Alec Nevala-Lee

A year ago, my writing life, which had always been something of a gamble, was looking more uncertain than ever. I had a draft of a novel, Kamera, that I thought was in pretty good shape—although looking back at it now, it’s humbling to realize how much more work it actually needed. I no longer had an agent, having parted ways with mine the previous year (in a story that has yet to be told). My most recent publication, my first in a while, had been a novelette in Analog that summer, but I had nothing else of note in the pipeline. And I was faced with the prospect of a fourth consecutive year of writing for a living without very much to show for it.

Now, as the year draws to a close, things are looking brighter: I have an agent, an editor, and a deal for two novels, one of which has already been finished and accepted by my publisher. (I also have this blog, which has been a real pleasure to write over the past few months.) And yet certainty still feels a long way off. That’s the nature of the writer’s life, at least for most of us: security lasts only as long as the current project, if at all, and there’s no way to tell what the future holds.

Over the next year, I’ll be taking you through the process as Kamera heads for publication in February 2012, and as I continue to push forward on my second novel, which I’m scheduled to deliver in September. I’ll have another novelette, “Kawataro,” coming out in Analog in June, and hopefully a few more surprises down the line. Much of 2011 already feels mapped out—with a novel to write and revise in just over nine months, I don’t have much of a choice. But I expect that there will be some unexpected twists as well. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve got to [write] anyway. Like beavers, you know. They chop, they eat wood, because if they don’t, their teeth grow too long and they die. And they hate the sound of running water. Drives them crazy. So, if you put those two ideas together, they are going to build dams.

—David Mamet

The online Paris Review archive is the gift that keeps on giving. Not long after posting their interview with Robert Graves, I was looking for the new Art of Fiction profile of Jonathan Franzen—which isn’t online yet, meaning that I might have to buy the actual magazine—when I stumbled across this gem from 1997. It’s a conversation between David Mamet and John Lahr, and I fell in love with it right away. Which isn’t surprising, since I sometimes think that Mamet is the smartest guy in the world, as well as one half (with his wife Rebecca Pidgeon) of the coolest couple that my mind can conceive.

I’ve already mentioned that Mamet’s slim book On Directing Film is one of the most useful works available on storytelling of any kind, and the Paris Review interview gives a nice, clean summary of his basic philosophy, which sounds like simplicity itself: instead of obsessing over the “meaning” of the overall work, you focus on the meaning of the individual story beat, which nearly always revolves around what the protagonist wants. Then, once you’ve put the story beat into its most economical and elegant form, you move onto the next one. And if you’ve taken care of the individual beats, then the “drama” of the overall story will follow:

…[T]heoretically, perfectly, what one wants to do is put the protagonist and the audience in exactly the same position. The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want. That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. What gives rise to the drama, what is the precipitating event, and how, at the end of the play, do we see that event culminated? Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. You break it down into three acts.

And where does character come from? Here’s what Mamet says:

It’s action, as Aristotle said. That’s all that it is—exactly what the person does. It’s not what they “think,” because we don’t know what they think. It’s not what they say. It’s what they do, what they’re physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person’s character in life—not by what they say, but by what they do.

And here’s Mamet on writing for the audience:

I mean, if I’m not writing for the audience, if I’m not writing to make it easier for them, then who the hell am I doing it for? And the way you make it easier is by following those tenets: cutting, building to a climax, leaving out exposition, and always progressing toward the single goal of the protagonist. They’re very stringent rules, but they are, in my estimation and experience, what makes it easier for the audience.

Now, this is a very seductive approach to writing, and probably unimpeachable on rational grounds. In practice, though, the results can be a little mixed. I’ve never seen a Mamet film I didn’t like (even Redbelt), but it’s rare for his movies to move beyond the level of an elegantly conceived exercise. (The Winslow Boy probably comes the closest.) And it’s perhaps no accident that my favorite Mamet scripts (for Glengarry Glen Ross and The Untouchables) were brought to the screen by different directors. The greatest films are open to accident and improvisation in a way that Mamet’s approach never allows. At his worst, he can seem cold, clinical, even robotic.

