“When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.” Truman Capote
I discovered this quote in the introduction of The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner. Lerner continues by say, “Now I understand that writers are a breed apart, their gifts and their whips inextricably linked. The writer’s psychology is by nature one of extreme duality.” I breathed a sigh of relief. My soul danced for joy. Ms. Lerner’s words were so well timed in my life that their presence can only be described as a divine gift.
When I was an undergraduate, I was studying English with a minor in Spanish. I loved literature, so when the Spanish Department sponsored an Argentinean author to come teach Latin American Magic Realism, of course I was going to take his class! Oddly enough, to me at least, this writer was also a mathematician. “He has this formula for writing and he just follows it,” my Spanish instructor told me. A formula for writing? Like an algebraic expression? Could literature be written by just plugging in the right components in the right order? I envied this idea.
Check out The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner
For the next decade, I would search for this formula: creative writing classes, books, social media communities filled with other writers. I discovered there were a lot of formulas. Some were very rigid, like an architect’s blue print, and some where more general like an old family recipe. I tried them all, like a self-conscious girl searching for a prom dress. Each one seemed to accentuate some horrible defect in myself, and I would toss it in the corner discouraged in my abilities as a writer and filled with self-loathing. Really what hope is there when you are a self-identified writer who cannot write?
Lerner opens chapter 1, “The Ambivalent Writer,” with a number of questions:
“Do you have a new idea almost every day for a writing project? Do you either start them all and don’t see them through to fruition or think about starting but never actually get going? Are you a short-story writer one day and a novelist the next? A memoirist on Monday and a screenwriter by the weekend? Do you begin sentences in your head while walking to work or picking up the dry cleaning, sentences so crisp and suggestive that they make perfect story or novel openers, only you never manage to write them down? Do you blab about your project to loved ones, coworkers, or strangers before the idea is fully formed, let alone partially executed? Have you ever accidentally left your notes, diary, or disk behind on a train or plane and bemoaned the loss of what certainly had been your best work? Have you ever been diagnosed with any combination of bipolar disorder, alcoholism, or skin disease such as eczema or psoriasis? . . .If you can relate to any of the above, you certainly have the obsessive qualities—along with the self-aggrandizement and concurrent feelings of worthlessness—that are part of the writer’s basic makeup.” (13, The Forest for the Trees)
I breathed a sigh of relief. I am not broken. I do not need to be fixed. I am perfectly designed to do what I love doing. I am a writer.
I have just started Lerner’s book, but I already know it is going to be one of the most important books I will ever read, not simply because it is an editor’s compassionate advice to writer’s, giving us an inside glimpse into the world we both long for and are afraid of, but because The Forest for the Trees is a mirror, like all great books are. The author, seeking to reveal the truth about themselves and the world as they know it, provides the perfect reflective surface for you to see yourself and who you really are. I guess, in one line, that is my formula. Thank you, Betsy Lerner.
