1. You need a plot. You really, really do. A Good Idea (”What if it’s the future! And robots are the boss of everything and this hot non-emotive dude has to find this kid who is actually his dad and send him back in time before the robots kill everyone!”) is an excellent start, but a Good Idea is NOT sufficient to carry the entire vehicle of your novel. We don’t care how highfalutin’ your concept or your prose is; you leave out the plot and you are going to bore us out of our skull, and not because we are too stupid to comprehend the brilliance of your talent. You REALLY EXTRA-ESPECIALLY need a plot if you are working in genre fiction. Bonus points if your plot MAKES SENSE (see No. 2).

Can anyone think of a kinder way to phrase Dickens’ letter, which justifies breaking a social engagement in order to write? I’ve often longed to say something like this; hell, maybe the key to prolificacy is not worrying about the “kinder” bit.

Teachout’s response:

I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web Sudoku for an hour.

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences. [...] The idea is to instill in the would-be writer a fear of not writing.

Depending on the mode you choose, consequences are:

* Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
* Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
* Kamikaze Mode: Keep writing or your work will unwrite itself.

Apparently one of the “unpleasant sounds” in Normal Mode is…Hanson.

Take a lot of Xanax in the morning to really calm the hell down. Try to wake up no later than 11. Work from 11:30 to 4:30, then go see the shrink, then meet some friends for drinks. Find a good bar where everyone knows your name and you can get a nice buyback. Try to relax. This is the major problem. Writing is both boring and stressful, it’s the worst combination. Sometimes I go to the gym, but it’s very hard to lift things there, because they’re so heavy.

How distracted are you by IM, skype, blogs, email, internet research etc. while trying to write? Are you more tempted by online or off-line distractions? How (and how successfully) do you resist them?

If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language, it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them. Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything, and which makes it possible to share everything. Without language there would be no science, no technology, no law, no art, no love. But without another person with whom to interact, the invention becomes virtual. It may atrophy, diminish, disappear. Writers, to a certain degree, are the guardians of language. When they write their novels, their poetry, their plays, they keep language alive. They are not merely using words—on the contrary, they are at the service of language. They celebrate it, hone it, transform it, because language lives through them and because of them, and it accompanies all the social and economic transformations of their era.

[...]Stig Dagerman’s phrase about the fundamental paradox of the writer, unsatisfied because he cannot communicate with those who are hungry—whether for nourishment or for knowledge—touches on the greatest truth. Literacy and the struggle against hunger are connected, closely interdependent. One cannot succeed without the other. Both of them require, indeed urge, us to act. So that in this third millennium, which has only just begun, no child on our shared planet, regardless of gender or language or religion, shall be abandoned to hunger or ignorance, or turned away from the feast. This child carries within him the future of our human race.

Thanks to Natalie for sharing the link.

For only $15, participants receive the following: a free copy of the most recent issue (vol 26.2), daily writing prompts and reading-writing exercises, a Riff Word of the Day, a Podcast of the Day, craft talks, and access to the journal’s online literary companion.

BAJ: For some writers, the engine that powers their fiction is character. For others, it’s language. For others still, the engine might loosely be called “theme.” Do you identify with any of those? What sparked the initial idea for you?

PM: Very important as those are, the seed and engine of a novel, for me at least, is that hidden, all but inexpressible feeling [...] that must be isolated and gradually brought forth during the telling.

I recently discussed that most elusive aspect of craft, theme, with my students; we read and responded to excerpts from a wonderful essay by Eileen Pollack (”How Theme Gets in a Story”), and most members of the class expressed anxiety and suspicion about writing stories that were “about” much beyond a specific situation. They’ve learned to smell falsity, overstatement, and hack symbols from a mile away…but the problem is (as Eileen’s essay notes) that this awareness also makes them afraid of any “larger” truths or connections. Of course specificity is key to good fiction, but in a vacuum, it can’t be all: instead of a work of art, it’s just something that happened to someone, and who cares? Yet it remains an unknowable mystery how we make stories matter without hitting people over the head with painfully obvious symbols or points or moralistic conclusions. Of course the best themes emerge from stories; they don’t propel them–and most of us have to write our way to meaning. But once we realize a work-in-progress’s aboutness, can we engage with it? Can we not?

I like the language Matthiessen uses to describe what makes a story matter to both reader and writer–a “hidden, all but inexpressible feeling.” He stresses that the process of getting there is anything but pre-determined, but it does involve a great deal of work and exploration:

…Eventually some kind of entity emerges , at which point I embark upon what will become the first of many drafts. I already know where I am going—not the “plot”, which is rarely important and sometimes non-existent—but in searching out the elusive feeling—the mystery or underlying truth—which impelled the writing in the first place and urgently demands creative expression.

