The New Guy

So, I’ve written this blog entry about five times. I’m not certain I know what I’m doing.

I mean, I’m an amateur when it comes to real estate. I’m like that kid in the back of the classroom who ate paste. And I don’t mean the kid in second grade. I mean the kid in college who sat in the back eating paste.

I’m also, officially, a Redfinnian.

I’m not entirely sure how I got the job as a writer here. I spent the past nine years writing for videogames – none of which were real estate-related, by the way. I’ve been following the market for the past couple of years, but I came to it the same way most people do, I suppose; my wife and I were considering buying a house. We started reading up to educate ourselves. We started checking out Redfin.

Prices started to drop, then plummet, and we decided to wait until the dust settled a bit. But in the meantime, I continued going to the site, checking on my favorites like they were my prized petunias. I kept reading the blogs and the news. I was like some sort of armchair home-buyer. It’s entirely possible that I was a little obsessed with the process.

One day, my wife spotted the job listing on Redfin for a writer. One short whirlwind later, here I am.

Since I got the job, it’s been interesting to read what people say about Redfin, on blogs and discussion boards, or wherever. Because I’ve always loved the site. The data is great. The map is great. I can spend hours just browsing for houses.

But a lot of people love the site. The interesting part is reading the Internet chatter about the people of Redfin. That they’re crazy, or trying to ruin the industry, or that they haven’t thought their business model through, or that they don’t care about their customers. Or that they’re making some Big Mistake that will doom them to failure.

As I was struggling to commit to my blog entry, Glenn Kelman gave me some advice. He told me, above all, to keep it real. So here it is: You’re never going to meet a smarter, more passionate, more customer-focused group of people than you’ll find stepping off our elevator. Believe the hype. This place is the real deal, and it’s intimidating as hell, frankly.

As for the Big Mistake… oftentimes, the chatter was right. The people here have made some Big Mistakes, some of which might really have killed the business. But it’s a funny thing about mistakes – they only kill you when you refuse to acknowledge them. And if there’s one quality the people here seem to hold above all others, it’s this: You admit when you’re wrong, and you learn from it.

So, for what it’s worth, I promise to work my butt off as the new guy here on the site. I promise that I’ll make my mistakes as quickly and entertainingly as possible. And I promise I’ll do my level best to learn from them.

(Photo Credit: b7_banana on Flickr)

The Garage and the Penthouse

When it comes to rent, entrepreneurs are sometimes too cheap for our own good. Up ‘til Redfin’s move last week, I’d spent the last 15 years in Grade B & C office space and, as a point of pride, looked forward to spending another 30 more in the same.

It was the only thing I knew. On my first day at Redfin, I sat in David Eraker’s apartment at a desk beside the bathroom, listening twice a day to Bahn and Savan work their magic. Our first San Francisco office was an un-air conditioned sweat-shop next to a pile-driver that made the floor shake every few seconds.

Redfin got low-rent places partly to save money – I still sleep on friends’ floors when I travel and none of us has an assistant — partly to avoid going soft, partly just to one-up our friends: entrepreneurs brag about controlling costs because it’s the one thing at a startup we can control. And we love the camaraderie — is there a more potent startup symbol than the garage? — of everyone working together in close quarters.

But I’ve seen startups take it too far, with eight people in a one-bedroom apartment working beneath the auspices of a Ho-Chi Minh poster. This sounds fun, but you get less done.

So when rents plummeted in Seattle last fall, Redfin went on the prowl for a better space. Now that we’ve moved to a little building by a farmer’s market, overlooking the water and a few mountains, the whole office is energized. People smile more. Since all the walls are glass, folks feel more approachable. We are more likely to work things out in person, which is faster than emailing. Since the building doesn’t turn the heat off at 5, we are more likely to work late.

Was it worth the extra juice? Let’s just do the math. Even for a hefty startup of 50 people, which requires about 7,500 square feet, the costs differences are small:

• Dump: $15 per square foot, $9,375 per month
• Not bad: $20 per square foot, $12,500 per month
• Pretty nice: $25 per square foot, $15,625 per month

You can adjust rents up 15% for Silicon Valley, and down 15% for Seattle. By comparison, once you add up benefits, taxes and equipment, each employee costs a company nearly $12,500 per month. The difference between a dump and a pretty nice place is half that — around $6,250 a month — or 1% of payroll.

