The Forest for the Trees Read online

  While I’ve never been accused of being trendy, I also changed careers in a move that has now been identified as a trend: editors becoming agents. While for me there perhaps could be no greater career than that of book editor, I crossed the line for a combination of reasons, personal and professional, including becoming a mother and wanting more freedom to work closely with a wide variety of authors. Though we are sometimes in adversarial positions, editors and agents essentially want the same thing: to see their authors well published and productive. Both experience that particular rush that comes from discovering a manuscript and helping it find its way in the world.

  It is my deepest hope that this book will offer helpful advice to beginning writers, but even more that it will inspire the late bloomers, those who have worked in fits and starts over the years but have never just quit or given up the dream completely. This is also a book for people who sometimes believe the worst about themselves when it comes to their writing, who imagine themselves impostors, poseurs, dilettantes, and manqués. It is for people who torture themselves over their writing.

  Whenever I attend writers’ conferences, I am struck with the overwhelming sense of alienation that many aspiring writers seem to feel with regard to publishing. Many even believe there is a conspiracy of silence inside publishing houses about the way decisions are made, from acquisitions to the allocation of funds. I think it is nearly impossible for an unpublished writer not to suffer from battle fatigue; the disenfranchised are rarely comfortable. But even the most successful writers suffer from bouts of failure of confidence. In an interview in the Hungry Mind Review, Don DeLillo best described the predicament: “The writer has lost a great deal of influence, and he is situated now, if anywhere, on the margins of culture. But isn’t this where he belongs? How could it be any other way? And in my personal view this is a perfect place to observe what’s happening at the dead center of things. . . . The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he’ll become.”

  This book is about what I’ve seen and what I know. I wrote it to help writers achieve or get closer to their goals. At the very least, I hope that in contemplating your life as a writer you may get some perspective on your work, and in gaining that perspective, see the forest for the trees.

  PART I.

  WRITING

  1.

  THE AMBIVALENT WRITER

  DO YOU HAVE A NEW IDEA ALMOST EVERY DAY for a writing project? Do you either start them all and don’t see them to fruition or think about starting but never actually get going? Are you a short-story writer one day and a novelist the next? A memoirist on Monday and a screenwriter by the weekend? Do you begin sentences in your head while walking to work or picking up the dry cleaning, sentences so crisp and suggestive that they make perfect story or novel openers, only you never manage to write them down? Do you blab about your project to loved ones, coworkers, or strangers before the idea is fully formed, let alone partially executed? Have you ever accidentally left your notes or diary behind on a train or plane and bemoaned the loss of what certainly had been your best work? Have you ever been diagnosed with any combination of bipolar disorder, alcoholism, or skin diseases such as eczema or psoriasis? Do you snap at people who ask how your writing is going? What’s it to them?

  Do you fear that you will someday wonder where the years went? How it is that some no-talent you went to high school with is being published everywhere you look? Or how some suck-up from graduate school is racking up prizes and being interviewed in the Arts section of the New York Times? Now you can’t read the paper at all without thinking back to your classmate and the fawning way he used to schmooze the professors. God, he was so transparent.

  If you can relate to the above, you certainly have the obsessive qualities—along with the self-aggrandizement and concurrent feelings of worthlessness—that are part of the writer’s basic makeup. However, you also have so many conflicting thoughts and feelings about writing and about yourself as a writer you are unable to choose one idea and see it through. You cannot focus. Just as you settle on one idea, another voice pops into your head. Or just as you sit down to write, you suddenly and inexplicably fall asleep. You are what I call the ambivalent writer. You have something to say, something you may feel desperate to express, but you have no idea how to go about it. As a result, you are highly impressionable; everything strikes you but nothing sticks. You are volatile and vulnerable, but the energy it takes to quiet the voices leaves you depressed and listless. Every time you hear an author exchange barbs with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, or browse at your local bookstore, you think: I could do that. You are both omnipotent and impotent.

  For most writers, writing is a love-hate affair. But for the ambivalent writer who cannot attempt, sustain, or complete a piece of writing, the ambivalence usually shifts back and forth from the writing to the self. The inner monologue drums: I am great. I am shit. I am great. I am shit. But the writer with publication credits, good reviews, and literary prizes is not immune to this mantra either; in fact, the only real difference that I have been able to quantify between those who ultimately make their way as writers and those who quit is that the former were able to contain their ambivalence long enough to commit to a single idea and see it through.

