The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers
- Author
- Betsy Lerner
- Year
- 2000
- Cluster
- the writing life
- Format
- book
Betsy Lerner spent years as an acquiring editor before writing The Forest for the Trees (2000), and it shows in the book’s unusual angle of attack: it is advice about writers more than about writing. The first half is a field guide to the species an editor meets — the ambivalent writer, the natural, the wicked child, the neurotic — written with enough sympathy to sting. If you have ever stalled a manuscript by polishing chapter one for a year, Lerner has met you, and she can tell you what happens to you in the end.
The second half walks the publishing machine from the inside: what agents and editors actually do, what rejection letters mean and don’t mean, how books move from slush to shelf. Some industry mechanics have shifted since — query culture, self-publishing, the platform economy postdate her desk — but the psychology on both sides of it is intact.
There is deliberately little sentence-level craft here. Read it to understand the animal you are and the system you’re submitting to; read Browne & King to fix the pages.
You want to understand how you look from the other side of the desk — and how the publishing machine actually processes you.
You want sentence-level craft; Lerner works on the writer, not the page.
On Writing — the writer's side of the desk · The Successful Novelist — career pragmatics to go with the psychology