And yet his example remains very instructive. T.S. Eliot once pointed out that if a poet tries to imitate the style of Dante, at worst, he’ll end up with a boring poem; if he tries to imitate Shakespeare, he’ll sound like an idiot. I think of Mamet in the same way. It can be incredibly dangerous to imitate the greatest, most idiosyncratic writers (like Proust) or directors (like Kubrick).  If you imitate Mamet—that is, his approach to storytelling, not his dialogue or themes, which are uniquely his own—at worst, you’ll end up with a mechanical but watchable piece of work, with a minimum of backstory and self-indulgence. Which, after all, is far from the worst thing a writer can do.

To write regular verses…destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distinct and totally unexpected thoughts.

—Paul Valéry

I’m not a huge fan of Family Guy, but this is still a video I try to watch every year or so, just to keep things in perspective. Happy New Year!

If you have taken the time to learn to write beautiful, rock-firm sentences, if you have mastered evocation of the vivid and continuous dream, if you are generous enough in your personal character to treat imaginary characters and readers fairly, if you have held onto your childhood virtues and have not settled for literary standards much lower than those of the fiction you admire, then the novel you write will eventually be, after the necessary labor of repeated revisions, a novel to be proud of, one that almost certainly someone, sooner or later, will be glad to publish.

—John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

The publication of the fifth edition of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, the best book ever written on the movies, is cause for celebration, and an excuse for me to talk about one of the weirdest books in all of literature. Thomson is a controversial figure, and for good reason: his film writing isn’t conventional criticism so much as a single huge work of fiction, with Thomson himself as both protagonist and nemesis. It isn’t a coincidence that one of Thomson’s earliest books was a biography of Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy: his entire career can be read as one long Shandean exercise, in which Thomson, as a fictional character in his own work, is cheerfully willing to come off as something of a creep, as long as it illuminates our reasons for going to the movies.

First, a word about the book’s shortcomings. As in previous editions, instead of revising the entries for living subjects in their entirety, Thomson simply adds another paragraph or two to the existing filmographies, so that the book seems to grow by accretion, like a coral reef. This leads to inconsistencies in tone within individual articles, and also to factual mistakes when the entry hasn’t been updated recently enough—like the article on George Lucas, for instance, in which the latter two Star Wars prequels still evidently lie in the future. And the book is full of the kind of errors that occur when one tries to keep up, in print, with the vagaries of movie production—as when it credits David O. Russell with the nonexistent Nailed and omits The Fighter. (Now that this information is readily available online, Thomson should really just delete all of the detailed filmographies in the next edition, which would cut the book’s size by a quarter or more.)

And then, of course, there are Thomson’s own opinions, which are contrarian in a way that can often seem perverse. He’s lukewarm on Kurosawa, very hard on Kubrick (The Shining is the only movie he admires), and thinks that Christopher Nolan’s work “has already become progressively less interesting.” He thinks that The Wrestler is “a wretched, interminable film,” but he loves Nine. He displays next to no interest in animation or international cinema. There’s something to be outraged about on nearly every page, which is probably why the Dictionary averages barely more than three stars from reviewers on Amazon. And if you’re the sort of person who thinks that a critic whose opinions differ from your own must be corrupt, crazy, or incompetent—as many of Roger Ebert’s correspondents apparently do—then you should stay far, far away from Thomson, who goes out of his way to infuriate even his most passionate defenders.

Yet Thomson’s perversity is part of his charm. Edmund Wilson once playfully speculated that George Saintsbury, the great English critic, invented his own Toryism “in the same way that a dramatist or novelist arranges contrasting elements,” and there are times when I suspect that Thomson is doing the same thing. And it’s impossible not to be challenged and stirred by his opinions. There is a way, after all, in which Kurosawa is a more limited director than Ozu—although I know which one I ultimately prefer. Kubrick’s alienation from humanity would have crippled any director who was not Kubrick. Until The Dark Knight and Inception, Nolan’s movies were, indeed, something of a retreat from the promise of Memento. And for each moment of temporary insanity on Thomson’s part, you get something equally transcendent. Here he is on Orson Welles, for example, in a paragraph that has forever changed how I watch Citizen Kane:

Kane is less about William Randolph Hearst—a humorless, anxious man—than a portrait and prediction of Welles himself…As if Welles knew that Kane would hang over his own future, regularly being used to denigrate his later works, the film is shot through with his vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent…Kane is Welles, just as every apparent point of view in the film is warmed by Kane’s own memories, as if the entire film were his dream in the instant before death.