  I often encounter writers at conferences who tell me that they have a number of ideas they’d like to get working on but can’t figure out which is best. They want some advice about which idea they should pursue, and often have some vague notion about what’s selling these days. Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything. Chances are that you have been writing or trying to write in one particular form all your life. There are very few writers who, by switching genres, say from novels to plays, suddenly achieve great results and conclude that they have been working in the wrong mode all along. But in my experience, a writer gravitates toward a certain form or genre because, like a well-made jacket, it suits him.

  It is true that some people can write well in more than one genre. I am thinking of poet-critics, such as Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky; poet-novelists, such as Denis Johnson and Margaret Atwood; novelist-critics, such as John Updike and Cynthia Ozick; and novelist-essayists, such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. But we are more likely to be suspicious of someone who attempts to write in more than one genre—who cross-dresses, generically speaking. When I was getting my MFA, it was considered anathema, if not altogether taboo, for someone from the poetry side of the program to write a short story or for someone from the fiction side to write a poem. We suspect those who attempt creative work in more than one genre or field of being dilettantes or dabblers. Gone is the idea of the Renaissance man. In a Paris Review interview, Gore Vidal addressed the problem of literary ambidexterity: “Writers are the only people who are reviewed by people of their own kind. And their own kind can often be reasonably generous—if you stay in your category. I don’t. I do many different things rather better than most people do one thing. And envy is the central fact of writing life.”

  Finding your form is like finding a mate. You really have to search, and you can’t compromise—unless you can compromise, in which case your misery will be of a different variety. But just as there are probably only one or two people to whom you could commit yourself, there are probably only a few things you can write about, and only one genre, or maybe two, in which you might excel. It’s no coincidence that most authors’ bodies of work hover over two or three basic themes or take a single basic shape. Think of the novels of Trollope, Austen, Dickens, or Hardy; think of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They each revisited the same themes, settings, and conflicts over the course of their writing lives. The James Joyces of the world, those who can move from short story to novel to epic, are rare, but then again, few writers master each form the first time out of the gate.
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  Even though most writers return to the same mine for inspiration, readers find infinite pleasure in watching their work change and deepen over time as they grapple with their obsessions. Think of Roth’s Zuckerman, Updike’s Rabbit, Ford’s Bascombe. But if you aren’t yet sure what your themes are or what category you should be writing in, you need to take a full accounting of all the reading and all the writing you have ever done or wanted to do. If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully finished or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator. If you read only literary novels, that should tell you something. If you’ve always kept a diary noting the natural world in all its variety, you might want to try writing nature essays.

  It never fails to surprise me, in conversations with writers who seek my advice as to what they should write, how many fail to see before their very eyes the hay that might be gold. Instead of honoring the subjects and forms that invade their dreams and diaries, they concoct some ideas about what’s selling or what agents and editors are looking for as they try to fit their odd-shaped pegs into someone else’s hole. There is nothing more refreshing for an editor than to meet a writer or read a query letter that takes him completely by surprise, that brings him into a world he didn’t know existed or awakens him to a notion that had been there all along but that he had never much noticed.

  Some of the most striking and successful books are clearly born of a writer’s obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirk of the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime. Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn’t have been the bestseller list, because almost anyone in the publishing industry would have told him that nobody would care about the story of a gay antiques dealer who languished in jail after shooting a cheap hustler. Clearly, Berendt was born to write this book. His strengths as a reporter, as a travel writer, and as a Southerner with a gothic sensibility for the macabre produced an original and unforgettable book that would stay on the New York Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 216 weeks.

  The same could be said for the brilliant essay collections by David Sedaris. Publishing wisdom 101: Essays don’t sell. Humor is tough. Good thing Sedaris didn’t get the memo. Nothing would have predicted the massive success of Sedaris’s eccentric and hilarious pieces, which makes their success that much sweeter. It is true that Sedaris began to attract a book-buying audience when NPR launched his essay “Santaland Diaries,” which recounted his stint at Macy’s as an elf at Christmas. Still, lots of writers are featured on NPR; his success defies the publishing industry’s received wisdom. After the publication of his first book, most of his essays have appeared in the New Yorker and every single title has gone on to become a New York Times bestseller, the last two in the number one slot. That’s not a fluke. A fluke would be the runaway success of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, since epistolary novels don’t sell—that is, until one comes along and plants itself on the bestseller list for more than a year. And in this crazy, youth-driven culture, Olive Kittredge, a book about a woman in her sixties—an unsympathetic character, I might add—wins the Pulitzer Prize and becomes a national bestseller.

