July/August 2000 | Contents

BEGETTING A BOOK
The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers

BY STEVE WEINBERG  

Since becoming the author of my first published book in 1978, I have received inquiries more or less weekly from print and broadcast journalists about how to secure a book contract. My callers are certain they have something interesting and important to say that publishers will pay to print. So, they ask, will you help me find a literary agent who will sell my manuscript to a publisher? Or, they ask, will you help me find a publisher directly, leaving the agent (and the agent's 15 percent commission) out of this?

Currently, I am writing my seventh nonfiction book, for my sixth publisher. The callers figure if not-at-all-famous Weinberg in the middle of Missouri, for God's sake, can break through, certainly he can help them do as much.

I always listen, I always try to be polite. In many instances, though, I do not provide the name of my agent or editor; I can tell from the conversation (or from a later scanning of the manuscript) that the callers are unrealistic either about their writing skills, their subject matter, the difficulties of getting published -- or all of the above. Sometimes I do refer callers to my agent or my editor, or to some other, more appropriate, agent or editor. A few of those referrals have had happy endings. Most have not.

After twenty-two years of such time-consuming, no-charge consultations, Betsy Lerner has entered my life via her just-published book. She will be saving me lots of time, and helping most of my callers far more than I can.

Although I try to keep up with the good editors in the book publishing world, I confess that Lerner had escaped my notice during her decade-plus employment at Houghton Mifflin, Ballantine, Simon & Schuster, and Doubleday. She has recently left the publishing side to become a literary agent at The Gernert Company in New York City. Though I have never met Lerner, I feel as if I know her well. Her beautifully written book of observations and advice seems to be coming from a friend.

In the Introduction, Lerner explains how she fell into an editor's role at book publishing houses after a vocationally undirected college career as an English major, a job in the library of a New York City investment bank and, finally, a Columbia University MFA program in poetry that led to a publishing house internship, where she found her passion.

At first, Lerner thought writers were exalted beings with life-styles to be envied. She soon learned otherwise, but the truth did not lead to disillusionment. Instead, it led to fascination about which authors made it and which did not. That, in turn, led to the intense quantitative and qualitative study that shines through every chapter of Lerner's book.

"I saw mediocre writers who were brilliant at networking and superb writers who couldn't part with their pages," Lerner says. "Some seemed blessed with the confidence of entitlement, others cursed with paralyzing insecurities. I saw their defenses and fears, their hopes and ambitions. Very soon I was able to recognize which writers would hunker down for the long haul, revising their texts over and over, and which felt that simply producing a manuscript should be enough to secure a publishing contract."

Ah, the long haul. Most of the journalists who call me have little sense about how different book writing is from newsroom work. In book writing, there is little if any tangible daily gratification. There is no workplace camaraderie. There is also no place to hide mediocrity or failure. Not-so-talented journalists can skate by in newsrooms, where reporter and editor colleagues pick up the slack. No skating by is allowed in book writing; the author is all alone until delivering a book manuscript to an editor like Lerner.

While the first part of Lerner's book is instructive and enjoyable, for the insightful journalist it might also be painful. Its overriding theme is types of writers, with their insecurities on and off the page. Sometimes naming names, more often preserving anonymity, Lerner describes the self-promoter, the natural, the wicked child, the neurotic, and the downright mentally ill. She explains the ambivalence that almost every writer feels about writing for oneself versus writing for the public. Reading Lerner's take on each type, I recognized my writer acquaintances and myself. The recognition was not always pleasant, especially given that I am way overdue on my current book.

Lerner prepared her typology for reasons other than mere curiosity:

"While editors are most certainly concerned with matters of style, structure, voice and flow, they are often faced with extra-textual problems -- keeping the writer motivated, seeing the bigger picture, finding the patterns and rhythms, subtexts and operating metaphors that may elude an author drowning in research or blocked midstream. In the most productive author-editor relationship, the editor, like a good dance partner who neither leads nor follows but anticipates and trusts, can help the writer find her way back into the work, can cajole another revision, contemplate the deeper themes, or supply the seamless transition, the telling detail."

In the second part of the book, Lerner switches the emphasis from analytical to descriptive, as she explains the process of getting published. Lerner concentrates on how agents become involved, how authors deal with rejection, what editors are looking for from authors, what authors are looking for from editors, the way a book comes together step by step after a contract is signed, and either the letdown (normal) or the euphoria (abnormal) after it is on sale.

Lerner's goal in the second part is "to give a feeling of what it's like to sit behind an editor's desk and read hundreds of manuscripts, of how an editor feels when she is either supported or thwarted in her efforts to acquire a project, or when a favorite author's book is universally panned or worse, ignored." She succeeds.

Journalists hoping to make the passage from newsroom pieces to books, she advises, should refrain from unproductive emulation. "Every writer who proposes a book of oral reportage swears that he's the next Studs Terkel. Those who want to describe a year in the life assure you that they are the next Tracy Kidder . . . . Every feminist tract is the next Backlash [by Susan Faludi]." Be yourself, Lerner instructs. After all, Terkel, Kidder, and Faludi were all unpublished authors at one point.

Part of the emulation disease comes from trying to outsmart the market. Forget about that, Lerner says. Journalists should choose book projects that they are passionate about, that take everything they've got. Using journalist Jonathan Harr as an example, Lerner says when he started to research A Civil Action, "it's likely that more than a few people tried to discourage him. Who wants to read about kids who die of leukemia? Who wants to read about toxic poisoning? . . . The success of Harr's book pays tribute to an author going for broke and writing his book with as much integrity and grit as a person can muster."

Granted, most nonfiction books, even those as good as A Civil Action, sell poorly, and hardly ever become Hollywood films starring John Travolta. If the long odds are discouraging to you, don't bother.

Because Lerner understands the long odds, she usually refrains from overtly inspirational passages. Underneath it all, however, her book is quite likely to be inspirational for journalists who already have the fire to do a book.

It would be pleasing if I could quote passage after passage verbatim, because every chapter is filled with covertly inspirational examples. My remaining space permits just one, however. I chose it because it expresses so well what I emphasize to my callers over and over -- writing a book is not primarily about making money or achieving fame. Rather, writing a book is about passion. I want to give Lerner the last words:

"Some of the most striking and successful books . . . were clearly born of a writer's obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a queer book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirk of the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime. Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn't have been the bestseller list . . . . Clearly, he was born to write this book, and he worked through whatever ambivalence and uncertainty he might have felt within himself or encountered from others.

"Most writers have very little choice in what they write about. Think of any writer's body of work, and you will see the thematic pattern incorporating voice, structure, and intent. What is in evidence over and over is a certain set of obsessions, a certain vocabulary, a way of approaching the page. The person who can't focus is not without his own obsessions, vocabulary, and approach. However, either he can't find his form or he can't apply the necessary discipline that ultimately separates the published from the unpublished." *

Steve Weinberg, a cjr contributing editor, serves on the National Book Critics Circle board of directors and reviews regularly for a dozen newspapers and magazines. He is currently writing a biography of Ida Tarbell.