Teaching Myself to Write

Over drinks last night at the White Horse Tavern, Katie asked me if writing my blog helped with writing my novel. I didn’t hesistate to say “sure,” thinking that any exercise in writing at least serves to strengthen one’s rhetorical muscles. On reflection, though, the blog and the novel are so independent that the idea of linking them doesn’t make much sense. The blog is basically an outlet for any sort of nonsense I feel like writing, whereas the novel is a narrative, with constraints of time, place, and believability that blogging doesn’t really have.

In any case, I don’t intend to blog extensively about the process of writing a novel, but here are some recent extracts in a kind of before-and-after montage. I do all of my writing in longhand, mostly at Doma, a café in the West Village, or occasionally at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. The typing happens later, once I get home, and I almost always fall asleep at the keyboard.