The Forest for the Trees.

I have been reading Betsy Lerner's 'The Forest for the Trees' on and off over the months and will read it several more times before I finally put it down. This is an honestly written humorous, insightful and engaging read. Lerner sees into the hearts of writers and has a built-in humbug detector. No one sits down to write a modest success, she tells us, rather every writer wants to write words that inflame the readers' minds and hearts. How true. There's no denying it. Whether its a runaway success like Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the Wind' or Patrick White's Nobel prize-winning 'Tree of Man' every writer secretly hopes his or her next work will be the major opus, the great one! I enjoyed Lerner's anecdotes about writers, some of them were very quirky characters indeed, needing to engage in certain rituals before being able to start their day's work. Dame Edith Sitwell reputedly lay in a coffin at the start of her day no doubt to get her in the sober enough mood to begin. Hemingway felt the need to sharpen twenty pencils before the muse joined him and Truman Capote always typed the third draft of the novel on very special yellow paper. For the famous writers all these ritualistic behaviours become known as their 'process' - what made them tick. The problem is this is not writing, Lerner points out, this is just stalling! And the more you indulge any neurotic notions about a set of necessary conditions that will enable you to write, the colder the trail will get. This book is a real treat for those who write, who want to write and enjoy nothing so much as reading about the art of writing and what motivates other writers. Would highly recommend it.



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