On Spielberg and Schindler’s List:

Schindler’s List is the most moving film I have ever seen. This does not mean it is faultless. To take just one point: the reddening of one little girl’s coat in a black-and-white film strikes me as a mistake, and a sign of how calculating a director Spielberg is. For the calculations reveal themselves in these few errors that escape. I don’t really believe in Spielberg as an artist…But Schindler’s List is like an earthquake in a culture of gardens. And it helps persuade this viewer that cinema—or American film—is not a place for artists. It is a world for producers, for showmen, and Schindlers.

And, wonderfully, on what is perhaps my own favorite bad movie of all time:

Yet in truth, I think Kevin [Spacey] himself is the biggest experiment, and to substantiate that one has only to call to the stand Beyond the Sea, written, produced and directed by Kev and with himself as Bobby Darin. The result is intoxicating, one of the really great dreadful films ever made, worthy of an annual Beyond the Sea award (why not give it on Oscar night?), as well as clinching evidence that this man is mad. Anything could happen.

The result, as I note above, is a massive Proustian novel in which nearly every major figure in the history of film plays a role. (Thomson has already written a novel, Suspects, that does this more explicitly, and his book-length study of Nicole Kidman is manifestly a novel in disguise.) Reading the Dictionary, which is as addictive as Wikipedia or TV Tropes, is like diving headfirst into a vast ocean, and trying to see how deep you can go before coming up for air. Although if it really is a novel, it’s less like Proust than like Pale Fire, in which Thomson plays the role of Kinbote, and every article seems to hint darkly at some monstrous underlying truth. (In that light, even the book’s mistakes seem to carry a larger meaning. What does it mean, for instance, that Thomson’s brilliant article on Heath Ledger, in which he muses on “the brief purchasing power” of fame, was “inadvertently dropped” from the fifth edition?)

And what monstrous truth does the Dictionary conceal? It’s the same truth, which applies as much to Thomson himself as it does to you and me, as the one that he spells out, unforgettably, at the end of Rosebud, his study of Orson Welles:

So film perhaps had made a wasted life?
One has to do something.

In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there.

—Talleyrand

As I hinted briefly yesterday, there was a time, in my early teens, when I thought that The White Goddess by Robert Graves was the most important book I had ever read, and perhaps that had ever been written. I’ve since modulated my admiration a bit, largely because I’ve come to realize that Graves’s central argument—that the Celts worshiped a Triple Goddess of the moon whose cult was forcibly overwhelmed by the followers of an usurping male deity—has no historical basis whatsoever, regardless of what fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley would like to believe.

Yet it’s still an astonishing book, and one that everyone should read, if only for the glimpse it provides of a matchless poetic intuition at work. Graves’s conclusions may be flawed, but his process is exhilarating, and it yields enough ideas, good or bad, to feed a reader for a lifetime. My own life has certainly been changed by it. In fact, The White Goddess is possibly the single most useful guide by any major author to the role of intuition in imaginative literature. Graves makes a considerable effort to support his conclusions with historical arguments, but the conclusions themselves, he freely admits, were the result of intuition, assisted by moments of scholarly serendipity:

Really, all that I needed to do was verify [my conclusions] textually; and though I had no more than one or two of the necessary books in my very small library the rest were soon sent, unasked for, by poet friends or tumbled down into my hands from the shelves of a second-hand sea-side bookshop.

This is an experience to which any writer can relate: when a project is rolling along, it really does seem as if the entire universe is conspiring in the author’s favor. But Graves takes the argument further:

In fact, it is not too much to say that all original discoveries and inventions and musical and poetic compositions are the result of proleptic thought—the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning—and of what may be called analeptic thought, the recovery of lost events by the same suspension.

While this may sound suspiciously like mysticism, it’s actually a description of a very real phenomenon. In the past, I’ve talked about a number of creative tools—mind maps, intentional randomness with the I Ching and Shakespeare, scene cards—designed to make the creative process more efficient. A solution to a fictional problem that might take days or weeks to solve using a more rational approach can often be solved within minutes using one of these more intuitive methods. And I don’t use these tools for mystical or superstitious reasons: I use them because they work, in the most practical and unsentimental way possible. (Since I currently have just over nine months to take a novel from initial proposal to final draft, I’m going to use whatever methods I can.)