Here’s a sample chapter from Shadow Country.

Norman Mailer’s Book Release Party (Monday, January 22, 2007 / New York City)

I bartended a private party in what used to be Greenwich Village, plain and pure, before the West of things arrived. Streets aligned with cobblestoned curiosity, dead quiet at night and in the heart of such endless activity. It was once a place where literary-minded folk, artist folk and folk singer-songwriters would hang and wax intellectual on the active dream of inspiration.

But I’ve never seen it. Not firsthand, anyway. Sure, I get my fair share of screenwriter envy. Every New York café serving table space gives me a direct view of writers toiling over their scripts. And good for them. Back in January, I was in the Village working a private party, helping host and celebrate the impending release of Norman Mailer’s latest and last book, The Castle In The Forest.

Mr. Mailer, architect of narrative nonfiction, spent his life taking on obstacles seemingly out of his reach, yet he never averted from his innate will, temperament and fearlessness, perpetually asserting himself somewhere between the outside world, where stories began, and back inside his world as a working writer, the place where stories take shape.

As a young writer, I viewed Mr. Mailer’s legacy with the utmost reverence. I’m just as competitive as he was in his heyday. If I’m not working on a new piece or rehashing an old one, I’m out looking for the next story. And I’m no journalist. I write in the morning and afternoons so I can make my money at night. So when I was asked to bartend a private party for Mr. Mailer’s book release, I attended as an employee of the private residence and, if possible, gracious gopher for the man himself, amongst other guests such as Guy Talese, E.L. Doctorow, and David Ebershoff, etc.

The party, needless to say, was literati to the literary max. Guests spilled editorial banter over their halo-shaped champagne flutes, aggressively calculating the company at hand. All of those effervescent headache spoils were a testament to my unbridled youth. I was, after all, working the party. So I observed. I tried not to get too involved, much as I craved involvement. Mr. Mailer entered shortly after the party began, walking with two arm canes, and his presence filled up every available space. When I wasn’t refilling bubbly, I watched, then I wrote. But even what I jotted down in my notebook remains fragmented to this day, a choppy result of overwhelmed giddiness in such company: A girl with bones sticking out of her back; nursing a new belly ring and a half bottle of wine. Chevy luminaries. Pencil guts. Old style button-down camouflage. Ticklish piano. Neon. Lucid. Temperate. Excused by my mother and never my father, whose mind is a fairy tale he reads to himself after a long day’s work, his eyes erasing a dinner table of women and children, massaging his temples as he peers through his gin chalice in breakneck purification.

Four floors of contemporary design. Basquiats and Warhols and Harings.
Eighties glam. Mechanized toilets that lift when you piss.

I looked over my artillery. Bottles of viognier, Austrian weissburgunder,
California cabernet and Dolcetto d’Alba. Bottles of water, Italian beer, and
tonic/soda/Diet Cokes spread evenly across my station. It was a simple party. Keep their glasses full and everyone’s happy. Don’t daydream. Don’t be cynical. Don’t join the party. Be cordial. Be sunlight. Be yourself.

And before I even knew what was happening, the guest of honor was sitting right
next to my bar. For a brief moment, he was sitting alone, and the selfless host of the party, informed earlier that I was a young writer, saw an opportunity to introduce us. I was lucky enough to share a few words with the man who insisted I call him Norman.

“Brian, see those two girls over there?” Mr. Mailer asked.

I fixed my eyes on two young ladies standing ten or so feet away, sipping white
wine, one wearing a cocktail dress and the other dark slacks, comfortably chatting.

“Yes sir, I do.”

“Those girls are fuckin’ sweethearts.”

“Is that right?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

“That’s right. They’re F’in S’s,” he said, exhaling with delight. His tell-tale eyes
scanned the room. “I gotta get home,” he exhaled. “I’m on Martha
Stewart tomorrow morning. Can you believe that?”

“My mom loves Martha Stewart,” I told him. “Through thick and thin.”

“I get eight minutes. What’s gonna happen?” he asked, though he didn’t want an
answer, or perhaps, at his age, after asking questions his entire life, he wouldn’t mind having someone tell him what was going to happen the next day.

In the meantime, he handed me his half-full wine glass. “Here, would you mind?
I’m done drinking wine. I don’t need any more of that.”

