Dance With the Muse and Write to Dissent
 by Mark Cantrell

ACCOUNTANTS AND MANAGEMENT GURUS ARE LIKE THE COMMISSARS OF CAPITALISM, and they make for extremely bad muses. Likewise, the real muses have no time for balance sheets and cost accounts. They don't care about the bottom line. All they want to do is sing.

Writers are -- or should be -- addicted to this sweet melody of inspiration that magically transfers raw thought into crisp prose. Without it, the writer is frustrated and grumpy, as if a lover has developed a predilection for headaches. The muse is a fickle lover at the best of times.

Yet aspiring writers will eventually encounter advice to shackle their muse in commercial chains. They must develop an intimate knowledge of the markets, they are told, and think in terms of commercial viability. To write something deemed uncommercial is a sin. The bottom line is all -- writing is a business, just like any other. If it cannot be quantified in financial terms then it is considered irrelevant.

Of course, at its most fundamental level, there is some sound advice contained in the market sermon. To send a romantic story to a publisher of hardcore horror is foolish and a waste of time. So it makes sense to nurture a knowledge of markets as outlets, to know who is publishing what.

The danger exists that this can be taken too far, until the "business" ethos takes over. The question ceases to be "Where is the best outlet to reach my audience?" It becomes ""How much money can I make, and how do I maximize my earning potential?"

The markets lead, the writer follows. Eventually, the muse wanders off in search of a more appreciative amour. The writer has become a hack, churning out endless reams of formulaic dross tailored specifically for some market, as quantified on an accountant's spreadsheet. This may produce functional, competent, even moderately entertaining prose. But hardly anything inspiring. A potboiler to kill an hour or two, not a shared vision that sears the mind like lightning.

Good writing sneers at such narrow commercial considerations and mocks attempts at empirical calculation. After all, how can vision, imagination and flair be truly quantified? They cannot. They exist beyond the slide rule.

Artificial constraints should never be placed upon a writer's imaginative horizons. A piece of good literature (in the broadest sense) not only stretches the imagination, it is also capable of expanding the markets and breathing a little life into the drab existence of Capitalism's commissars.

Had J.R.R. Tolkien, for instance, followed the diktats of market forces, then The Lord of the Rings would never have been written. Nor would many other novels that grace the shelves of bookshops and libraries. The market knows nothing about the quality of literature, and therefore is a poor guide to follow. Far better to trust in the muse, our writers' instincts, and those of the readers.

At the end of the day it is the shared vision between reader and writer that makes for good fiction. Whether this touches a handful of souls or a million, the words are merely a delivery system. A means to trigger imagination and emotions. This is a process the writer can never fully control. The readers bring to each work their own subtle nuance of imagination, experience and emotion. Together these facets of the soul affect the way in which the audience reads between the lines.

Our readers' response to our words is individual like the people themselves, a process that is far more engaging than viewing a flickering screen of visual hackery. The visual medium tends to provide a passive experience in that we merely observe. Literature is active, for it involves us. We, the readers, experience the characters. We see and feel and experience ourselves through those characters.

This is the world of the muse, from where she reaches into our hearts and minds. Through the writer she crackles into the collective human brain and, down through the ages, grows in and ramifies our consciousness like a glorious oak.

How can the markets come to terms with that? What can the balance sheet really tell us about the quality and worth of a piece of literature? Nothing. Follow such narrow horizons, and writers will inevitably sever themselves from this great flow of human vision. At the end of the day, human beings are creatures that dwell in dreams. These are what compel us to crawl from our beds in the morning and motivate us through our lives -- the urge to put flesh on our dreams, no matter how great or small they may be.

Writers have always come into their own when striking out against the narrow boundaries of their society. In so doing, they expand our dreams and create them afresh. Consequently they need to be bold. They cannot be timid, for they are expressing the shared experiences and fantasies of the human race, nibbling away at the constraints placed upon our perceptions and viewpoints, exploring what it means to be alive on this planet.

To do anything less not only short-changes the reader; it withers the writer. Unless a writer pushes at the bounds, writing cannot develop. If genres were never mixed and merged, if new techniques were never tried, then creative writing would die. As human experience grows and develops, this must be reflected in the novels 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 highbrow works. More often this is just another genre, one for cultural elites to masturbate with to aver their "superior" reading tastes, while showering the hoi polloi with the discharge of their contempt.

To hear the muse and be transported into the human dreamscape, writers 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 what they express 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 writers take pleasure in their work, how can they communicate this love 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 Earth. 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 one-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.

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. Good writing will always rattle the chains.

Mark Cantrell is a UK-based writer and journalist. Somehow he has managed to avoid doing anything that sounds really interesting in a biography, but he is working on it.

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