The Best Book on Writing:

Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000)

Not a book for the brand-new writer or for most student writers approaching the blank page for the first time, but the single most honest volume about what it takes — in the real world of publishing — to get your words into the hands of a reader. Besty Lerner’s book is generous, witty, engaging, and brutal.

Best lines: “It is the writer who seeks publication 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.‘”

And: “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, even in those that exercised enormous restraint in the telling: in the hearts of my favorite 19th-century novelists’ highly repressed heroes and heroines there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to. … At a time when people are encouraged to follow their bliss, to pursue whatever makes them feel good, I suggest you stalk your demons. Embrace them. If you are a writer, especially one who has been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab your demons by the neck and face them down. And whatever you do, don’t censor yourself. There’s always time and editors for that.”

And: “The ambivalent writer confuses procrastination with research. He can’t hear through the static to find the one true voice. I know a lot of writers who beat themselves up on a regular basis, either for not writing or for not writing well enough. And when they are writing well they make themselves crazy over things, not the least of which is how they’re going to pay the rent, why they don’t have health insurance, whether or not anyone will care.”

OK, and simply because I can’t resist, one more: “Writers take note: your struggle to produce a piece of writing of interest and value means nothing to the reader. The reader doesn’t care what you went through to produce your work. He only cares if the piece succeeds, if it looks as if it arrived whole.”

Finally, I should also acknowledge my interest in devlish question posted by a reader with the unlikely name of “SlowBadHands” who asked “Are any of the putatively good books on writing offered in the Comments actually on the professor’s lists of bad books on writing? Tell the truth, now.”

When somebody insists I tell the truth, I want to run away and to confess (it’s the Recovering Catholic in me). I practically break out in a rash. But it also gets me all fluttery and interested. It’s a dare.

Here goes nothing: I didn’t like Eats, Shoots and Leaves (preferring the title of another book called Free Drinks for Ladies With Nuts which also calls attention to the importance of word selection, punctuation, and general use of language. Well, yeah, okay, Free Drinks for Ladies With Nuts is just mostly a collection of signs in English from non-English speaking countries but I prefer it to Truss, whose name you could not have assigned more perfectly even if you were Dickens, because Free Drinks for Ladies With Nuts makes the same point without being all prissy).

I’m not a Bird By Bird fan, but I adore and respect so many people who are that I feel actually guilty admitting it and would not have done so without this dare; same with LeGuin’s Steering the Craft.

Whew, confession feels good.

Yes, Milena is correct when she pegs me as a non-fan of Cameron’s. I’ll admit it, yet I find myself hoping that doesn’t mean Milena will stop writing terrific responses to the blog. (Also, she should know I’m always up for hot chocolate — and that if there is chocolate involved, any lighting will do.)

But I’ll also confess that my favorite response, from another reader who’s posted before and whose comments I’ve enjoyed, was one expressing displeasure. “Case hardened” (another smart alias) sneered at me. Yes, he did. He made the point that “the world would be a sweeter place if everyone abided by Strunk and White, and if the little men in brown suits who compile dictionaries would stop giving in to barbaric usage.”

Fair enough, I thought, and then realized I was included amongst the savages when the next sentence quoted me back to myself “Incidentally, when you wrote ‘…two of them were loaned to me…’ did you mean to writie ‘…were lent to me?’” Initially I feel small, ready to internalize his chastisment (maybe “her,” but I believe “his,” what with the “hardened” and all), but then I saw that his comment included the word “writie” which is adorable and has GOT to be humbling when wagging one’s professorial finger at a colleague.

You’ve been enormously generous (just like Lerner) in telling me — in telling us—about the books you’ve found useful and inspiring. Thank you.

So — are you ready to begin to writie?