The Write Stuff

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, which has just been awarded the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, most recently won by Nelson Mandela in 1990.

As you all know, this site seeks your answer to a question we ask, and that solicits your responses that we will address next week. In return, we entertain you. Today’s entertainment will be particularly huge. I will be asking you to weigh in with a zeitgeist-shifting poll.

But first, the question. Tell us something you have read — anywhere, in a book, in a newspaper, a comic strip, on the wall of a public toilet — that had an unusual or intense influence on you. It has to have been in print. We are looking primarily for humor, but irony will do. Or profundity. Or anything interesting. Send it to our regular orange humor / profundity button, here:

Now, the entertainment. I am considering creating a fourth day of The Gene Pool each week, probably on Fridays, (call it, for the moment, “The Write Stuff”) — that will be available only to a self-selected group of Gene Poolers, an elite tier for which people would have to pay extra.

The Write Stuff would be a writing clinic, hosted by me, for you. Each week I would link to something I have written, or that I have edited, or that I admire from afar, something that is an example of good writing. I will explain the story behind the story, how it developed, and analyze why it works, what its flaws may be, and how to fix them. I am reasonably good at this.

Well-known writers tend to charge a great deal of money for this sort of advice. I will not, for three reasons: 1) I don’t need a great deal of money; and, 2) I really like interacting with readers; and, 3) There are a lot of you.

You’d get to write in, with questions, and observations, and even submit brief samples of your writing for critique. (This last thing takes courage. We don’t all have it, and I understand. I don’t have it myself.) I will choose what to respond to.

What would you pay? Not clear yet, but assume that it will be $10 a month above what you are currently paying. That would be roughly $100 extra a year if you are now a paid subscriber, or roughly $140 a year if you are not. None of this will affect your current status in The Gene Pool, at the current rates you are paying or not paying. Whether or not you opt for this, everything you have access to now, you will still have access to. Except The Write Stuff.

What will each Write Stuff episode amount to? I am glad you asked. They will be like this:

Here are two of the shortest stories I have ever written. They are both chapters in “The Fiddler in the Subway,” a collection of my best stuff, because they are among my favorite stories. It will take you a total of five minutes to read both of them, and afterwards, right here, I will tell you how they were written and why.

This one is “Roger and Me,” a memoir about me and Roger Maris. No, it is not a sports story. I had been thinking about it for years, but wrote it in one hour because I had stupidly lost track of the date, the only day ever in the history of the world that it could possibly have been published. Bam, write it now, schmuck. That was me, the editor, talking to me, the writer.

This one is “On a Wing and a Prayer,” about what I saw on the way to work one day in 2003. It was a morning when the news was full of leaked plans that the Al Qaeda goons were about to launch an even deadlier attack on American soil, likely in Washington, D.C. , and likely soon.

So, read them. I will wait right here.

Tum te tum.

No, that was an order. I am your perfesser, and I said READ THEM NOW. Five minutes, total. You have spent more time, at times, pooping. Read them.

Tum te tum.

If you have not read them by now, I will not accept you into my class, whatever you are willing to pay. Feel free to read on, but you are dead to me.

So.

In each of these stories, I was forced to confront a central precept of mine, one that I have harangued younger professional feature writers with, in seminars, for 30 years: Every story must be about The Meaning of Life. What I mean by that is that however small the immediate subject seems to be, it must also seize upon something universal, something with depth that exists outside the confines of the story itself. This is a concept that eludes many professional feature writers. They are settling for less.

Who gives a crap about some nerdy kid’s adulation of Roger Maris, or some bird who gets trapped in a display window? These may be entertaining stories, but so what? In my case the connection to the meaning of life came easily, because I was in my 50s and had been doing this for most of my life. You, at 29, have to be able to see it Big, and see it true, without a painful stretch.

Roger and Me turned out to be about generational chauvinism, and the pressing urgency of mortality. As Kafka said: “The meaning of life is that it ends.” A Wing and a Prayer is about our helplessness in the face of fear, and our very human impulse — desperation, even — to create an illusion of control in a situation that is inherently out of control.

What the great feature writer does is to take the specific, the narrative that is plainly in front of you, and see in it the universal, the thing that is hovering behind it.

You can do it. You have to train yourself to do it. And then you have to write it in a way that is evident, but not ham-fisted; available, there for the taking, but not spoon-fed. How to do that is a lesson for another day.

The Write Stuff will not be a private tutorial. I might respond to you personally, but mostly, it is about creating “content” for The Gene Pool — your work product or your thoughts — that I will share with everyone.

And here we arrive!

I want to know if this is something that might interest you. A simple one-question Gene Pool Gene Poll. I don’t mean to overstate this, but if you are not honest, may God smite you and hurl you screaming into the Stygian Satanic abyss, the fiery pit where your skin will be boiled from your body and your stomachs will be roasted on a spit.

Note: There are currently an astounding 48 people who have been “Founding Members” of the Gene Pool. For nearly a year they have paid double for this dubious honor, for no reason other than generosity and loyalty. They get rewarded. They will automatically get The Write Stuff, because that is the kind of guy I am. A mafia don, basically.

So:

Assuming we are talking about a yearly additional fee of $100…

And feel free to react to today’s post, including the Write Stuff part. What do you think of those stories? Send your reactions here: