Why write about anything? In the print edition of today's New Yorker, John McPhee discusses rambling and thrashing his way into profile-writing.

"One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the ‘fiction course’ is getting the fiction it deserves. At any rate, it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms." —Edith Wharton, in the 1920s, from The Writing of Fiction.

On Saturday morning, me and Angelica and a reporter drive my mom's car from Brooklyn out to East Hampton for the 63rd Annual Artists vs. Writers charity softball game, which takes place in a public park next to a really upscale Hamptons strip mall. My only pre-game exposure to the game was when I went to the game's official website, where I was greeted by an unexpected embedded auto-play video of Mike Lupica speaking really loudly about the game, with a resolution too big for the frame that the video is inside so a lot of the text is cut off. The video sounds like a commercial off [...]

A recent New York Times Book Review essay on author brand-building cited Ernest Hemingway's and John Steinbeck's stints as a spokespersons for Ballantine Ale. (Not mentioned was The Poseidon Adventure author Paul Gallico, who appeared in the same series of print ads for the beer.) Of course, they weren’t the first or last authors to shill. Mark Twain’s name and likeness were used (not always with his permission) to sell everything from shirt collars to passenger trains. Émile Zola, H.G. Wells, Alexandre Dumas, Henrik Ibsen and Jules Verne all provided testimonials for the cocaine-infused French elixir Vin Mariani. More than a century later, Allen Ginsberg and [...]

Paul Lester, who writes New Band of the Day each weekday for the Guardian, looks back at five solid years and 1000 bands: "But let's just say that having to file 600 words every day was partly responsible for the collapse of my marriage." Uh… 600 words a day? Thousands of bloggers just laughed in your face. (Well, to be fair, half of those haven't had a date in years.)

Believe it or not, some percentage of the world's population likes to write novels. (I'm one of them.) Or maybe "like" isn't the best word, considering that it often feels more like a compulsion or an addiction, although there are more destructive compulsions or addictions, as we'll explore in some detail below. To put a slightly more positive spin on it, novels are the LTRs of prose writing: never easy but on balance probably worth doing. (Although just to be clear: writing a novel, like being in a relationship, doesn't make you "better" than anyone else, that's for sure.) From a mechanical perspective, novels generally range from about 60,000 [...]

So I took my first non-emergency day off yesterday from this blog, which is my "day job." Holy mackerel. I went to some libraries and did research! I went to cafes-cafes that didn't have wifi-and wrote! I took a nap in the middle of the day! So here is my mini-revelation. You know how you have writer friends who don't have another job who are all, oh, my book, my book is due in four months, I have to write this boooook and are all torturey and tortured? Please laugh at them all the time.

Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero.

In the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his preschool teacher wife and two teenage kids—one who recently took off for college with most of his father's drum set in tow—Sullivan explained how a life spent crisscrossing [...]

A brief primer on writer and lesbian-marrier Robert McAlmon. (Who? Yes.) A writer, publisher, and a connoisseur of the Parisian nightlife, Robert McAlmon was a fixture of the Lost Generation’s expatriate community in Paris in the 20s and 30s. McAlmon took Hemingway out to the bullfights in Spain that he would immortalize in The Sun Also Rises. He typed proofs of James Joyce’s monumental novel Ulysses, and due to the convoluted system of notes and addendums in Joyce’s manuscript, the voice of Molly Bloom that the first generation of readers received was actually McAlmon’s interpretation of Joyce’s. Through his publishing company Contact Editions, he was the first to [...]

For many writers struggling for publication, advertising has proven a useful field (it does pay, after all): F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salman Rushdie, Dorothy Sayers, Don DeLillo, Joseph Heller and Helen Gurley Brown all worked as copywriters early in their careers—some with more success than others. Rushdie came up with "Naughty. But nice" cream cakes for Ogilvy & Mather; Sayers introduced "Just think what Toucan do" to Guinness and founded a dotty, fictional (and wildly popular) "Mustard Club"; and, thanks to Fitzgerald, streetcars in Iowa once ran with the promise "We keep you clean in Muscatine" sparkling on their sides.

Yet for all six, advertising was mostly just a means [...]

"I don’t know why writers are mourning the death of an industry that’s done so little for them for so long…. It’s time writers thought of themselves as an army rather than a city under siege." —What has the publishing industry done for you lately anyway?

The New School's MFA writing students are learning! "Provided they’ve been paying attention to the world outside the workshop, they’ve noticed that the conversation about what it means to be a certificated 'writer' has shifted away from the literary, and even the lofty, and is now taking place in the rather harsher language of political economy."

It was noon on a Saturday. It was ninety-five degrees, and there was a line out the door, and the previous customer had been a tiny elderly Armenian woman who had been impossible to understand, and so obviously the person next in line was my former undergraduate thesis advisor.

"I had no idea you worked here!"

"Oh, hi, [redacted]! So nice to see you again!"

"You too! This is such a lovely little place, you must love working here."