It’s true. I can’t get anything done while there are more Sarah Pain videos out there for me to laugh at. It used to be that my first stops on the internet were literary: maybe Papercuts, followed by The Guardian books section, followed by, say, The New York Review Of Books. Now it’s straight to Wonkette and the HuffPo.

It seems I am not alone. This week, someone writing under the pseudonym “Stumped” sends this complaint to Cary Tennis, Salon’s advice guru and creative coach:

I am taking a creative nonfiction writing course, and I’m supposed to be working on a piece about what I ate for breakfast. The problem is, every time I sit down at the computer to work, I start compulsively reading the election coverage online, sometimes spending two hours or more on variations on the same five articles. I am ashamed of my lack of self-control in this area.

I hear that. I’d find it tricky to write about what I had for breakfast too (two slices of multigrain toast with hard boiled egg, in case you were wondering). More to the point, I am ashamed by my lack of self-control in the internet area also. I have watched that clip of Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, the one which shows her stammering about the economy, fifty sixmany times. That should be enough. Alas, it is not.

“Stumped” has other problems too, though, including what sounds like an over achievement complex combined with some self esteem issues, and Cary’s full response is all over the place, accordingly, while never failing to be encouraging and supportive, which is one of the things I like about him.

My one critique is that he kind of skips over the essential point — a lesson that is essential for all writers. Here it is:

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By jove, I think I might have done it! Embedded a video! Huzzah!

This is Jim Levine, principal at the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency, talking at the Strand book store in New York, about what he’s looking for in a memoir. Those of you exclusively in the third category — the “exceptional writing” group — have the hardest sell, in my opinion, and the most work to do, because in that case, you are selling art, not ideas or experience. It can be done though — just look at Mary Karr.

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Video care of GalleyCat, at Media Bistro.

Why hello! Thanks for visiting. You are looking great, by the way. Younger every time I see you.

I’d like to serve up, today, some luscious literary links.

First up, David Gessner, in the New York Times magazine, on what it’s really like to be an MFA writing professor. Times have changed since his day:

I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado in the early 1990s, and only one professor there ever learned my name; the rest, most of whom were granted their positions in the 1960s after the publication of a chapbook or two, approached their jobs with all the liveliness and enthusiasm of members of the Politburo. Iowa, of course, set the standard for the genius approach to writing in which the great man or woman allows the eager young to gather round, where they are to learn by osmosis.

Gessner teaches at UNC-Wilmington, in case you are interested. At the end of the piece, Gessner worries that he might be intentionally sabotaging his teaching career by publishing his thoughts about it, especially a few weeks before he goes up for tenure. But if I were applying for nonfiction programs right now, his essay would make me add Wilmington to my list, if it wasn’t already on there.  Just so you know, tenure committee.

Then there’s New York magazine on the end of book publishing as we know it. Cheery!

Lately, the whole, hoary concept of paying writers advances against royalties has come under question. Following their down payments to authors, publishers don’t have to pay a cent in royalties, which are usually 15 percent of the hardcover price, 7.5 for paperbacks, until that signing bonus is earned back. The system is supposed to be mutually beneficial; the publishers guarantee writers a certain income, and then both parties share in the proceeds beyond that level. But it only works for publishers if they’re conservative in their expectations. As auctions over hot books have grown more frequent, prudence has gone out the window— paying a $1 million advance to a 26-year-old first-time novelist becomes a public-relations gambit as much as an investment in that writer’s future.

That money has to come from somewhere, so publishers have cracked down on their non-star writers. The advances you don’t hear about have been dropping precipitously. For every Pretty Young Debut Novelist who snags that seven-figure prize, ten solid literary novelists have seen advances slashed for their third books.

That’s it! It’s all Jonathan Safran Foer’s fault!

Finally, Wired magazine is blogging the development of one of their stories, from the pitch to the “get” to the copy edit, with all the emails in between. It’s a great primer for anyone interested in the actual process an idea goes through to wind up on the pages of a mainstream magazine. Read it here.

Like every other book blogger in the Western Hemisphere, I’m here today to chew over the Man Booker Prize shortlist, announced yesterday. Here it is:

Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry — The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh — Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant — The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher — The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz —  A Fraction of the Whole

Two first time novelists, one woman, and no Rushdie.

The two first-timers, Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz, are currently getting the best odds, though how the bookies calculate these things I have no idea. Here’s a link to The Guardian’s “condensed read” version of the books. And here’s an absolutely fascinating article, also from The Guardian, in which Man Booker judges from previous years talk about their experiences. Warning, folks: It ain’t pretty.

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There’s a great interview with Luc Sante up at Guernica magazine. The interviewer, Suzanne Menghraj, weaves in questions about music and rhythm and solicits this great quote from Sante:

Rhythm in writing is [...] a completely intuitive matter. I don’t really understand the process. It’s related to the substance of Flaubert’s famous letter to George Sand: “When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principal? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?” This is crucial stuff for me. I write intuitively, not knowing where I’m going, not knowing what the next sentence will be until this one has guided me there, and knowing how the sentence goes begins with my hearing its rhythm in my head, and then filling in the specific words. If the sentence is cloddish and clunky, it’s simply wrong—and not just wrong-sounding but wrong in its meaning.

I can’t think of a better reason for paying close attention to the construction and flow of every single sentence. Ugly sentences, the ones that don’t scan, the ones that the reader stumbles over? No less than a failure of meaning.

The instinct might be to fix the sentence: rewrite it till it flows. I’d suggest stopping and thinking and getting clarity on what it is you are trying to say before you do that. As Flaubert says: The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Find the idea and the words should, in theory, take care of themselves.

Ah yes, you say, but what if you don’t know what you want to say? What if the idea is elusive, impossible to pin down? Isn’t that one of the reasons why we write in the first place? To discover what it is that we feel and think?

To which I say: that’s what first drafts are for! Write it out in order to know it, to understand it (whatever “it” is here: story, idea, feeling). Then write it again, with this new knowledge having been dredged up and placed, to some degree, at the front of the mind. These two documents might have very little in common. The first enables the second, and the second isn’t so much a rewrite as a re-imagining.

That’s my thoughts on process for today folks, inspired by Flaubert, care of Luc Sante, care of Guernica magazine.