Betsy Lerner

Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees

Monday, August 1st, 2011 | Betsy Lerner, Writing Process | 2 Comments

Long before I ever sold a word of my work, I read the THE FOREST FOR THE TREES: AN EDITOR’S ADVICE TO WRITERS by Betsy Lerner. In that memoir, or book of advice, Ms. Lerner made me feel as if I were not a madwoman for wanting to put the stories in my mind down on paper. Her gentle, realistic voice made me realize that what I am doing, I must do, and it is ok.

It’s hard to express what that meant to me when no one had read my work but a friend or two and handful of writing teachers. What it still meant to me once I had acquired an agent, during the long years during which we shopped my work before we found a buyer for my own particular way of looking at the world. It meant a lot to me still once I found my own editor, and began to work with her toward a vision of what my first novel was meant to be.THE FOREST FOR THE TREES means a lot to me still.

I am going to read it again before this summer draws to a close. This is easier to say in the South, for even with the tight deadlines that I will  meet between now and the end of the year, summer lasts a long time down here in coastal NC, spinning its way into the beginning of October sometimes. Though with global warming, Congressional debt crises, typhoons, earth quakes, and 2012 looming, there is no way to predict anything at the moment, least of all the weather. But I do predict that I will return to this book this summer, and in the years to come because it is a touchstone for me, a reminder that while it is terrifying to be a writer, we have allies. Not just our friends and families, not just our agents and editors, but books like this one, books that quietly remind us that what we are doing is a sacred art. That is the biggest lesson I drew from this book the first few times I read it: that writing is sacred, and that I am not the only one who thinks so.

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