If you had the chance to meet Mr. Mailer – at least later in his life – I’d argue that
his social dynamic would’ve affected you same as his canon of work. Soft yet strained, honest and weathered, they were the eyes of stories you must hear, a succession of tales that were subtle and brief. We clung to each hopeful sentence as he delivered them with such brazen elocution. This was a storyteller. This was someone capable of keeping us entertained and attentive, more than any electronic device capable of eliminating delays or time consumption. I didn’t think of cell phones or emails or digital images penetrating my cognizance. I caught a moment or two with a literary legend and I tried to hang on for dear life.

Two hours later, people made their way out into the crisp, irregularly starry New York night. Mr. Mailer, one of the last to leave, slowly approached a younger man, perhaps a family member or someone lucky enough to develop a relationship over the years.

“When are we going to sit and have a chat?” he asked the young man.

It felt great to hear those words. Given our digital excess (something Mr. Mailer
has hinted would punish the published book one day), it felt like I hadn’t heard those words in years. To sit and chat with someone. Like the old days. Like they did through the streets of Old New York, Grandma Bohemia.

I stood over the varying mixers, full wine bottles and polished glassware,
relishing the utilities.

Famous eighties artists hanging like scarecrows from the off-white walls, somewhere between applause and the stratosphere.

I still tell people the story of waiting on Norman Mailer over his last book release
party. I remember how affable he was, how tired but calmative he appeared, and who may or may have not been there to celebrate one of our most ambitious literary heavyweights. Names are concrete when spoken but soon become fragments of the past.

“Tell me,” they say, “How was waiting on Norman Mailer?”

“Actually,” I reply, “He was waiting on us.”

I.

“To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed, good writing is inherently subversive.”

Published in 1972, J. Mitchell Morse’s The Irrelevant English Teacher opens with this assertion—which, for all its clarity and force, rings with an earnestness that may sound tinny to the modern ear. These days, after all, many wonderful novels fail to produce even a blip on the cultural radar, unless a talk-show host uses them as tools to expand her media empire. Remarkable collections of short stories and poetry vanish in a conspiratorial hush, like Argentine dissidents. In classrooms across the country, many students respond to what Morse would call “good writing” with distaste or—worse—indifference. And Morse’s books themselves are dust-gatherers, long out of print.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972 (142 pages)

So our first response to The Irrelevant English Teacher may be a wan smile. Does the FBI keep a secret file on Richard Ford, known agitator? Does Sarah Palin lay awake at night, worrying that some literary pusher will offer little Bristol a taste of Lorrie Moore?

Well, perhaps they should.

Over the course of eleven essays and 140 pages, Morse backs up his starry-eyed claim. Writing well, he subverts the norms of his own era—the smug Philistinism of Nixon and Agnew, the incipient political correctness of the universities, the crude anger and lotus-eating blitheness of the fading Sixties—while offering you and me, nearly forty years later, a valuable reminder: we are irrelevant, and irrelevancy makes us dangerous.

II.

During the election season especially, it’s easy to lose sight of the irrelevant. Every time we open a newspaper or tune to CNN, we are bombarded by relevancy, and many everyday acts—filling up at the Texaco station or scribbling a check for health insurance (or a mortgage, or student loans)—have become darkly symbolic, fraught with ominous meaning.

In this context, a love of literature might seem vestigial, escapist. Moby-Dick won’t feed the Darfur orphans; Anna Karenina won’t hasten ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. These books merely delight us, nothing more.

But Morse argues that there is nothing mere about delight. It’s true that literature alone “can’t feed us, it can’t solve the problems of poverty and injustice, it can’t bring peace or clean air or drinkable water,” and yet “we must not turn our backs on art because it is less important than food or because its action is no stronger than a flower.”

Like a flower, literature is significant for the joy it brings us. And the joy that literature brings us is special: we are transformed by it. As Morse puts it:

“Joy is a value we undervalue at our political peril. Once we have experienced joy, we are much less satisfied with dullness; once we have joined in the joyful play of a lively mind, we are much less easily impressed by the stencils and stereotypes of a Presidential commercial.”

III.

“Stencils and stereotypes”: emerging from the deep fictional dream engendered by an Atonement or a “Daughters of the Late Colonel” and turning directly to CNN’s coverage of a presidential debate (complete with live tracking of audience reactions so that we know exactly how to feel) or this month’s issue of Lucky (or Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated) is like reentering Plato’s cave after spending an hour in the light. The lover of literature’s refined capacity for joy provides a form of intellectual armor. Delighted by “Ripeness is all,” she is girded against the cheap tricks of advertisement and demagoguery—”The original mavericks!” or “Yes we can!” or “Coke is it!”

