In Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives, Jeff Schmidt writes,

The prospect of failing the qualifying test frightens the student, even the student who is best at answering the kind of questions used on the test. The student is frightened because his desired future as a professional in his field of interest is at stake. But he is also frightened because society does not guarantee his material security (except at a life-shortening subsistence level). It seems possible for the individual, if suddenly of no value to employers, to go overnight from a job to walking the streets, from being somebody to being nobody, from living in the suburbs to living on skid row, left to struggle for survival among the desperate at the bottom of society. It doesn't matter that such individual downfall is very unlikely; by simply featuring the possibility, the system announces the fundamental insecurity of the individual. This insecurity unrelentingly haunts the student studying for the qualifying test. The student sees professional training as his chance for a secure future, with status and nonalienating work, his life free from the threat of a nightmarish trip to the bottom of the heap. An important part of his past is also riding on the qualifying test, because no matter how many years he has vested in preparation, coming close to passing is worth nothing in terms of attaining professional status. The years of preparation go down the drain along with the hoped-for career.

Writing has been professionalized.

The career path for a writer is you attend a Creative Writing program at a good university. You network with other students and find a professor to act as a mentor to you.

Your work appears in little magazines subsidized by the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts]. You win a fellowship to graduate school and get an MFA [Master of Fine Arts] in writing. You apply for a grant and win one. You get a job teaching writing at a good university. Your poems and stories are published, perhaps your narrative nonfiction. You get a book contract for a novel, or a nonfiction book, and write it. It is published to good reviews. Your friends give it good reviews and your old professors write blurbs for the dust jacket. You are on your way.

Don't falter. Don't try anything new. Don't rock the boat.

One misstep and it's over, as fast, seamlessly, and decisively as it began.

There's no appeal.

You had your chance.

You didn't hit a home run.

It's not back to the minors for you. There are no more minors. It's all the big leagues. If you can't hit major league pitching, you're not going to make it.

It's play in the majors or don't play.

It's either/or

You get one shot.

One at-bat.

Don't blow it.

So much pressure. So much pressure.

There are two people above you in the food chain.

Editors and agents.

Editors are failed writers. Agents are failed editors.

You have to get past the agent before you get to the editor. Then you have to get past the editor to get your book out in bookstores, reviewed in the book pages, taught in college writing classes.

These people are not your friend.

They are dem.

The MFWICs.

Anthony Burgess wrote a book called MF once.

It stood for Massey-Ferguson, a tractor dealer. Also for male/female. Also for Miles Faber, the hero.

George Carlin did a bit on words you can't say on television and all of them were regularly used by the people he looked up to, growing up: jockstraps, cops, and GIs.

They weren't trying to be profane, that was just the way they talked.

Tough guys.

Growing up.

School, the military, work.

You play football in high school, you serve in the military as an enlisted man, you go to work for a company and work until you are old enough to retire.

That's all, for a man. School, the military, work.

You learn how to behave. You learn the rules. You learn to follow them.

You have to or the bureaucrats and accountants will make your life miserable, the middle managers, the executives above them. Up on Mahogany Row.

The writer is to a publisher as a worker is to a manager, or an executive. The editor is the manager. The publisher is the executive.

When I was in college, I roomed with a person who was in the MBA [Master of Business Administration] program to get out of Vietnam.

He was in favor of the war, he just didn't want to fight in it. He had other priorities.

Vietnam was for blacks, Hispanics, and poor white trash.

It wasn't just the business majors who felt that way.

To me, people in the MFA program were business majors.

They were learning to game the system. They were ticketpunchers, apparatchiks, who sang the company fight song, to get ahead, or to keep their dachas and their chit books at the nomenklatura store.

They were like the members of the Soviet Writers Union who voted to expel Solzhenitsyn when the party bosses told them to, or the East German writers who informed on each other to the secret police.

You and me are pals--huh, Spike?

I thought I would come up the way Henry Miller did, or Jack Kerouac.

Perhaps Hubert Selby, Jr. Or William S. Burroughs.

I would write a book like Naked Lunch.

Last Exit to Brooklyn. On the Road. Tropic of Cancer.

MF stands for motherfucker.

MFWIC is motherfucker what's in charge.

You can't say motherfucker on television.

It was me versus the MFWICs, the writer versus the War Heads in publishing, the media of mass communication, arts agencies and cultural foundations, and university Creative Writing programs and English departments.

If you said that in college you failed the qualifying test.

I said that in college and failed the qualifying test.

I was a graduate fellow in anthropology. I had a three-year NDEA fellowship. [National Defense Education Act.]

I stole the last year of my three-year fellowship.

I signed up for Thesis, to draw the stipend, stayed an home, and taught myself to write.

I wrote two books and started a third.

Then I went to work as a laborer in a feldspar mine.

My last two permanent jobs were custodian and handyman.

I was a custodian at a community behavioral heath care center.

I updated Edward Sapir's essay, "Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls in the Business of Getting a Living." Work makes you crazy.

Writing is a business.