It’s the Payroll, Stupid
So the question comes down to whether you’ll get an extra 1% out of yourself and your colleagues if the place where you work all day is a nice place to be. If you’ve hired an army of clock-punching dipsticks maybe not; your goal should be to treat them as poorly as you can get away with. But most of us are trying to hire artists, not an army. Artists work better in a happy place, with good spots for lunch, dinner and drinks close by, and plenty of light.

And these people, not rent, are a startup’s big cost. If James Carville ever saw a startup’s income statement, he’d immediately come to the conclusion that took me years to recognize: “It’s the payroll, stupid”  – and the rest is mostly symbolism. The best way to be cheap is to hire a handful of ninjas who get a terrifying amount of work done. This doesn’t mean you should rent the penthouse suite in some antiseptic skyscraper, only that it helps recruiting, retention and productivity to have a creative space.

A Startup Should Move Every 18 Months
One other thing that took me a while to figure out: if you really want to save money on rent, don’t focus on the traditional metric, dollars-per-square foot. Instead, get smaller spaces, and move more often when you grow. Moving’s a pain, but it’s easier now that most systems run in the cloud. A brief tour of Craigslist for sublets will tell you that the #1 way a startup wastes rent is by being stuck in too much space, for too long — when signing a lease, the company feels embarrassed to tell a landlord it might be out of business in 18 months, and a commercial agent make more on longer leases.

So here you have a company that prides itself on its scrappiness telling the world to order the steak – or the pot roast — because sometimes it’s cheaper than ordering more of the ground round than you can eat. I don’t know if Redfin would have ordered steak had it not been a blue-light special — we’ll actually pay less rent in 2010 because of the move — but what I never would have guessed is how much that steak has affected us so far.

(The funny picture of Ho Chi Minh comes from Wikipedia’s Creative Commons)

Why Isn’t There an Executive Master’s Program in Computer Science?

Two executive MBA students just came by the house to interview me for a class on entrepreneurship. Answering questions about the #1 quality of an entrepreneur, my #1 weakness, my #1 advice, I found myself translating true stories about what has worked for me into aphorisms that felt made up.

We have begun to think of entrepreneurialism as this discipline, this science, this profession, as if startups succeed via a formula, when the whole point of a startup is to do things differently not the same. We can teach people to paint the Mona Lisa by numbers, but it won’t be art the second time around. And we can dissect entrepreneurialism like a frog, but the frog usually dies in the process.

This is probably why the students’ questions made me feel like the disappointingly ordinary Oracle in The Matrix. When Neo asks if he’s The One, The Oracle says, “But you already know what I’m going to tell you?”

“I’m not The One?” Neo says.

“Sorry kid,” The Oracle says. “You got the gift, but it looks like you’re waiting for something.”

What these very intelligent, eminently fundable MBAs were waiting for was an idea, and the belief in themselves to follow it through. I wanted to tell them that the whole reason to start a company is to be yourself, not to imitate someone else, especially not me. Their program won’t help with that.

The world would be a much better place if all the folks in an executive MBA program would master a creative skill instead. Why isn’t there an executive master’s program in computer science, design or materials science? I’d enroll today.

We need to educate people who have already begun a career because too many miss their chance in college. The number of students studying business has steadily increased over the past decade, to more than one in five undergraduates, at the expense of the creative arts and sciences.

For life after college, a whole new genre has emerged of self-help for entrepreneurs. By Amazon’s count, more than 12,000 books on entrepreneurship have been published in the past decade, at a rate of three per day, every day.

Many of those books and programs are inspiring and useful; I have organized a few, contributed to some, and benefited from more. But if I had to say what needs more emphasis, it would be the product, not the process.

Outside of Paul Graham and Eric Ries, many entro-pundits have little interest in actual products. The worst purveyor of gimmicks is Malcolm Gladwell, who argued in last week’s New Yorker that entrepreneurs are predators who succeed because of their business acumen at driving hard bargains. Gladwell based this theory on two unlikely boots-trappers: a silver-spooner who inherited a massive media empire and a Wall Street trader who bet more than $100 million that the housing bubble would burst.

Both of Gladwell’s role models are very good business people, but that doesn’t make them entrepreneurs – even if one of them, Ted Turner, later developed into one — creating a news network he loved so much that he compared its eventual acquisition to female circumcision. But Turner started his business career the old-fashioned way: getting the better of somebody on a deal. It’s a zero-sum game that doesn’t create anything or delight anyone. And creating something is what entrepreneurs do that the MBAs sometimes don’t always seem to get.

