Betsy Lerner's Blog, page 5

The First Cut is the Deepest

Even though I’m an agent, I still do a great deal of editing for my clients. Lately, I’ve been working with a writer I’ve known for over 25 years. By now, it’s like we’re an old married couple. I know her strengths and weakness. She knows my pet peeves and prejudices. We bicker about the same things, agree about the same things. Sometimes we don’t have to say anything at all. When I suggest a more apt word, move a paragraph, change the tense, she’s delighted. Calls me a genius. A small halo lights up over head. No change is too small. And I am thrilled when she takes a chance, makes a leap, says “look ma, no hands” with a string of sentences that blows my mind. In the end, it’s the dance. The call and response. The trust that if I know you’ll catch me, I am free to fall.

Who do you trust with your writing?

photo: Antique Boutique

We’ll Marry Our Fortunes Together

I took an actual vacation — a long delayed (Covid) 30th anniversary trip. My husband and I both have demanding publishing jobs, and spend a lot of vacation time apart to write. It was nice to know that we still get along, hiking and talking about our writing projects, our life choices to work inside the industry and not pursue writing full time, the need for structure and a regular paycheck, the creature comforts, wondering about the road less travelled, lamenting our cowardice, grateful for our jobs and the rich life working with writers and books.

What road did you take?

I Gave Her My Heart But She Wanted My Soul

I’ve been working on my editor’s notes for a month with ten days to go. She has nipped, tucked, corrected, questioned, prodded, challenged, and inspired me. Word choice, cliches, active verbs, varying sentence structure, wordiness, tightening, extraneous details, point of view. After 30 years of editing, I’m humbled by her work. If a sentence, sentiment, or thought is off by a hair, she questions it. She calls me out on all my bad habits. She has also encouraged me to take more chances. I am almost ready.

Are you?

Nothing Compares 2 U

It’s official. I’m a simile slut. I don’t know when to stop. If I can compare something to anything else, I will. Given the chance to use “like” or “as” I’m all over that shit. Look, I spent 40K on a poetry MFA, what the hell else am I gonna do. My editor (yes, ahem, working on ye olde first novel, lol) has pointed it out, exasperation all over the margin notes. An early reader also commented on the PLETHORA ( a word I hate that reminds me of lady parts) of similes: “If the simile is not precise, it fails to do the job it was meant to do and draws attention to the artifice that’s taking place.” Busted. So true. The simile must thread the needle, you know, the one in the haystack. I’m off my fucking rocker with this revision. Please stop me before I kill again.

Similes, talk to me. Pro? Con? Like? As?

Credit: Owlcation

Sooner Or Later It All Gets Real

My editor sent my quote unquote novel back with her notes. It’s a true, old school line-edit. Be still my heart. Her pencil is everywhere: tone, structure, point of view, word choice, continuity, transitions. There is nothing like being in the hands of a real editor. The careful attention, the big picture, the perspective. You know my level of gratitude is enormous. That’s not to say that I didn’t plummet to the depths today, just facing how bad the bad parts are, the rookie mistakes, the wanton abuse of semi-colons. The sheer wordiness (which I had deluded myself into thinking was my “voice”). I’m gonna get a good night’s sleep and hit it again in morning. The one guarantee about writing: One day you’re great and the next you’re the worst.

How do you handle editorial feedback?

You’re Still Young, That’s Your Fault

I was talking to a young writer the other day and the question came up about whether you need to “stay in your lane,” meaning stick with one genre. He writes screenplays and plays and poetry, and he had started thinking about writing a novel. What is my advice? I have no idea. If you’re aiming for one thing, it’s probably smart to just do that one thing and hone your craft develop contacts. But some people play multiple instruments, and others write, direct, and act. When I think of how much I put into poetry as a young person, and all the screenplays I’ve written that have gotten nowhere, and the books I wound up writing instead, I honestly can’t make much sense of it. I can connect the dots, but there was never a plan. One thing led to the next.

Do you have a path?

credit: cool2bkids

I Need Someone to Love Me the Whole Day Through

I got nothing this morning. My projects taunt me. The falling apart notebook with the story of my pottery lessons in the backyard garden of an old man with life lessons. The letters I wrote from London to my family trying to mask my depression. The letters sent to me when I was in the hospital for said depression. The screenplay about two employees who work on a dating site and want to date each other but are too fucked up. The screenplay about a book editor who falls in love with a neanderthal. The screenplay about a tik tok influencer and a washed up thirty-something actor from a beloved tv show. The book about adult siblings. The The book about things that ring true.

What’s in your drawers?

photo: wiki

Old Friend, Why Are You So Shy?

What does a workaholic do on vacation? How does a workaholic know when vacation’s over? How hard does the rain have to fall? I can still remember the first day of school after summer, pretending not to be excited, but secretly so happy to be back behind a desk, the smell of new supplies, new books, watching a new teacher try to make an impression. My mother’s sandwiches in tin foil, a piece of fruit banging around in my lunch box. I did four loads of laundry when we got home and walled off.

When you say you’re not good at something, what do you mean?

I’m Not Too Blind To See

Someone called me “driven” the other day and it kind of bothered me. What does that even mean. Honestly, I’m probably more compulsive than I am driven. I don’t like leaving things unfinished. It’s also true that I get frustrated when people tell me that they can’t write, or they have to make themselves write, or they need certain circumstances in their life to be able to write. In my mind, it’s something that you do because you don’t know how to make sense of the world any other way.

Is that driven?

King of the Road

When I was about around eleven or twelve, my mother and I were driving by a corn field dotted by brown stalks sticking out of the snow, and I remarked that they looked like the stubble on a man’s face. She said that my observation was a simile. A comparison using like or as. I attribute my love of poetry and writing back to that moment and pleasing my mother, a woman difficult to please. Metaphor, more abstract, came later, more gradually. When I finished War and Peace the other day, I felt as if a glacial metaphor had moved through me, the book encompassing all of life on a grand scale and also on the most intimate. And yet through all that, one image keeps coming back to me. There is a hunt for rabbits where thousand-ruble dogs compete with mongrels, and a mongrel named Rugay is the victor. Tolstoy writes, “For some after, they kept looking askance at red Rugay, who trotted along Uncle’s horse with mud all over his hunched up back, jingling the fittings on his leash, with the serene air of a conquerer.” Yes, a metaphor for the whole book, the Russian army defeating the French, but oh that phrase, “the serene air of a conquerer,” the sound and flow of it, the feeling and image it stirs, the inherent simile. And that, dear reader, is the depth of my love of writing, right there in a single phrase.

What excites you most about writing?

photo: Sky History