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For Tin House’s site, I write about finding solace for the slow pace of my own novel in the writing of Donna Tartt and my friend Alexander Chee.

She read my manuscript and said she loved it, and then she asked why I decided not to write the other part of the story in the same book.

“I thought it was too ambitious,” I said. “I was afraid I couldn’t do it.”

“That’s not a good reason,” she said. “Of course you can do it.”

And now, I am doing it. Hooray for Julie Barer!

Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark,[1] dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on.

It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say it’s an affinity of perspective — a morbid fixation on the absurdities of human existence — combined with precision, bluntness, and humor.

Of late, E.B. White has joined the second group. I’ve been making my way through One Man’s Meat — a collection of essays about leaving New York City for his Maine farm — and I particularly enjoyed this bit from an essay on his failed efforts to raise turkeys for money:

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

I’ve previously mentioned this great aside, in the same vein, from his Paris Review interview:

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer — he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive for him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.

I guess the reason writers have to clear the decks is that they never know when the “moments of sustained creation” will come, and they have to be sitting in front of the page, waiting for them — and pushing through the others.

Which is to say (and to remind myself) that I’m still finishing my novel and, apart from the day job, doing very little else. Last week’s posting flare-up was an anomaly.
 

See (and hear) also: a 1942 interview with White on One Man’s Meat, rare recordings of the author reading from Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, and his response to a fan who wanted to visit him at his farm: “Thank you for your note about the possibility of a visit. Figure it out. There’s only one of me and ten thousand of you. Please don’t come.”

1. Twain for his essays, de Vries for The Blood of the Lamb, and Spark for everything. ↩

Apart from the occasional Twitter flurry, I’m really only doing one thing in my free time these days (getting closer, thanks for asking). With a few exceptions.

Next Wednesday, September 15, I’ll ask Rosecrans Baldwin a few questions following a reading from his smart, taut, very accomplished first novel, You Lost Me There, about a scientist whose memories of his screenwriter wife are upended by some angry notes he finds in her office long after her funeral.

Baldwin and I share an admiration for Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene, and I’m interested in the way You Lost Me There, like The End of the Affair, turns on the discovery of a woman’s diary. We’ll be at McNally Jackson at 7 p.m.

Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story on my iPad.

The easiest thing would’ve been to type it all up in Pages or, better yet, to plot it out in my notebook (for some reason, I take comfort in keeping provisional things handwritten). Instead, I downloaded a new app and spent a couple hours teaching myself to draw letters with my index finger. (See practice effort, above.) At the time this seemed, if not sensible, like a reasonable way to spend the morning. Later, less so.

But now I have the whole scheme in a handwritten PDF that, after many more hours’ work on the book, I’ve updated twice, once from home and once from my office. Maybe the effort wasn’t a complete boondoggle, after all.

Kelsey Newman, the narrator of Scarlett Thomas’ forthcoming Our Tragic Universe, aspires to literary greatness but actually ghostwrites YA thrillers. Her descriptions of the ever-evolving Serious Novel she’s been writing for years remind me so much of my own experience, laughing at them feels like an admission that I have no idea what I’m doing.

“I realised a while ago that I was always trying to make the novel catch up with my life,” Kelsey says, after describing, in hilarious detail that I probably shouldn’t quote from a galley, its transformation.
 

My own plan has been to write one novel* and then turn my attentions to something else: researching a straightforward biography, writing an accessible book on tax policy (don’t laugh!), going undercover to investigate extreme manifestations of fundamentalism, becoming a private investigator…

Many writers who take their own experiences and twist them into fiction only have one story in them but publish many more, of ever-diminishing worth, after their first book appears. I’m deeply afraid of becoming that kind of literary natterer-on.

The trouble is, though, if you decide you’re only going to write one novel, you will want that book to be the best it can possibly be — not just for right now, but for all time. Down this particular obsessive-compulsive road lie many interesting developments. A completed manuscript is not one of them.
 

Recently I’ve been hacking away at my novel draft, and last week I finally admitted to myself that what I’ve been writing as one book for the past six years is two different stories.

The prospect of wrangling them separately fills me with nearly as much dread as relief, but part of being a writer is tricking yourself, again and again, into investing in each new epiphany. So I’ve given myself a deadline to finish the first book. We’ll see how it goes.

The photo above is of Scarlett Thomas’ contribution to the Significant Objects project, which I won in the third round of auctions (benefitting Girls Write Now).** The object itself was chosen by Paola Antonelli, and you can read Thomas’ brief story about it here.

When I do complete the draft, I’m going to open a bottle of champagne and light the candles. Even though I’ve only read forty pages of Our Tragic Universe so far, I have a feeling Kelsey Newman would approve.

* You can read an excerpt from the beginning in Narrative Magazine.

** I contributed my own story to Significant Objects, and I sit on Girls Write Now’s Board of Directors.

Obviously I’m thrilled to be included in the Times’ (UK) list of “Forty bloggers who really count.” As is my nature, I also feel anxious and unworthy, but at a certain point (which came for me a long time ago) it is tacky and seems disingenuous to say so. Feel free to call me on that.

This month marks eight years since I started blogging. When I began, not long before this photo was taken, I figured the whole endeavor would quickly and unceremoniously go the way of my first website, which I set up in 1995, decorated with little New Yorker drawings, and abandoned to disappear along with everything else on the Alachua Freenet.

If you’d told me in 2002 that I would keep at this for so long or that so many people would know about this site or care what I had to say, I probably would’ve reacted the way I did to two boys in elementary school who said I was pretty: decided you were mocking me and head-butted you to the ground, shouting, “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”
 

I’m grateful to all of you who’ve visited this site through its many permutations. Even now, every six months or so, I find myself re-evaluating and changing what I do here.

This year I’ve posted more sporadically, read fewer new books, and written far less book criticism, so as to finish the novel that, as the Times notes, has yet to materialize. (The list compilers were very kind about the delay, actually. I wonder sometimes: John Steinbeck aside, has anyone in the history of letters ever whinged so publicly and at such length about writing a book that does not even exist?)
 

I find myself focusing — here, at Twitter, and elsewhere — ever more unapologetically on the strange assortment of writers and cultural phenomena that interest me. In the last six months, I’ve obsessed over Muriel Spark and day jobs, begun writing an intermittent column on Christian fundamentalism, tried to explain my reasons for writing a novel rather than a memoir, outed myself — at NPR, no less — as a hypochondriac with a disorder of the humors, and discovered that the archives of my great-great aunt (and self-given namesake) are held by the State of Mississippi.

Which is to say: If my perspective and voice are the strengths of this site, they are also its limitations.
 

The truth is that, nowadays, there are so many excellent sites keeping up with book news, interviewing authors, reviewing novels, and commenting on publishing, my own appetite for participating in generalized literary talk has dwindled. I read other sites as widely as ever, though, and I’ve been interested to observe the evolution of book blogs.

Whether you’re just stopping by or are a regular reader, I’d like to direct you to some other bookish venues that you might enjoy (and want to send copies of your books to, sinc