A question worth asking

• Alison Flood wonders how much effect Word would have had on Kerouac at the Guardian Book Blog.

Kerouac wrote the novel fast because the "road is fast". He'd delete unwanted phrases by crossing them out with a pencil or typing over them.

These days, the computer is the writing implement of choice. It allows us to delete, shift sections around and continually edit, in the way that Kerouac, writing on his lengthy scrolls, could not.

The typewriter/computer/notebook are, of course, just the instruments of the trade, but it's possible they have more influence on the eventual product than we think. Paul Auster, for example, writes by hand in notebooks, revising each paragraph until he feels it works – and I think his polished, elegant prose reflects this.

It would be different, that's for sure. There's a quality to handwritten stories that's unique. But whatever the mechanism you choose, you have to make your story work, and moving the words around until they do is what matters.

The value of absolute clarity

• Michael Dirda on Paul Auster in The New York Review of Books.

Till recently, few innovative, literary novelists could rival Auster in his gusto for reframing tales of mystery, fantasy, and adventure. Auster repeatedly uses these genres to illuminate, often with great poignancy, life's fundamental relationships: parents and children (especially fathers and sons), married couples, mentors and disciples, artists and their work, even owners and their pets. All these affiliations are generally placed under severe strain—there are secrets between friends, suspected or actual infidelities, eruptions of street violence into ordinary life, distressing revelations. In Moon Palace the likable young hero inadvertently causes the deaths of his grandfather, father, and child. More recently, Auster's books—certainly the last half-dozen—have focused regularly on elderly, debilitated men with literary or intellectual vocations, as though their author were preemptively working through his own later years (Auster is now in his early sixties).

Some of Auster's tics or techniques—the incestuous literary connections, the skewed autobiography, the ambiguous blurring of fact and fiction, the pervasive fatefulness—might sink any ordinary novel from sheer portentousness. And portentousness, as well as sentimentality, has been a criticism regularly leveled at his work. At its best, his tone is unruffled, meditative, intelligent, yet sometimes it does grow gravely august, both orotund and oracular. His characters are all too often the playthings of invisible forces; and the most trivial action—answering a telephone, buying a blue notebook—can bring about the most improbable and dire consequences. What may look like chance is usually kismet, and to Auster New York really is Baghdad on the Hudson, an Arabian Nights world of omens, shifting identities, unexpected windfalls, improbable meetings, wildly good and bad luck, and all those sudden peripeteias that seem more the stuff of melodrama than of modern fiction.

I sometimes think of Paul Auster as the godchild of the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell: introspective and wistful by nature, both are drawn to society's more charismatic pariahs, bohemians, and misfits, and feel at home in the odd corners of metropolitan life. And both suggest that Americans are as lonely as the men and women glimpsed in the paintings of Edward Hopper.

The need for stories

• Paul Auster talks about writing in The Guardian.

From Auster's acceptance speech for Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters:

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the 'post-literate age'. That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories.

Novels are not the only source, after all. Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. They need them almost as desperately as they need food and however the stories might be presented - whether on a printed page or on a television screen - it would be impossible to imagine life without them.