A Failed Novelist Walks Into a Pulpit and Finally Learns to Write

Mindy Misener became a preacher in her mid-thirties, and she credits the pulpit with rescuing a novel that, by her own account, was going nowhere. In a new personal essay published alongside her book Good Guys (Melville House Publishing), Misener is blunt about the failure that preceded the sermon: "My novel wasn't getting traction because it didn't have any treads."

That is a rare admission in a genre that usually blames the gatekeepers. Misener, who holds an MFA and teaches college composition, concedes the literary world "made no such mistake" about her work. Her drafts, she writes, were "heavy on vibes and light on substance" — styled and re-decorated but frictionless, incapable of generating narrative heat.

How does a writer end up preaching?

Misener grew up in a conservative evangelical church, left in college, and drifted back as an adult to denominations with different theological commitments. Her first sermon came at a church in Bozeman, Montana, on an Advent Sunday. She said yes, then immediately doubted both her qualifications and her motives. Might preaching, she wondered, be nothing more than a bid for "another audience — and a captive one at that" to replace readers who never materialized?

She tried to hedge. Rather than preach from the pulpit, she delivered that first message from the sanctuary floor, off a standard-issue music stand, hoping it would pass as a literary reading. Then she looked up. "I found looking back at me not a spiritually-minded audience but a congregation."

What's the difference between an audience and a congregation?

This is the essay's working thesis, and it is a useful one. An audience, Misener notes, derives from hearings, trials and interviews — contexts of assessment that "retain echoes of desperation." A congregation is something else: a flock that runs together "to encounter in each other what they can't encounter alone." The workshop model, she argues, however generous, still gathers people for judgment.

Writing sermons rewired her habits. She needed the congregation's collective need for clarity because it affirmed her own. She needed their reality because it kept her from drifting into abstraction. She needed, even, not knowing many of them well, because it forced humility — an admission that she probably didn't know their questions, let alone the answers.

The pressure didn't vanish. It relocated. The lexical tools had to serve saying something: if a congregant asked over lunch what the sermon was about and could only stammer, the sermon had failed. The proof of success was whether listeners could identify how the subject met the stuff of their own life.

What did preaching teach the novel?

The essay's central line: "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." She adds a verdict on pulpit certainty that resists paraphrase: "any preacher who is sure they know exactly what their congregation needs to hear is a preacher full of shit."

Writing, she concludes, is an exercise in risk and vulnerability. If an audience delivers judgment, a congregation delivers continuity — "practice, not performance. Tradition, not spectacle." The real hope in writing, she writes, is 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."

The essay doubles as a craft lesson for writers with no attachment to religion at all. Good Guys by Mindy Misener is available now from Melville House Publishing.