In my mid-thirties, I became a preacher. Might as well come right out with it, admit I’m a preacher the way a neighbor at the block party might mention they have COVID. Seems only fair to give you a chance to get some distance, because who knows? Maybe I’ve got a word for you.

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Bad news first: I do kind of have a word for you. Not about God, though, and not about doctrine or scripture. My good news—my gospel, if you will—is about how the view from the pulpit helped me as a writer of fiction. And I don’t think a writer needs to be a preacher, or even have any attachment to organized religion, to benefit from what preaching taught me.

It was in the context of my ongoing failure as a fiction writer that I wound up in the pulpit. Sometimes when people put the word “failure” and “writer” in the same sentence, they’re on their way to suggesting that the real failure lies with the literary gatekeepers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, appreciate the writer’s genius. I assure you the literary world made no such mistake about me. My novel wasn’t getting traction because it didn’t have any treads. I kept revising superficial elements of the story without committing to its depth, and I couldn’t commit to its depth because I wasn’t actually sure why the story mattered. My drafts were heavy on vibes and light on substance. I kept styling and re-decorating scenarios that, no matter how gritty I thought I was making them, remained effectively frictionless and therefore incapable of generating the kind of heat that draws a reader to narrative in the first place.

I don’t think a writer needs to be a preacher, or even have any attachment to organized religion, to benefit from what preaching taught me.

Growing up, I had attended a conservative evangelical church. I left the church in college but, as an adult, found myself pulled back to the Christian tradition (this time, though, to denominations with different theological commitments). It didn’t take long, after my return to church, for me to realize that I was interested in preaching myself. A few years later, I got my chance—I was invited to give a message at our church in Bozeman, Montana one Advent Sunday.

Immediately after saying yes, I began to doubt my qualifications and even my motivations. Wasn’t it kind of weird to want to preach, to think that I had anything of spiritual value to offer? Wasn’t I—with my MFA in writing, my job teaching college composition, my failure of a novel—pretty, like, unqualified? Indeed, and most embarrassingly, might my interest in preaching be little more than an attempt to assuage my writing disappointments? Was I just looking for another audience—and a captive one at that—to replace the readers who had failed to materialize?

Somehow these misgivings didn’t interfere with the actual composition of the sermon, the writing and rewriting of which, while it was not only like an essay, was still somewhat similar to the writing of an essay, only this one was due very soon, and would require my reading it out loud to dozens of people, some of whom I knew well and some only slightly, but all of whom were very real.

Seeking to convey that I didn’t assume any special authority, I chose to share that first message not from the pulpit but from the floor of the sanctuary, an arrangement I also liked because I thought it would give my sermon the air of a literary reading. If (I reasoned) anyone argued that what I said was somehow wrong or that I wasn’t qualified to preach, I could point out that I was merely reading a spiritual essay off a standard-issue music stand to an audience of spiritually-minded people.

Imagine my surprise, then, as I glanced up from the pages I’d just finished arranging on that music stand and found looking back at me not a spiritually-minded audience but a congregation.

*

All beginning writers are taught to worry about audience. Who might be reading our work? What are the interests of those readers? How can we meet enough of those interests to be satisfying while also subverting enough of them to be intriguing?

The workshop model—love it or hate it—puts a writer and their work in front of the audience of their peers; if those peers are both generous and honest in their reading and commentary, the writer might benefit from their insights. But even a generous audience comes together for the purpose of assessment. Hearings, trials, interviews—these are the contexts from which audience derives, and the word retains echoes of desperation. Having an audience will yield a favorable or adverse outcome, and that outcome hinges largely on one’s ability to impress, or at least satisfy, those who sit in judgment.

I’d never been afraid, exactly, of an audience. Choosing to write toward publication meant deciding—or realizing—that I was willing to submit my work to be judged. But the audience in my mind was tyrannical. It showed up before the story had a shape and remained, at every turn, dissatisfied, probably because that was kind of its job.

