An excellent book about writers

Here's my Goodreads review for the book I finished yesterday. I already put a couple of my favorite passages on an earlier post, I'll add a couple more below.

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One of the best books about writing I've read, though it's not a how-to. Betsy Lerner was an editor for 15 years at a few houses, and is now an agent (she was also a poet.) She says the first half of her book is meant as an encouragement to those stalled in their writing or afraid of writing; maybe because that's not my problem, I just found it to be a celebration of writers. She tells great stories both from her own career and from the lives of famous writers and their editors, and really gives you the drive to just keep pushing onward. It's full of quotable moments.

The second half is her advice about the publishing industry, step-by-step from querying to marketing. If it were only practical advice the book wouldn't be that different from others and I'd have been disappointed. But again she brings her personal stories and a wealth of anecdotes to the subject matter, so in the end it feels like you've spent a week having lunches with your new New York publishing friend. 

Finally, Lerner just writes really well. Clear prose, funny, inspiring, and though her background is in literary fiction she doesn't turn her nose up at popular writing. I don't just recommend this to writers, but to people who love books and want the insider scoop on the old world of publishing (the one that's likely on the cusp of a radical overhaul.)
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In this part Lerner talks about the possibility that what you loved about books was that there was no censure, and in them you were free to express anything about yourself:

All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive--as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books .... In the slyly dark and chilling lines of one of my favorite British poets, Philip Larkin, I found images that cracked the world open. I am not suggesting a writer let it bleed so much as I am suggesting that he harness whatever drives him.

I suggest you stalk your demons. ... If you have been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab them by the neck and face them down. And whatever you do, don't censor yourself.

Oddly enough I identify with that, cause when I was a teenager sometimes people tried to tell me I should write realistic stories, instead of my wild and crazy comedies about my friends as adults. (Must be the reason I'm the only person who doesn't like Little Women. Jo is no role model for me!) To this day I have to suppress an eye-roll when someone asks me: Why don't you write about what you know?

Heyer and Wodehouse rescued me. They proved you can write the most ridiculous novels, bring all your craft to them, and they'll sparkle like diamonds. So... what drives me? What do I need to harness? Making people laugh. That's all. And what do I know? I know human beings. It was good enough for Shakespeare who, as far as we know, wasn't an Italian teenager, or a suicidal Dane.

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In a later chapter Lerner quotes Salinger on a related topic:

"One day, a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll produce the work you're capable of."

Mind, there are writers who did that alienated them from their friends (Truman Capote) or angered entire communities (Philip Roth). I don't know if my comedy will ever require that of me!

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"'I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl,' recalled Joan Didion, 'but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make believe. It's performance.'"

Lerner has other quotes about writers writing from an early age, but I that one makes me laugh cause when I was little I used to like dancing, and I wanted to be a "star" when I grew up. Nothing specific like an actor or a singer or a dancer. Just a star.

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"...antisocial behavior is essential. An absolute solipsism takes over as the writer becomes more alive inside his work than in the real world. ... What look like neurosis and eccentric behavior may provide the crucial barricade that enables the writer to work when everything in life conspires to distract him or co-opt his energies."

This is why I depend on my husband or friends to make me leave the house sometimes. Unfortunately I only have one friend who isn't as bad as me (thanks Swiss Girl.) They're not writers, what's their excuse? They're all artsy I guess. When I was in high school and Swiss Girl would call and I'd been writing, she could always tell, cause I'd have nothing to say. I was happy to listen, but words would escape me for the first twenty minutes or so.

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"A good editor should be able to go as many rounds as a writer needs to get his manuscript just right, though an inverse equation often rules: those books that require the most work may be the least improved by editing. ... The finest writers, often perfectionists, tend to require the least amount of the editor's time.  ... As the first editor I ever worked for said, after finishing his line-edit on a very fine biography that was eleven years in the making, 'It was like polishing silver.'"

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"What goes on between a writer and an editor is as mysterious and alchemical as a marriage. ... Most [writers] have such deeply ambivalent feelings about what they deserve and how good they are that they are often bouncing between their desire for approval and fear of rejection. Then again, if they didn't struggle with issues of need, attention, disapproval, isolation, and social life, chances are they wouldn't be writers."

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That's it. I have many other passages bookmarked, but these were the most quotable.