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and short stories that somehow capture the spirit of each age and reach beyond to those that follow.
NONE of this need be a call for literature in its biggest form - whatever that really is. There is no need for a crusade to sell high brow works. More often this is just another genre, one for a cultural elite to masturbate with relish over their "superior" reading tastes, while showering the hoi polloi in the discharge of their contempt.
Beyond that, it is just another marketing ploy, a way for the markets to neatly package and categorise a form of human expression it is incapable of understanding.
To hear the muse and be transported into the human dreamscape, the writer must throw salt over their shoulders and into the eyes of the whispering Commissars. They must be honest in their writing, possess enthusiasm and a joy for what they do. Above all, they should have something to say and a burning need to express it - even if that is only a damn good story.
Liberating the muse from market forces is an attitude, not a technique. It stems from a love of words and an enthusiasm for human expression. Unless a writer takes pleasure in their work, how can they communicate this to others? How can they inspire a mind to dance through the dreamscape, even if only for a little while?
The market is the last totalitarian system on Earth2. It is also the most highly developed, the most subtle and consequently the most powerful. More than most, writers have an opportunity to give totalitarianism the two-fingered salute of contempt. And they have the luxury to do so, without risking the sinister knock in the early hours of the morning, followed by a terrifying journey so some distant gulag.3
Capitalism, after all, is a strange form of totalitarianism. It is a system that is quite happy to profit from the seeds of its own destruction. And that is why a call to reject market principles in writing need not mean the production of "unpublishable" works. Remember that much literature held in high regard was initially rejected as "commercially unviable" by the Commissars of Capitalism.
Writers should challenge the restraints of capitalism. Never should the totalitarian principles of market forces be unquestionably accepted. Perhaps writers are so bound, but it should be an unwilling slavery and good writing will always - at least - rattle the chains.
September 1998

It Just Got Harder!
THEY say that writing a novel is one of the hardest things you can do.
It's not like writing a poem or a short story or an article, though each of those has its separate challenges and headaches for the poor scribe.
But a novel - that's something else.
For one thing it's a long haul. Obviously. Day in day out, the writer is struggling to piece each word and each sentence together. They have to sustain the characters, the plot, the dialogue and the narrative over several hundred pages and many thousands of words.
Beyond that, the satisfying point of completion - of gaining a sense of achievement - can be months or years away. Seldom are there any mid-point grains of satisfaction to cheer the author on. But still, if they are going to be a novelist, they must persevere.
Take it from me, it's hard, often soul-destroying work. One of the hardest things ever. And it gets harder, because after that final word is added to the manuscript, the novelist must start again. Savagely. No novel is written. It is re-written, hacked, edited and revised until both editor and manuscript look - or more like feel - like a bit-part victim in a cheap slasher movie.
Butcher your baby, dear novelist if you ever want to make the grade. But don't expect to retain thy sanity.
Okay, so don't just take it from me.
Try Tom Clancy, and he must know, because he writes some mammoth tomes: "Writing that book must become the most important thing in your life. If it doesn't you will fail. If it does, you might just succeed... Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed round the world."
Clancy is spot on, but I prefer Orwell's take on the matter.
"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle," he said, "like a long bout of some painful illness."
Orwell, of course, was not only suffering the pains and birthpangs of the novelist, he was also genuinely ill with consumption. You might say he took his research for Down And Out In London And Paris a little too far, as that's where he apparently picked up the wicked bug that eventually brought his words to a permanent end.
Of course, after all that hard