Ideally, as an author continues to grow in craft, such methods become ever more efficient. (I no longer need to spend as much time with my scene cards and mind maps as I once did.) And once the author is sufficiently experienced in intuitive thinking, the tools may be discarded altogether, until the writer simply needs to look at the problem “slantwise,” as Graves puts it. At that point, the time between the posing of a fictional problem and its solution, once measured in days, has been cut down to a matter of seconds. And it isn’t hard to imagine that the lag between problem and solution might occasionally be reduced to less than no time at all—that is, for the writer to discover the solution to a problem that he or she didn’t know existed.

This is how the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton—to use one of Graves’s favorite examples—first intuited the existence of quaternions, as a flash of insight as he was crossing Broom Bridge in Dublin; it’s how Graves had the initial moment of inspiration that led to The White Goddess; and it’s probably how many novelists arrive at their most surprising and unexpected ideas. Such imaginative leaps may seem magical, but in reality, each moment of intuition is the result of a lifetime of preparation—in Graves’s case, as a poet, novelist, and classicist. The White Goddess, for all its shortcomings, is the best record we have of how the process worked for one of the most fertile poetic minds of the twentieth century.

Memory of the future is usually called instinct in animals, intuition in human beings.

—Robert Graves, The White Goddess

Do you notice anything strange about this room?…Well, everything is made by hand—with one exception: this nasty plastic triple file which was given me as a present. I’ve put it here out of politeness for two or three weeks, then it will disappear. Almost everything else is made by hand. Oh yes, the books have been printed, but many have been printed by hand—in fact some I printed myself. Apart from the electric light fixtures, everything else is handmade; nowadays very few people live in houses where anything at all is made by hand…One secret of being able to think is to have as little as possible around you that is not made by hand.

—Robert Graves, to The Paris Review

When I was growing up, one of my heroes was the poet and novelist Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess, which is one of those great and seductive books that can easily lead a young writer down a dangerous intellectual dead end. These days, I tend to regard The White Goddess as an infinitely more inventive and sophisticated version of one of those historical conspiracy books, like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, that might “inspire” someone like Dan Brown. But it’s still an amazing piece of work, full of wild guesses and incredible leaps of logic, with more fascinating ideas—right or wrong—in a single chapter than most authors have in an entire career.

Graves, too, remains a strange and inspiring figure: a scholar and a mystic, deeply learned in a way that seems impossible today, both hugely organized and capable of insane flights of fancy. The Paris Review article quoted above skims the surface of his singularity, but for an even more interesting look, check out Roger Ebert’s interview with him from 1966, which was posted online for the first time ever last week. The chance encounter of Graves with Ebert, another one of my heroes, is full of wonderful moments, especially the one where Graves claims to cure Ebert of scrofula. And I’ll be writing more about Graves—and what his example means for other writers—tomorrow.

I never write except with a writing board. I’ve never had a table in my life. And I use all sorts of things. Write on the sole of my shoe.

—Robert Frost

“No, I do like Christmas on the whole,” she announced. “In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But oh, it is clumsier every year.”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End

From “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which Christopher Morley called “Surely one of the most unusual things in the world: a Christmas Story without slush”:

“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies…I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which also a bird will be the chief feature.”

You can find the full text, as originally printed in the Strand Magazine, here.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

—George Santayana

In January of 2008, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile, by Charles McGrath, that I’ve thought about often over the past three years. The subject was Charles Bock, author of the debut novel Beautiful Children, and his life story was both singular and uncomfortably familiar:

Bock worked for 11 years on Beautiful Children and lived for most of that time in a tiny one-bedroom Gramercy Park-area apartment….For a while Bock, who is now 38, a little old to be a first novelist, charged his groceries on his girlfriend’s credit card, and he rarely bought new clothing, making do with vintage rock T-shirts he collected in college. To pay the rent, he temped, worked as a researcher and a legal proofreader and ghost-edited Shaquille O’Neal’s autobiography, Shaq Talks Back. He also did a very unhappy stint as a rewrite man at a supermarket tabloid. But mostly he avoided steady work whenever he could, much to his parents’ concern.