This isn’t to say that entrepreneurs are better than MBAs. In fact, the problem I have these days is that what makes you successful as an entrepreneur may limit you later on as a business person, a topic we’ll have to take up next week. In the meantime, if you know of any good executive masters programs in computer science, or any boot-camps with that emphasis, leave a comment and let us know.

If I Can Change, and You Can Change, Everybody Can Change!

There’s plenty of talk on Twitter and the web about my saying in an interview with the Globe & Mail in Toronto that the real estate industry is still “screwed up.” I first said this a long time ago on 60 Minutes, in response to a question I’d been asked over and over again.

I was asked again last year at an Inman keynote if I still felt that way. I said that I regretted my tone, and was grateful to those in the industry who’d forgiven me for it. The moderator, Brad Inman, persisted: “is the industry still screwed up?” Well, I thought to myself, I sure can’t say no, the industry is just fine. So I said that respectfully, politely, humbly yes, the industry is still screwed up.

In recounting that discussion last week to the Toronto journalist, I emphasized how Redfin had changed, how the industry has changed, and how I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to change: to be more collegial and constructive, focusing on customer service as well as technology, blending what has always been good about the industry with what we like about our approach.

It has been a tough balance. We want to be honorable members of our industry, and a good partner to our fellow brokers, but we also want to be an advocate for the consumer, and for the industry to keep getting better. The whole dialog blows up when self-critical statements about how harsh I used to be are recycled as new opinions.

Even now that the journalist published a transcript of his notes, the focus is on our saying that there’s a problem, not on whether there actually is a problem, let alone the solution.  If we stop arguing over whether there’s anything wrong with real estate, we can start talking about how it could become better. Here, scribbled down during breaks in a conference, are a few ideas:

1. Pay agents in a way that doesn’t creates a conflict of interest with their customers, particularly when the customer is buying a home. Paying for a closed deal regardless of whether the customer is happy tends to maximize closed deals at the expense of customer happiness.
2. In fact, dump the whole coffee-is-for-closers culture, which makes brokerages feel like the Coyote, and our customers feel like the Road Runner, pecking at listings then running for cover. As I’ve come to know brokers better, I’ve been surprised at the genuine pride brokers take in their service. But I’ve been surprised too at just how deeply ingrained the sales mentality is in our culture. Before Redfin, I’d always thought that attitude was a relic of the 1970s, a caricature from Glengarry Glen Ross. But even now at industry events, I feel like a sissy when I say our agents are customer-service people, not salesmen. The audience sniggers. Outside of real estate, it’s hard to find a business with hundreds or thousands of employees without a published set of values or mission statement. Yet that’s sometimes the norm at brokerages. As a new generation of agent strikes out on Bloodhound Blog, Active Rain and Agent Genius to build her own, service-oriented brand, this attitude will change.
3. Spend money on technology, not lead-generation: The reason Redfin charges half what most other agents do isn’t because our agents make less: almost all the agents negotiating deals for Redfin in 2009 earned six figures, with benefits, vacation and all their dues, telephone bills, and travel costs paid. We just spend a lot less time and money buying leads and chasing customers, so we have more for ourselves and our clients.
4. Thin the herd: brokerages often make money by hiring the most agents, not the best. For real estate to be a profession like law or medicine, we have to profess to an ideal, to put our customers’ interest ahead of our own, and then ruthlessly exclude people from the profession who don’t uphold that ideal. Historically, we’ve excluded almost no one. But now that the number of agents has dipped, I’ve heard brokerages for the first time boast about agent quality. Let’s run with that idea. It’d be better for everyone if we had 500,000 well-paid agents, not a million half-starved ones.
5. Invest in the rest:  you can only get agents to commit to what a brokerage stands for if the brokerage makes a commitment to the agent: providing for fundamental needs like health-care, offering as best we can some basic level of financial security in hard times, creating a team-oriented atmosphere, delivering high levels of training and career development. To get the best young people to launch a career in real estate, we have to begin to compete with employers like Google and Zappos, who have made a cult out of treating their employees well.
6. Get religion about publishing data. We’re indignant that 4 of the 5 most-trafficked real estate websites show only a fraction of the homes for sale but it’s our own fault for being ambivalent and persnickety about sharing data. It is abundantly clear that consumers want data; we should be the ones to give it to them. The DoJ-NAR settlement opened a floodgate, but there are still plenty of rules around how many listings we can show on a page and how consumers register. To compete against Google, we need the simplest and smallest rulebook possible.
7. Be transparent about agent performance: consumers should be able to shop for agents as well as houses on our websites. Redfin surveys every customer, and publishes every response on our agent’s online profiles. The Houston MLS does the same, with some limits. Plenty of brokerages want to do this, but worry their top producers will walk over one bad review. Let ‘em walk. There isn’t another consumer product or service in the U.S. — and certainly not one that can cost a consumer $50,000 — that isn’t subject to some kind of consumer review. The truth will set us free, from lame billboards and late-night TV ads and all sorts of hucksterism.
8. Stop bickering and focus on the customer: the industry can’t fix its relationship with consumers because it’s still so busy arguing with itself: about what agents should pay brokerages, about what brokerages should give agents, about who promotes whom. Every time I start to think that real estate will sort itself out, I go to a conference of brokers and panic, because I’ve never seen so many professionals invest all their passion in topics that have nothing to do with the customer. If we focus on the customer, we’ll be unstoppable.