  It is true that most books that sit on the bestseller list fit a certain genre (crime, science fiction, romance, and so forth), and they are prized in part for how well they work within a certain formula. Their authors are successful for having created characters and stories so compelling that they engender intense loyalty among their readers, a following. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard a “literary” writer (usually one who is stalled or struggling) announce that he’s thinking of writing something commercial; implicit is the idea that this project would be beneath his skills. I’ve always found this arrogance mind-boggling. If any writer could toss off a “commercial” novel and cash in, why haven’t they? The reason may be obvious: it’s not as easy as it looks. On the contrary, these writers deploy the tools of their craft, a craft they have honed and studied and labored at for years, if not decades. I don’t believe that writers can choose a topic or genre the way you can choose a country you’d like to visit by spinning a globe.

  Most writers have very little choice in what they write about. What is in evidence over and over is a certain set of obsessions, a certain vocabulary, a way of approaching the page. The person who can’t focus is not without his own obsessions, vocabulary, and approach. However, either he can’t find his form or he can’t apply the necessary discipline that ultimately separates the published from the unpublished.

  I believe that the writer who can’t figure out what form to write in or what to write is stalling for a reason. Perhaps he is dancing around a subject because he is not ready to handle it, psychologically or emotionally. Perhaps he is unable to pursue a project because doing so would upset his world too much, or the people in it. Maybe not writing, maybe being driven crazy by the desire to write and the inability to follow through, is serving some greater goal, keeping some greater fear at bay. Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it’s that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through—that is, the fear of not being heard.

  Certainly, the desire for success and the fear of failure run along a continuum. And the extent to which either motivates or paralyzes a given artist is dependent on a great many factors, including ability, ego, desire, and drive. But it’s important to remember that success and failure are only part of the equation. The making of art and the selling of it are two entirely distinct enterprises. Any number of great writers have not received the appreciation all artists crave. In his lifetime, Charles Dickens, who published his novels serially, was considered a hack. Emily Dickinson saw only seven of her hundreds of poems published. Jane Austen published under a pseudonym for her entire life. Artists such as Virginia Woolf, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman, who tragically took their lives in midcareer, would never know the prizes, cultdom, and canonization their work would later receive.

  Today too little is made of all the writing that doesn’t seek publication, all the letter writing, email sending, recipe copying, and diary keeping—all the writing that minds our lives. Now there is a great emphasis on turning one’s diary or blog into a published memoir or novel, and any number of books will advise you how to do so. Don’t get me wrong. I love websites, blogging, and blogs (BetsyLerner.com, ahem), but I believe that, like diaries, they need to be shaped to be successful as books. Or as Ellen Wernecke put it in her 2008 article published by the A.V. Club, “Why buy the cow?” The article listed twenty-seven popular websites or blogs that became books, most notably Tucker Max’s “fratire” I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, basically a compendium of frat-boy rants, digs, and other spurtings by Max, a self-proclaimed “raging dickhead.” Max’s blog attracts a million visitors per month, the book has been on and off the bestseller list for three years, there’s a film based on the book, and a sequel called Assholes Finish First. (Gotta admit, the dude has a knack for titles.) Some online material, like Max’s, clearly translates to a book audience. Before him, any number of stand-up comics such as George Carlin, Jerry Seinfeld, and Chris Rock translated their routines into hugely popular books. In other words, I’m all for writers mining any and every aspect of their lives for their writing. But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.

  It’s the writer who seeks pu
blication but who cannot finish even one project who must ask himself whether his stalling is also a form of self-protection. I can assure you that you will never finish any piece of writing if you don’t understand what motivates you to write in the first place and if you don’t honor that impulse, whether it’s exile or assimilation, redemption or destruction, revenge or love. “Getting even is one great reason for writing,” said William Gass in a Paris Review interview. “I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, ‘Why do you write the way you do?’ I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.”