It isn’t hard for any aspiring novelist to relate to this description, especially the last sentence. I know from experience that it can be tricky to convince one’s parents, or grandparents, that the time spent on a novel, in which even the most productive writer can make no visible progress for years, is a better use of one’s time than a paying job. In my case, it took four long years, with only a handful of publications along the way, before I began to earn anything close to a living wage for my fiction. And eleven years seems almost unimaginable.

In Bock’s case, the story had a happy ending: Beautiful Children was accepted for an advance that was “just into six figures,” and Bock was the subject of the respectful profile mentioned above, earning him more than a little backlash within the New York literary community—which, of course, is the greatest compliment of all. But, as for most writers, the numbers are remorseless: $100,000, split into three installments, after taxes and a 15% agency commission, isn’t a lot for eleven years of work. And it’s unclear if Beautiful Children, although greeted respectfully by critics and readers, ever earned back its advance.

Which brings us to the present moment, which appears to be a difficult one for Bock and his family. Author and blogger Edward Champion has more on their situation here, as well as information about a benefit that the literary community is organizing on their behalf. If you like, you can make a donation via PayPal, or, if you prefer, buy his book, which is worth a look for reasons of its own. Because writers need to look out for one another. Given the nature of this profession, we’re all going to need a little help somewhere along the way.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

—Cyril Connolly (“Palinurus”), The Unquiet Grave

First off, I don’t see how anybody can fail to love this kid, although apparently this video has generated more than a few negative comments on YouTube:

Personally, I love getting books for Christmas. And while yesterday’s post was about potential gifts for the writer in your life, today I’m going to be talking about a few personal favorites—a handful of rare or out of print books that might make a more unusual present for a discerning writer (or reader). Some are a bit hard to find these days, but I can’t imagine my own library without them:

1. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould. Leslie Klinger’s more recent edition is a fine piece of work, but for sheer reading bliss, it doesn’t hold a candle to Baring-Gould’s original version, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the best book in the world. While Klinger tries to be objective, Baring-Gould cheerfully favors his own theories about the identity of Watson’s wives, the location of Watson’s mysterious wound, and what, exactly, Holmes was doing during the Great Hiatus. The result is a monumental work that has probably given me more pleasure, over the years, than any other single book.

2. Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R.H. Blyth. If I could own only five books, this strange but wonderful little volume would be among them. It’s ridiculously hard to find—there’s one used paperback copy available on Amazon for $25, which is the lowest price that I’ve seen in a while, and hardcover copies tend to run much more than that—but if you can track it down, it’s more than worth it. As well as a highly opinionated introduction to Zen, it’s one of the most idiosyncratic multicultural anthologies around, with much valuable poetry, both Eastern and Western, that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I don’t agree with everything that Blyth says—notably his low opinion of Coleridge—but this is still the closest thing that I’ve ever found, between book covers, to my own personal philosophy.

3. The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes. Speaking of Coleridge, this obsessive look at the composition of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is an unparalleled look at a writer’s creative process, as well as a compellingly odd book in its own right. Lowes begins by studying the scribbled quotations in Coleridge’s notebooks, and by tracing the quotes back to their original sources, he attempts to reconstruct the process by which the two great poems took shape, idea by idea, with one image leading to another. It’s speculative, eccentric, and probably unacceptable by current scholarly standards, but also riveting, with a lot of fascinating incidental material along the way. The footnotes alone are worth the price of a good used copy. (The novelist Toby Litt is particularly eloquent in his praise of this book, which you can read in an article here.)

4. World Tales by Idries Shah. Arguably the best book of folklore and fairy tales ever published, with a consistently entertaining and surprising selection of stories from throughout the world, complemented by Shah’s insightful thoughts on their origins and variants. You can buy a no-frills paperback on Amazon, but for the full experience, you’re better off tracking down a used hardcover copy of the illustrated edition, which features fantastic artwork by Brian Froud, Alan Lee, and other legendary artists. (Some of the illustrations might be a little scary, or smutty, for kids, but that’s part of the fun.)

