Reader, The act of writing is "at once absurd and a means of understanding everyday human experience." None of you will take issue with the second claim. We writers are a serious bunch, after all. When we sit down to write, we're not just scribbling. We're trying to make sense of this world, of our lives, of the hairy gentleman sitting next to us in Starbucks. It's why we all love E. M. Forster's dictum: "How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" It's also why some of you were...