The Plot (The Book Series, #1)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

might still be persuadable that Jake was a famous, or at least a “highly regarded” young (now “youngish”) novelist, but the would-be David Foster Wallaces and Donna Tartts who were certainly present in the pile of folders? Not so much. This group would be all too aware that Jacob Finch Bonner

had fumbled his early shot, failed to

produce a good enough second novel or any trace of a third novel, and been sent to the special purgatory for formerly promising writers, ...

Even without reading the work of his new students, Jake felt he already knew them as intimately as he’d known their earlier counterparts, which was better than he wanted to know them.

that Ripley fantasy that they were all, “students” and “teachers” alike, colleagues-in-art, each with a unique

voice and a singular story to tell with it, and each equally deserving of being called that magical thing: a writer.

One thing we

do know is that writers have always helped other writers, whether or not they’re in a formal program together. We all understand that writing is a solitary activity. We do our work in private—no conference calls or brainstorming meetings, no team-building exercises, just us in a room, alone.

And just to add a layer of practicality to this, we now have a publishing industry in which the traditional role of ‘editor’ is diminished. Today, editors want a book that can go straight into production,

she knew enough by now to recognize that as unpleasant as her home life and “family” might be, there were endless versions of worse out there in what she had come to understand as the wider world.

What was she supposed to do with such information? Exactly.

Many fledgling writers labored under the misperception that if they themselves knew what a character looked like, that was sufficient to magically communicate it to the reader.

“Well, I’d never tell you connections don’t help, but just remember, no one has ever published a book as a favor.

“We’re all only as good as the work we’re doing now.

And also the dude was a narcissistic jerkoff of the first degree, this was now undeniable.

“I want to write my book,” the guy said, so fiercely he might have been uttering a tagline in an adventure movie, something along the lines of You haven’t seen the last of me or Don’t underestimate what I’m capable of.

He didn’t believe in an afterlife. He didn’t believe in destiny, fate, luck, or the power of positive thinking. He didn’t believe that we get what we deserve, or that everything happens for a reason (what reason would that be?), or that supernatural forces

impacted anything in a human life.

What was left after all of that nonsense? The sheer randomness of the circumstances we are born into, the genes we’ve been dealt, our varying degrees of willingness to work our asses off, and the wit we may or may...

To Jake, the word that comprised the relationship between a writer and their spark was “responsibility.” Once you were in possession of an actual idea, you owed it a debt for having chosen you, and not some other writer, and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist ready

make painful, time-consuming, even self-flagellating mistakes.

Hand to hand and brain to brain in the marvelous connection that was written language meeting the power of storytelling? He had these things now. And to think: he had acquired them with only his hard work and his pure imagination. Plus a story that might not have been entirely his to tell. Which somebody, somewhere out there, might conceivably know.

It was time-consuming and irritating drudgery, and crammed with rabbit holes, most of which drilled straight into his personal labyrinth of unhappiness.

the revulsion of every single person he’d ever known, envied, felt superior to, had a crush on, or—lately—been in business with.

None of it even made a dent in his whirling, howling terror.

faux-cheerful

Nobody else gets to live your life.

Seattle’s rarefied temples to java.

He was a ridiculous over-sharer on Facebook, mostly about his beagle, Josephine, and his kids, but he posted nothing at all about any writing he might currently be doing, and he mentioned no writer friends nor any writers he was reading or had admired in the past.

“I wish I was in your class. That guy I got assigned to, all he wanted us to

do was write about place. Place, place, place. Like, every blade of grass had to have its own backstory. That was his thing.”

profoundly Maine-centric

the institutionalized teaching of creative writing.

fawning acolyte,

congenitally incapable of keeping their mouths shut,

literary darlings of the cognoscenti

It’s more important to get it right than to get it fast. But right and fast would be best of all.”

derisory

Some underachiever might have keyboard courage

but if he states or implies a provably false statement of fact, not just an opinion, that’s defamation.

To Jake’s ears she seemed to be straining for optimism.

The best thing for all of this nonsense is to get the new novel into production as soon as possible.”

It was the biggest cliché of all that a writer’s first book was autobiographical: my childhood, my family, my horrible school experience. His

And thus reacquainted with his righteousness on the matter, he started his car again and headed south to the city.