignities suffered around the workshop table, one thing was very clear: I discovered that I was good at suggesting changes that could improve a fellow student’s poem, whether it meant moving one stanza from the middle to the beginning, deleting a line altogether, or sometimes just changing a title. In my final year I became editor of the literary magazine, and I found that the pieces I liked best, believed had the most merit, were usually those that stirred debate or aroused strong feeling, whether or not we included them in our pages. I didn’t know it then, but I was becoming an editor.

  When I was granted an internship at Simon & Schuster in my final semester, my publishing career began in earnest. I remember my first day on the job. I had arrived early and was sitting in the reception area when a young woman came flying through, waving a sheet of paper and screaming, “Number six, number six!” The next thing I knew, she and an older woman were grabbing each other’s elbows and jumping up and down, still screaming. I later learned that the older woman was the publisher and that one of their books had hit the bestseller list. I wondered if anything would ever make me that excited. One short year later, I caught a glimpse of myself running down that same corridor screaming with glee, an advance bestseller list in hand. A book my boss had been working on for many years, which I had helped in its final production stages, had hit the list. I had found my passion.

  When I entered the business, I believed that writers were exalted beings. How else could they capture in a single phrase the emotional truth of a lifetime or render a scene that seemed more lifelike than life? How else could they risk their lives and livelihoods on a string of sentences, baring their souls in a world ever more hostile to artists and art? I was in awe of all writers, even those with less than perfectly realized works. They had broken through, and somewhere books existed with their names on them. Of course, it didn’t take long for those pedestals to crumble.

  As an editor, I was both privy to and subjected to every aspect of my authors’ lives. And the more I worked with writers, the more I found myself thinking about the characteristics that contributed to any given writer’s success or failure. I saw mediocre writers who were brilliant at networking and superb writers who couldn’t part with their pages. Some seemed blessed with the confidence of entitlement, others cursed with paralyzing insecurities. I saw their defenses and fears, their hopes and ambitions. Very soon I was able to recognize which writers would hunker down for the long haul, revising their texts over and over, and which felt that simply producing a manuscript should be enough to secure a publishing contract. I also began to understand the cyclical nature of the publishing business, the brutality of the media, and the vagaries of the marketplace. But more than anything else, I grew close to my authors and saw firsthand how they soldiered on in their lonely work.

  Before I entered publishing, I believed, like most people, that the life of a writer was to be envied. It wasn’t until I began working with writers that I understood Truman Capote’s brilliant assessment of the writer’s dilemma: “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.” Most writers are a breed apart, their gifts and their whips inextricably linked. And the writer’s psychology, by its very nature, is one of extreme duality. The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person. It isn’t surprising, then, that many writers are ambivalent, if not altogether neurotic, about bringing their work forward. For in so doing, a writer must face down that which he most fears: rejection. There is no stage of the writing process that doesn’t challenge every aspect of a writer’s personality. How well writers deal with those challenges can be critical to their survival.

  Editors, like shrinks, have a privileged and exclusive view into a writer’s psyche, from the ecstasy of acquisition to the agony of the remainder table. Some editors limit their concern to the challenges on the page, but in my experience the challenges on the page and the challenges in the person go hand in hand. While editors are most certainly concerned with matters of style, structure, voice, and flow, they are often faced with extratextual problems—keeping the writer motivated, seeing the bigger picture, finding the patterns and rhythms, subtexts and operating metaphors that may elude an author drowning in research or blocked midstream. In the most productive authoreditor relationship, the editor, like a good dance partner who neither leads nor follows but anticipates and trusts, can help the writer find her way back into the work, can cajole another revision, contemplate the deeper themes, or supply the seamless transition, the telling detail.

  This is not a book about how to write. There are dozens of excellent books about writing, be it fiction or nonfiction, from the most technical to the most esoteric. Rather, I hope to help you if you can’t start or finish a project, or can’t figure out what you should be writing. I offer advice to writers whose neuroses seem to get in their way, those who sabotage their efforts, those who have met with some success but are stalled between projects. I promise not to repeat the most common piece of writing advice: Write what you know. As far as I’m concerned, writers have very little choice in what they write (though I do have some advice for those who can’t figure out their form). Nor will I Strunk you over the head with rules about style. Instead, I present ideas about how a writer’s styles on and off the page work in tandem. Is your neurotic behavior part of your creative process or just . . . neurotic behavior? Do you expose too much in your writing? Or are you protecting yourself or someone else with silence?
Are you an effective self-promoter or a selfsaboteur? Have you bought into certain myths about the writing life that aren’t helping your career?

  The second half of the book describes the publishing process from an editor’s point of view. I have tried to share my insights into the world of publishing from my days as a naive editorial assistant through my later years as an editor and finally as an agent and writer to show what really goes on there. I have some words of advice about the most commonly asked questions: Do I need an agent? Should I multiply submit my book? How long must I wait for an agent or editor to respond? What can I expect of my agent or editor? What happens once the book is accepted for publication? How do writers come up with titles? What if I hate the jacket? Should I hire my own publicist? Do I need a web presence, a website, a blog? Should I join Facebook or other social networking sites? Should I tweet? But more important, I try to give a feeling of what it’s like to sit behind an editor’s desk and read hundreds of manuscripts, of how an editor feels when she is either supported or thwarted in her efforts to acquire a project, or when a favorite author’s book is universally panned or, worse, ignored. I’ve tried to provide a picture of the particular pressures editors and authors feel in today’s publishing climate, and of what allows them to carry on in the face of so much industry instability.

  In the ten years since this book was first published enormous changes have shocked the publishing industry. The biggest publishers in the land have merged into six major conglomerates; Amazon is no longer a feisty start-up. Sales have grown from $15.7 million in 1996 to $25 billion as of this writing. That’s right. Billion. Of course, that is for all consumer goods, including the Kindle, the first handheld electronic device that finally took hold in the marketplace after many failed attempts. Ten years ago, consumers were wary of purchasing online. Amazon was a pioneer. Now, we buy everything from airline tickets to vintage sconces on eBay. During this time, and not coincidentally, independent booksellers’ ranks were thinned by more than half; independents now represent 10 percent of store sales. Downloading books, whether on your reader, iPad, or mobile phone, is no longer in the realm of science fiction or a high-end gadgeteer’s wet dream. While e-books account for an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the market, sales increased 177 percent in 2009 and are projected to eventually capture 25 to 50 percent of the book market, according to Ken Auletta’s New Yorker article “Publish or Perish.” Barnes & Noble, through an agreement with Google, has launched its own proprietary reader, the Nook, with hundreds of thousands of out-of-print books for free. Which reminds me: Google. Not around when I first wrote this book. I have the fat accordion file stuffed with photocopies and microfiched articles to prove it. Perhaps the greatest shift involves trust; we now rely on our computers for consumption, social interaction, information, and entertainment. Think about it: you can research, write, publish, promote, and sell your book without ever leaving your laptop. You can even win a Moby for best book trailer. Book trailer! Twenty years ago when I started in publishing, writers banged on typewriters, assistants sent Telexes, and editors enjoyed a few cocktails at lunch. Now, people are reading on devices, authors are tweeting, and editors carry yoga mats around town.