This writer, in Lerner's estimation, is a waffler, someone who's too insecure or too afraid or too distracted to put in the hard work of being a writer. The Ambivalent Writer - This chapter opens like an infomercial for a new drug: 'Do you have a new idea almost every day.Do you either start them all and don't see them to fruition or think about starting but never actually get going? Are you a short-story writer one day and a novelist the next?.Do you begin sentences in your head.Do you blab about your project.Have you ever accidentally.Have you ever been diagnosed.' and on it goes. In Part I, (the part in which she says everyone is mostly interested) Lerner breaks writers down into six categories: The book is divided into two parts: Part I: Writing and Part II: Publishing. Since I was reading a book with a stated intention of being for 'writers,' I wore my 'writer' hat when reading it. I'm the kind of girl who wears several hats: the writer, the critic, the editor. I can see why.īecause this book is intended to be 'advice to writers,' Lerner's readers are, most likely, writers themselves and would, therefore, be pretty interested in what she has to say about them (us). The wicked child and all that jazz.' Well.

Lerner recently posted on her blog that: 'My writing book is about publishing from an editor’s perspective, but the part that people seem more interested in is the inner life of writers.

I couldn't help but wonder if Lerner's audience wasn't actually intended to be other editors who would get the inside jokes and find the stereotypical caricatures of authors funny. On the other, it reads like an insider's exposé of what editors and agents really think of we writer types. On the one hand, it claims to be advice to writers which, in places, it actually is. Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers has a bit of an identity issue.

Betsy lerner forest for the trees