So those are some ideas on how the industry — and Redfin, too — can change for the better. Except the ideas aren’t really our ideas. Late at night, over drinks, most everyone in the industry seems to agree that some day we need to have fewer agents, focused on the right things, and kick-ass websites of our own for connecting consumers with reliable  information. The only difference of opinion is how long we wait to begin making those changes. We think the time is now.

(Photo credit: Canadian Pacific on Flickr)

Email, Phone & Fax All Back Online

All the ways you’d normally communicate with us are now back online. This includes agent emails, agent office phone numbers and fax numbers.

We’re very sorry about the rocky move we had today!

Work Phones are Down

Today we’re moving our HQ in Seattle and while we anticipated a temporary disruption for some of our systems the move has affected our email and office phone system more then we anticipated. We estimate having email and phone back up in 30 to 60 minutes and will keep you updated here. In the meantime if you need to get in touch with your agent please contact them on their cellphone.

Update @ 11:25 am: Email is coming back online now and should be online for all our agents by noon. We are still working on restoring phone services.

Update @ noon: Email should be fully back online. We are still working on phones. Thanks for your patience.

Update @ 7:30pm: Phones are back online. Everything is now back online.

Movin’ on Up

Redfin’s on the move! As the intrepid John Cook reported last night, today is our last day in the Dexter-Horton office building we’ve occupied for years here in Seattle. Our new office is at:

2025 1st Avenue, 6th Floor
Seattle, Washington 98121

We moved for a couple of reasons:

• To save money: we’re subleasing the space from Hasbro at a lower rate, and it’s slightly smaller than our current space too. When the sublease expires in a few years, the rate will go up, but for now it’s a very, very good deal. We would encourage any startup in Seattle whose lease is up to look at other spaces before extending a lease. We originally toured other offices as a tactic in our negotiations with Dexter-Horton, and ended up calling our own bluff once we saw what was out there.
• To work together better: Dexter-Horton is an old building, divided into fingers so everyone had a window to open on hot days. Now the windows are painted shut, and we spent the past two years staring at one another across a sunken courtyard. I worked alongside the engineers in the middle finger, flanked on either side by our real estate agents.  Being the middle finger wasn’t an ideal configuration for collaboration, and collaboration after all is what we hope will make us great: having agents and engineers work together to develop a deeper, more local understanding of the entire home-buying process.

We’re a little embarrassed to say that the new place also has jaw-dropping views, which I never expected to get at a startup, and probably will never get again — don’t worry, we won’t lose our scrappy spirit! – and it’s just around the corner from the Pike Place Market, the Virginia Inn and Serious Pie, good for late nights and happy hours. We’re packing up tonight, and hope to have the office ready late tomorrow morning.

Starting at 7 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on Friday, our fax line will return a busy signal while we move, and our agent telephone numbers will forward via Google Voice to their cell phones.  The fax should be back in action in an hour or so; our agents are distributing alternate fax numbers as needed.

All of our other systems, including Redfin.com, e-mail, our main office number, our customer database and our commerce tools — already run in the cloud, so there should be no interruption in service.

One final note: anyone looking for a great commercial real estate agent should consider Clay Nielsen at Washington Partners. He’s the only commercial real estate agent I’ve worked with who understands that startups need short leases for unpredictable growth and unsteady cash flow, he’s a bulldog in negotiations, and he knows everything that moves in the downtown market, usually well before it hits the market. No one else would put up with such insufferable cheapskates, again and again and again.

