I certainly didn’t see the writer as a business person. Why should the writer, who must daily summon the courage to dredge her soul–and that of her neighbors–also worry about marketability, profitability, and spreading the word about a product so worthy as the book?

All this has changed, and more.

Think of Michelangelo. He didn’t wake up one day with a vision to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was no quirky artistic impulse, some sort of installation project. No–it was a commercial job, an assignment. Nonetheless, he created immortal art on the job, prone on scaffolding, painting the hand of God. People have lain on their backs for money and done worse.

Raymond Carver produced many a short story because he had a wife and kids and had to pay his rent in Chico, California. Do we wish he’d had the leisure to forgo that writing?

I’ve mentioned that I’m taking a marketing course, one that has integrity and even love writ into its principles. I’ve been studying how you think about what you do, how you talk about what you do, whom you serve, how what you do addresses the urgent needs and compelling desires of your clients. Then I’ve been thinking about how all of this business sense applies to fiction.

Are writers service professionals?

I pose this question and all my old objections surface: the originality and honesty of the writer must not be compromised by some sort of base grappling with supply and demand.

But Charles Dickens rewrote the ending to Great Expectations to please his editors and the audience of this serialized tale. Shakespeare stooped to greatness to garner a laugh from the rowdy crowd.

The parenting angle of this rant is this: I am solidly out of the self-centered musing and exploration of my solitary youth. Everything I do is in relationship. Demand and supply. Demand and supply. It’s humanizing. The expression “navel-gazing” itself might remind us that we were, each of us, nurtured into being from somebody else’s body. That very belly-button of solitude is the site of our first and most dependent inter-relationship.

What happens to a book when its author is concerned with attracting readers?

First, it means the characters must be fascinating, the plot enticing, the language compelling, the world drawn so that the reader is drawn in. None of this is bad for art. If we are modern-day Scheherazades, tale-telling to save our lives, our lives dependent on the continued interest of our listeners and their insatiable curiosity–fed by our craft–to know what will happen next, does this repel the intimate muse? Is she the sort who will not let you take her out in public? Who will not kiss you on the dance floor? Beware the finicky muse. She will not supply your bread and butter.

David Mamet said, “If you have something to fall back on, you will.” And yet by setting the writing to one side and the money-earning, world-facing self to another, we force ourselves to fall back on something else. The most prolific writers I know have a working-class work ethic. Work doesn’t surprise or offend them, and they understand that writing is work–making it and selling it.

A cousin of my great-grandfather invented the heating and cooling system for the Ford. My great-grandparents moved into a small apartment with this man and his wife, so that they could live inexpensively, and they all worked–my great-grandmother made hats and sold them door-to-door–so they could invest in the company that would make these heating and cooling systems. They became very rich, and it’s taken three or four generations to turn that fortune into the exhaust fumes of family bickering.

But what if the inventor of the heating and cooling system had felt that the effort of thinking of the thing was enough, was all that he could be expected to do? What if my great-grandmother made hats but did not want to sell them, wanted them to sell themselves by dint of their beauty and worth?

My communist, trust-funder grandmother may be rolling over in her newly minted grave as I extol the virtue of market forces on art, but if she’d been forced to complete her decades-long project, a screenplay about the Haymarket martyrs, the world would be a better and a richer place, both. If she’d been hungry not only in her soul but in her stomach, she’d have accomplished more.

It is a false luxury and a disservice to imagine that you do not have to peddle your wares if what you make is art. If you were making a better spark plug, you’d have a business plan. It’s time for writers to do the same.

One final note: perfectionism is the bane of really good writers, and market forces do a funny thing. They force you to get your best work out in front of people. They support greatness and push against perfectionism. This is a gift no writer can afford to turn down.

“Given that I am ending up with chunks of interesting information and scenes but not necessarily fitting the original incline, what are some tactics or techniques for figuring out how to fit the chunks together in a narrative?”

