Any apprentice writer still learning his craft could do worse than to study the techniques and the tools of the professionals. This is the view held by the instructor of the short narrative course I recently completed, who urged students to emulate the writers they admire, and mentioned that he keeps the works of Joan Didion and George Orwell nearby to thumb through when he is stalled. For this reason I have moved all of my E. B. White and Annie Dillard books to the shelf above our headboard, and would have added the Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell’s essays if I was not afraid of being brained by it at midnight during an earth tremor.

I have already noted my fondness for The Paris Review interviews, the final installments of which are “coming soon” to the magazine’s online archive. These form a treasure trove of information on the “how” of writing, for all those whose favorite means of procrastinating is to dither over questions such as “Should I be writing in pen or pencil?”; “On lined or unlined paper?”; and “What brand of eraser is recommended by the pros?”

Fans of writing paraphernalia are always on the lookout for new additions to their arsenal, which is why I was thrilled to come upon the following passage in a review written by New York Times critic James Wood, of a recent biography of Gustave Flaubert. According to Wood (who may know good writing when he sees it, but to judge from his own style, could benefit from a close reading of Orwell’s reviews), what makes Flaubert stand out from his less successful peers is that he “scans the streets indifferently, […] like a camera.”

Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness.

It is this gel of chosenness which intrigues me: anything that helped Flaubert must be a supremely useful substance for a beginning writer, and I am making inquires of James Wood in order to determine where a sample might be obtained. Who knows: perhaps the Canadian distribution rights are still available; at this point I will consider anything that might supplement my (non-existant) writing income. I asked down at our local deli, but the best they could come up with was a small jar of royal jelly, which the proprietor assured me was “A jelly as close to chosenness” as she had ever seen.

Still, we can make some reasonable inferences about Flaubert’s miracle substance: since it allows the reader to see the items — bottles, newspapers, washing, an omnibus — inside, this gel must be translucent rather than opaque. It also appears to have preservative properties, leading me to speculate that it might be beneficial when applied directly to the skin.

But in a later paragraph Wood mentions that Flaubert, “like his details, is so visible and invisible, [that] he needs to be cleaned of the glaze of his renown every so often and shown afresh.”

This gel of chosenness, then, evidently leaves some kind of filmy residue, which is why I plan to start with the minimum dosage until I know the full effects of long-term use.