(Photo credit: D & E Hutchinson on Flickr)

January 2010 Newsletter: Strap In! We’re Headed for a Wild Ride

We kicked off 2010 by sending our monthly newsletter to 153,547 Redfinnians, an increase of 7% from last month. If you’d like to receive it via email, just sign up.

Howdy Redfinnians!

Here’s the latest romp through all the major data on home prices released in the past month, starting with the November 2009 Case-Shiller numbers just out this morning. What the numbers suggest to us is that home prices will stay in the doldrums for a little while, except in the dangerously volatile California markets. Take a look at the data and decide for yourself…

Case-Shiller Data Show Strong California Growth, Weakness Elsewhere

The Case-Shiller report was mixed, with weakness in the Northeast and Midwest, but strong growth in California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area. Overall, the 20-city composite index showed a November 2009 gain of 0.2% over October. As always, we present the seasonally adjusted numbers, which even out summer-time price increases as well as winter-time declines:

Other price indexes presented conflicting data. Drawing on data from conforming loans, the federal government today reported a larger price gain, of 0.7% in November. Meanwhile First American CoreLogic, a firm that analyzes escrow records, claimed that November prices declined 0.2%. The market seems like a sailboat in fluky, light winds, yawning from one direction to the other. Below is a graph of the Case-Shiller data over the past five years:

Are We Headed for Another Big Dip?

Good question! An economist at the Center for Policy and Economic Research just argued that homes are still priced 10 – 20% higher than mid-1990 levels, and that demand will only slacken as retiring baby boomers downsize. We don’t disagree with that analysis, but it’s hard to square with Redfin’s immediate experience. After two months of declining traffic at year-end, Redfin.com traffic began taking big jumps in January, and we also saw a huge, unexpected spike in home-tour activity. Of the offers we presented to sellers in December, 56% were competitive; in Southern California this number was 73%, with competition most fierce for homes below $500,000.

Sales Activity Fluctuating, Buyers are Jittery

All that can change fast. In general, the markets have been jittery, especially since the big dip in home sales reported yesterday. As we predicted in our last newsletter, the number of existing homes that sold in December fell 17%, a widely expected drop due to fatigue from the expiration of the original tax credit deadline. In California, December home sales increased by the same amount that sales decreased nationwide, 17% — which just goes to show that California is in a different market than the rest of the U.S.

Foreclosures Spike Up Again

Regardless of what happens to demand, supply will likely soon increase. According to the National Association of Homebuilders, new housing starts are expected to surge 38% over last year. And foreclosure activity increased 14% in December after government intervention had led to three straight months of declining foreclosures. Both new constructions and bank re-possessions will put more properties on the market, limiting price increases.

Macroeconomic Drivers Mixed

With the market in this much flux, the main drivers for sustained growth will be improvements in employment and consumer confidence, and easy credit. After unemployment eased in November, it increased again in 43 states last December. Just to confuse matters, a few days later consumer confidence improved for the third straight month. So the larger economy is also up and down.

Rates Drop, But Likely Headed Up Again

Credit has eased, surprising most analysts. The average rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage dropped to 5.15% last week, the third straight week of declines after rates began climbing last month. Most experts think rates will rise or remain unchanged, but nobody thinks rates will fall.

That’s the major news in real estate; if you have local questions, just write back and we’ll do our best to hook you up with an answer. Hopefully you’re having a good new year.

Best, Glenn

Daniel Phommathep, Rest in Peace

Dave Selinger, Redfin’s founding CTO and now the CEO of RichRelevance, contacted us today with news that one of the original developers of Redfin’s website, Daniel Phommathep, passed away this morning. Below is Dave’s soulful tribute to Daniel. May Daniel rest in peace.

Friends and Fans of Redfin,

This morning Daniel Phommathep, one of the great original sources of energy that brought Redfin from amorphous ideas and sketches to a reality, passed away after losing a two-month battle with cancer. At only 30 years old, his passing is a tremendous loss for the Redfin community and a tragedy for his entire family including his wife and three beautiful children.