This is an exciting question that inadvertently (but not accidentally) taps into the heart of what storytelling is all about. I say “not accidentally” because when you write everyday, throwing yourself deep into a book as this person has done, you are bound to end up right in the lap of the creature, aren’t you? So there she is, with chunks.

Putting chunks together is exactly how to build a story. We contemporary readers-cum-screen-watchers can jump cut from one universe to another, from one point of view to another, from one era to another without pause. We do not need our chunks cemented with smooth transitions, with careful contextualizations, with complicated explanations. Show us the money, baby. Lay your chunks out like cards.

Cards is a great metaphor, in fact, because what matters when you are turning over one card and then the next–say in a game of War or Black Jack in not so much the card itself as its relationship to the card that comes before or after. But once you know the rules of the game, the cards can just be turned, and the story is all in the turning.

Check it: Twenty-One: First card is a five of diamonds. Second card is an Ace. What next? Tap tap: third card is a seven. You’ve either got thirteen or you’re over with twenty-two, yes? Tap, tap: an eight of spades. You’re golden. Lucky bastard. (Note: My Twentyone experience, such as it is, comes from when I was about eleven and attended a conference in Florida with my father. While he went to boring lectures, I hung out with the bartender and played Twenty-one.)

Five; Ace; Seven; Eight. Chunks. It’s the rules of the game that allow the juxtapositions to take on meaning. What are the rules of the narrative game? Things like this: Whatever someone is counting on will not come to pass; when things are looking very, very bad, something is going to turn around; when things are looking very, very good, something is going to turn around; people change, unless they are the kind of people who think they are going to change radically and profoundly, in which case, they will stay the same; actions build and stakes rise, so things can only get better, or worse–they can’t simply repeat, even in intensity; and it always comes down to a choice.

So you place your first card, and we’re looking to see what’s coming next. We know it won’t be the same. Things are going to go up or they are going to go down. We’re looking to be surprised. What expectation does your first card set up? Your next card is going to upend that expectation. Your third card is going to keep raising the stakes. Your fourth card is going to force a choice. Your fifth card is going to reveal that choice. Your sixth card will announce unexpected consequences to your choice.

So how does this related to real-life revision? Annie Dillard talks about the nine-mile hike you take, around and around a long table, when you are revising. You lay out your chunks–on the floor, on your dining room table, pinned to your walls–and you pace, moving them around. You are looking for electric connections, unexpected conversations between the pieces.

Story is about juxtaposition, as David Mamet talks about in his wonderful book On Direction Film, which is really on writing story. He’s using Eisenstein’s theories of collage–the story comes from the uninflected juxtaposition of two images.

A branch cracking. A deer looking up.

A little dog running toward a curb. A giant wheel of a truck rolling forward. Little dog. Wheel. Little dog. Wheel.

See? Uninflected images juxtaposed create a story. Create meaning. There is no narration. No voice over saying, “Poor little dog, if only I had known . . . “

This means: trust your chunks. Don’t smear loads of glue on the back that will seep around the sides and dry into white plastic paste on the construction paper.

When I first apprenticed myself to writing, I was twenty and had just moved to San Francisco. I had a very plain notebook, the kind you buy at a drugstore for a buck, and I filled it with short scenes. Then I read through it and looked for unexpected relationships between those scenes, and by laying them side-by-side, this character becoming that character, another character becoming roommates with the first, stories emerged from those pages.

I thought of this practice as setting up crosscurrents. A story was usually about at least two things, two unexpectedly juxtaposed things, out of which a third–call it meaning–emerged. The tension in story comes where the crosscurrents create suction, movement, a whirlpool.

Try laying out your cards. Shuffle the deck and try it another way. Card by card, lay out the story, until it’s one you’ve never heard before but which you know to be true.

[I am teaching a six-week-plus online / Skype course in Revision (for writers) and Editing (for editors). I am currently offering several holiday specials and discounts. To learn more, please visit my online learning center. I also send out a monthly newsletter with a writing tip. You can sign up to the right of my blog. Thanks! Elizabeth]