5. The Limits of Art by Huntington Cairns. The fact that this remarkable anthology is out of print is a crime: it should be in every school and home library in the world. The concept is a simple one: it’s a collection consisting solely of works of prose and poetry that have been deemed, by one major critic or another, the best of their kind. Cairns reproduces the critic’s evaluation along with each passage—in translation and in its original language—and the result is like browsing through a compendium of the best that the human race can offer: the most famous passages of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest, of course, but also a lot of welcome surprises. It’s hard to read even a few pages without being immediately humbled, and inspired.

One last thing: if Google would make copies of these books, especially 3 and 4, readily available online, it would single-handedly justify its digital bookstore’s existence. Google eBooks has already made it possible for me to read the books of George Saintsbury, most of which are out of print, and it needs to do the same for Blyth and Lowe. Is anyone in Mountain View listening?

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

—G.K. Chesterton

Most writers, let’s face it, are less than wealthy. This profession has all kinds of rewards, but financial ones, unless the writer is especially lucky or the star of a reality television show, usually aren’t among them. This holiday season, then, you might want to treat the writer in your life to one of the following gifts, which will make his or her solitary existence a little more comfortable. (Full disclosure: I already own most of the following, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t get me this.)

1. Infusing Teapot from Hues ‘n Brews ($25). Most writers like to sip from a cup of something while they work. For me, it used to be coffee, and, in the evening, white wine—a bad habit that I’ve mostly given up. About a year ago, I switched to green tea, and it’s been great: with an infusing teapot, I can easily make tea from loose leaves, bought on the cheap from the Chinese supermarket, and steep them for two or more infusions, which is more than enough to keep me going throughout the day. After a factory fire this summer, Hues ‘n Brews teapots can be hard to find, so if you see one, grab it. And make sure you get a thermos, too—a tip that I learned from A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese—and a nice mug. (My own favorites are these sturdy little mugs from Pantone. Mine is Pantone 292, which fans of The Magnetic Fields will appreciate.)

2. Recycled hardcover journals from Ex Libris Anonymous ($13). These book journals—which are created from vintage hardcovers, with a few pages from the original book thoughtfully distributed throughout—are among the most beautiful and sensible gifts that a writer can receive. My first Ex Libris notebook, created from a copy of Thomas B. Costain’s Magnificent Century, has served me well for years now, and includes notes, mind maps, and miscellaneous scribbles for three novels, two screenplays, and a handful of short stories. Once the pages run out, I’ll be switching to a notebook made from Tatsuo Ishimoto’s Art of the Japanese Garden, which I’m hoping will last for just as long.

3. Messenger bag from Tumi ($150). Writers tend to carry a lot of stuff with them. (In addition to whatever book I’m currently reading, I’ll usually have pens, pencils, business cards for notes, Altoids, and often a larger notebook.) In cities like New York or Chicago, where the creative class tends to rely on public transportation, it’s essential to have a reliable bag. Women have this part covered, but men will probably need some kind of satchel. My favorite, from Tumi, is no longer available, but they seem to have some nice alternatives available online. I’m also fond of this one from STM, which is large enough to accommodate a laptop and some library books. (Just don’t call it a man purse.)

4. Symphony pillow from Tempur-Pedic ($99). Back pain is a chronic part of the writer’s life. I’ll be writing about this in greater detail in a future post, but suffice to say that right chair, a properly elevated workstation, and a good pillow all go a long way. If you’re in a generous mood, you might consider buying the Aeron chair mentioned above (I had to give mine up, sadly, after my move to Chicago). But, failing that, the Tempur-Pedic pillow will make your favorite writer’s neck and back a lot happier. (After six or more hours at a desk each day, that’s no laughing matter.)

5. The Writer’s Chapbook by The Paris Review ($10 or so). This wonderful book, edited by George Plimpton from the legendary author interviews conducted by The Paris Review, seems to be out of print, but it’s still widely available online. All things considered, it’s probably the single most useful and inspiring book a writer can own. (Many of my Quotes of the Day have this book as their ultimate source.) Other good books for a writer, aside from John Gardner’s essential Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, include Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith (apparently out of print, but very useful), How Fiction Works by James Wood (infuriating, but invaluable), and How to Write Best-Selling Fiction by Dean Koontz (also out of print, but available online for a whopping $88).

Finally, if all else fails, there’s always another option. At best, writers tend to be rich in spirit and poor in cash. Most will happily accept donations toward the advancement of art.