In an essay titled “Social Relevance, Literary Judgment, and the New Right,” Morse offers this description of the transformative power of literature:

“I . . . believe in the development of a critical, skeptical, humorous habit of mind—in the development of a liberally educated consciousness, a sensitivity to nuances and unstated implications, an ability to read between the lines and to hear undertones and overtones—both for the sake of political and social enlightenment and for the sake of our personal enlightenment and pleasure as individuals.”

Exposure to good writing raises our standards for all discourse. We lose patience with claptrap and grow resistant to hypnotism. We begin to think for ourselves. Confronted, in one of Morse’s examples, by the bathetic sentimentality of many pop songs, our response is likely to be contrarian. “If a lyric offers nothing for our intellect to perceive but the fact that it is making a cliché appeal to our tears, we will respond not with tears but with a smile of amusement or a sigh of boredom or a moment of resentment at the effort to take us in.”

IV.

There are words for those who sigh with boredom and frown with resentment. The catch-all label currently being bandied about is “elitist.” In Morse’s own era, the same attitude was neatly encapsulated by Spiro Agnew’s spitting disdain for “the nattering nabobs of negativity,” that “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

Yes, I say, guilty as charged. Why fight it? Why hide our copy of A Curtain of Green under the table while we scramble to remind our accusers that our father grew up in the blue-collar steel town of Scranton? We are negative, after all—there’s just so much, these days, to be negative about, so much that falls short of the intellectual and moral standards set by good writing. And surely, to some, that negativity must seem impudent in its consistent failure to show due deference to our political and cultural authorities.
But it’s Agnew’s use of the word corps that I’m most eager to bend to my own purposes. I love the martial connotation, the way it recruits those impudent intellectuals into a paramilitary outfit. An elite outfit. It makes me wonder how much difference there could have been, in Agnew’s mind, between a lover of literature, acutely aware of—and articulately calling attention to—the hypocrisy and shallowness in her own society, and a bomb-throwing radical from the fringes of the counterculture.

Morse, as always, puts it simply: writing, and partaking of good writing, “is a fundamental revolutionary activity that changes our ways of thinking and feeling.” In the “pleasures of well-made language” lie “the deep springs of originality and hence of unorthodoxy.”

V.

Neither Agnew nor Morse is the first to link good writing with subversion, of course. Consider Plato again, who banished poetry from his ideal republic. Or Isaac Babel, who, in his story “Guy de Maupassant,” wrote: “I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” Later, the twenty-nine volumes of Maupassant’s collected works are described as “twenty-nine bombs stuffed with pity, genius, and passion.”

Armies, stabbing iron, bombs: I don’t believe I’m overstating my case, or Morse’s, when I note that typing a word requires many of the same small muscles as pulling a trigger.

Isaac Babel was himself dangerous, a countercultural radical engaged in a fundamental revolutionary activity. Why else did Stalin’s regime incarcerate and torture him? Why else starve him and erase his identity? Why else put a bullet through his head?

Among the charges leveled against him was “aestheticism”—in other words, irrelevancy. Babel’s stories, sketches, and screenplays didn’t lionize the Soviet government, celebrate its values, or impugn its enemies, and in so failing, they revealed their author’s impudence. In the face of greater, more relevant demands, he was out to delight his readers, nothing more.

VI.

I’ll end at the beginning.

I owe my discovery of J. Mitchell Morse to Wyatt Mason, contributing editor at Harper’s, who in a blog entry described Morse’s books as “serious, funny, learned, angry, angering,” and Morse himself as “a literate man hell-bent on good usage and not unwilling to offend while making his campaign.” How could I resist an endorsement like that? And as an adjunct instructor of college composition, how could I resist a title like The Irrelevant English Teacher?

I tracked down a copy on the Internet. The spine had never been cracked.

We must write well and read well, Morse insists—but more than this, we must cultivate these abilities in others. We must encourage more people to crack the spines of more books. “Thus far,” chides Morse, “we have failed . . . inasmuch as we have been too timid or too politic or too disdainful to answer the demagogues who call the liberating arts ‘the bullshit subjicks’.” On some level, consciously or not, we’ve equated irrelevancy with frivolity; we’ve forgotten what a serious thing literary joy can be, and how necessary. We need to remember this—and if others deny it, we must learn to insist.

“The liberating arts,” though: I like that. Again I’m reminded of Isaac Babel, who did not take the task of spreading joy lightly. His last words were, “I am asking for one thing—let me finish my work.”

When J. Mitchell Morse calls readers, writers, and teachers of the English language “irrelevant,” he is voicing not a lament, but a manifesto. Let’s embrace our irrelevancy. Let’s all finish our work.