Daniel was one of the ten software engineers who moonlighted to develop the original website during the summer of 2004. We each worked our day-jobs, grabbed a quick dinner and then banged away on laptops and servers in my Harbor Steps apartment late into the evening—frequently past 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Daniel was a constant source of energy for the team and a motivator when we needed an “oomph” to push ourselves that extra mile (when even 3 Cokes, 2 Mountain Dew’s and a Redbull weren’t quite enough). We all worked for stock with no monetary compensation that whole summer because we believed so strongly in the vision of Redfin—we became a team and a family bound not only by our work, but by our passion. Through all of this, Daniel became one of my closest friends.

The Redfin site and experience that we’ve all come to know and love is in large part a tribute to the legacy of Daniel Phommathep. Today, let’s take a moment to honor Dan and his contributions to our lives, to say a prayer for his family, and to remember how utterly fragile our lives are and how precious each moment is in living.

First the Novel, Then The Essay, Now The Link

The web has turned every writer into a modernist poet.

Take the strange little masterpiece that is Tom Scocca’s essay on the martyrdom of Gilbert Arenas. Scocca’s idea — Arenas was banished from the NBA not for his guns but his jokes about guns — is good enough, and his writing is fine, but what makes the piece a joy to read is its dozens of snarky, cunning references: the essay includes 31 links to stories about people defecating in one another’s shoes, urinating on each other’s legs, firing guns at topless bars, hypocritically hyping athletes accused of doping, and all sorts of other glorious scuttlebutt. Scocca’s little catch-me-if-you-can crytpogram has more random cultural references and score-settling inside jokes than a T.S. Eliot poem.

Links are now an essential part of any creative effort, and any casual web reader can’t help but notice — and appreciate — their proliferation. Like Frank Rich of the New York Times — who routinely embeds more than 20 links in each of his columns, often to rumors that the Times itself would never deign to substantiate — Scocca’s links aren’t merely a facility for connecting one web page to another, but a way to incorporate dozens of arguments, jokes, ironies, anecdotes, tangents, historical footnotes, attacks, sometimes doubts that the writer barely has time to make. You aren’t even supposed to click all the links; they are simply a license for someone like Scocca to issue one intriguing statement after another. Every essay is now an iceberg, mostly submerged beneath the surface.

The result is so different that it is almost a new form — like the dramatic monologue invented by Browning, the essay itself invented by Montaigne or the novel by Apuleis — one invented by everyone writing link-happy posts. What was once a simple exposition of an idea is now a wholly intact world-view, a roller-coaster ride through the farthest corners of someone else’s trivia-stuffed brain, a David Foster Wallace essay that doesn’t wear you out. I find it exhilarating, mostly for its sheer speed: you don’t have to explain that Michael Jordan may have retired from basketball the first time around so as to avoid a gambling inquiry; you merely have to make a cryptic reference to stars with out-of-control gambling habits. Who can resist following that rabbit down its hole?

This is a better way to tell a story, and it’s an example of how technology isn’t just changing the communication of information, but the information itself: how we write and how we think. In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, the great Michael Kinsley complained that newspaper articles need to dispense with the laborious context and extensive citations that make an article about health-care reform such heavy-sledding — let’s do away, he says, with all the verbiage about “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system” or the clumsy references to ”Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee” — and just get to the point.

But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Kinsley that we don’t have to remove the context, we just have to link to it. Journalism shouldn’t always be diminished by the Internet; once we move to an all-digital format, it can actually be improved.

Of course, the issue is broader than just journalism. Am I the only who wonders how the hyper-link will affect longer works of art, such as novels and histories? When people talk about the Kindle, they invariably focus on the reading experience: what will happen to the book’s musty pages, rolled up paper-backs, fragrant glue? But I’ve wondered how the writing experience will change if book authors too begin to publish exclusively electronically, in a format that favor links and constant updates. For some silly reason I often find myself wondering how Shakespeare, or the Apostle Paul for that matter, would have written differently if he could have used HTML.

My fear is that writing will become more provisional, more “this-is-what-I-have-so-far” if the finished product isn’t type-set and committed to paper a million times over. What I need more than anything else from a writer is a commitment, to make up her mind about what she really means. In writing as in life, only an impending sense of finality can ever bring out our best effort.

This is true not just of mere mortals, but of the greatest writers of our time. One of Saul Bellow’s editors — did you know that Bellow did five-minute yoga head-stands while editors pored through his work? — complained that it was only in the proofs that Bellow really began honing his craft: “Just read that,” an editor who never liked him is reported to have said about one of Bellow’s late-breaking revisions. “Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better.” Not something we’re likely to do here!