I wasn’t entirely ignorant of this problem. Write for you, not for them! I would admonish myself. Maybe this insight failed me because we can never really take our own advice, but more likely it failed because I knew that if I were writing a book, then it wasn’t just for me. So then I would try, Write for your ideal reader! and while this perspective sometimes offered a flicker of hope, it always went out, because I couldn’t trick myself into thinking that this was actually a private missive. And as soon as I allowed any other imagined readers into the space of this communication, their judgments came hammering down again, drowning out my ability to perceive the heart of the story I was trying to tell.

*

At the risk of hyperbole, I will say that looking over the edge of that music stand changed my writing life. Not all at once, but also, actually, kind of quickly. The people gathered before me were not there to be impressed. They were much less interested in determining the quality of my sermon than they were in seeing if I had anything helpful to say. My own identity in this gathering had little importance. I understood that while people go to church for lots of reasons—to see their friends; or because they like the music; or out of habit—underpinning those reasons is the belief, or at least the hope, that some need will be met, some sustaining insight encountered. The word congregation, after all, connotes a flock, and flocks run together to encounter in each other what they can’t encounter alone.

I saw that I would have to commit to a story the way a preacher commits to a text, accepting its limitations before I could explore its depth.

As I kept writing new sermons, I kept realizing how much I needed a sense of the congregation to be part of my writing. I needed their collective need for clarity because it affirmed my own and gave my questions purpose. I needed their reality as people because it kept me from drifting into abstraction. I needed, even, the fact that I didn’t know many of them well, because then I had to remain humble, refrain from prescription, admit to myself that not only did I not have answers for them, but that I probably didn’t know what their questions were.

Writing with a congregation in mind changed how I thought about the stakes of what I was doing in my novel. It didn’t remove the pressure so much as relocate it. Assessment was now secondary to what I hoped to do, which was, yes, to utilize all the lexical tools at my disposal, but not because the goal was to write well or even tell a good story. The lexical tools had to be at the service of saying something. If a congregant were asked over lunch what my sermon had been about, and they were left stammering, then I had failed. I don’t mean that they would need to quote some moral or lesson—I hope it’s obvious by now that I am interested in neither—but rather that proof of my “success” (if such a word can be applied here) would be in their ability to identify how the subject of the sermon met the stuff of their own life and the world they observed. To put a finger, as it were, in the grooves the sermon left on their own heart.

Writing sermons helped me understand what it would take to find traction in my novel. I saw that I would have to commit to a story the way a preacher commits to a text, accepting its limitations before I could explore its depth. I understood, too, that I would never be sure of my novel’s “success” as a work of art for the same reason a preacher is never sure she will be “successful” in the pulpit. In fact, any preacher who is sure they know exactly what their congregation needs to hear is a preacher full of shit. Writing a sermon—or a story, essay, or poem—is an exercise in risk and vulnerability. Now more than ever when I step down from a pulpit, I wonder, Was that worth saying? Was that a waste of time? But I’m also not terrified by the outcome of that question, because the whole point of a Sunday congregation coming together—a congregation of which I am a part no matter what side of the pulpit I’m on—is to search again for the place where our lives intersect with truth and fear and hope. The best a preacher can do is locate where she believes that pulse to be and ask those gathered, Do you feel this too? and What should we make of it?

If an audience delivers judgment, a congregation delivers continuity. Almost no matter how helpful or dull a sermon is, no matter its scintillating connections or worn-out comparisons, its use or uselessness is bound to fade as the days wear on, as the pressures of daily life perform their necessary distractions. Which means that (the vicissitudes of publishing aside) another story will always be called for, another sermon scheduled, because what a congregation understands is that this whole exercise in gathering is practice, not performance. Tradition, not spectacle. Where is the real hope in writing? It’s in the fact that there’s always one more chance to see if there isn’t something like sense to be made out of this mess we’re all in.

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Good Guys by Mindy Misener is available from Melville House Publishing.