A prolific writer, whose many books have moved and entertained me, periodically writes a slim book of advice, a nonfiction attempt to be part of the change he wants to see in the world.  I have one here now, called Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation.  I have to say, he does his work much better in fiction, like in the magnificent recent novella The Gift of Fire.

Read The Gift of Fire with an open mind and you may find yourself deeply moved by the author’s vivid, animated example of the kind of world humans could have if we followed our deeper, higher natures.  A description of the story will not do the short book justice, get it from the library, read it.  Another great book by my favorite living writer.  I highly recommend it.

We turn now to his latest book of advice.  Published because he is a famous writer who has made millions for his publisher, it has little of the charm of the novels, but it moves toward the same end– showing what the world could be, if people only struggled to open their eyes and live in accord with what we all know in our hearts to be the right way to live.

One of the twelve steps the author prescribes for waking from our media-induced trance and finding out who we are and how to fix this severely broken world is to write daily.  My man is a writer, and he writes daily, and he is paid well several times a year for his new books, probably given large advances for each next one.  He’s had books made into Hollywood movies starring Denzel Washington.  He lives the life I’d like to live, if I had any idea how to start down that road.

He gets up every day and writes for three or four hours.  That’s his work day.  Then he goes out into the world, does whatever one does out there.  Returns at night to sleep.  Gets up the next day and writes for three or four hours, and so forth.  Every few months, it would appear, he has a new manuscript finished.  It goes to his editor, they work it over a bit, it’s out in print and I get a copy of it it at my local library.  A nice arrangement for everyone.

Step Six of the Twelve Steps Toward Political Revolution is called Everyday.  What we should do every day, those of us who are serious about not living as exploited zombies but doing what we are meant to do on this earth, is to write.  This should be done, the writer says, 365 days a year.  He says we don’t need to spend much time doing this, the drill is that it must be done daily.  The time of day doesn’t matter, after work, before work, the main thing is to have a regular practice that sits us alone with our thoughts daily and causes us to organize them while digging toward the deeper truths of our lives.

“Yes,” I think, “it is a good practice.  Shoot, I do it myself.  But you must realize, man who makes his living by writing what it pleases you to write, that it is easier for you to put in the recommended  ninety minutes to two hours a day searching your soul than it is for the bus driver, the cop, the campaign contribution bundler, the single mother with three kids, the school teacher, the data technician, the salesman, the career guardian ad litem.”

I don’t know where else to go with this thought, except to note that this famous writer and I were in the Creative Writing program at The City College at the same time.  His mentor was a guy named Tuten, mine was Mirsky, and our paths never crossed, that I can recall.  His imagination and drive led him to create a brooding detective character that became a franchise.  I was less productively consumed by my brooding which rumbled through the more amorphous and problematic things I produced.  I assume Tuten was a help to him, I believe I read something to that effect.

Mirsky always expressed a great belief in the importance of what I was writing, and lamented that, like much of his recent work, there was just no place in the market to sell it.  He did eventually hook me up with an editor, the grand-daughter of the Straus from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Somewhere I still have the accomplished young English major’s letter.  The writing was good, she said, but the pages I’d sent her indicated that the narrator had not undergone the kind of epiphany and transformation necessary for every great novel.  She closed with kind regards.